Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(79)

Or maybe he had no idea yet. It didn’t matter anyway. She felt that first sparkle of guilt, the one that caused her to glance up—and then she gasped as she realized what had happened, as she saw what had been inevitable from the start: Malfleur, still in her travel cloak, entering the room, dropping a gift of glass, which shattered like a scream.

It would have been better if Malfleur too had screamed. Anything would have been better, Belcoeur thought, than the look on her perfectly sculpted face: its scar blazing white like a star, her cheekbones high and proud, her pretty mouth—thinner than her twin’s and more sharply defined—mute with comprehension.

That moment, full of such ugliness and such beauty, became a thorn wedged permanently into Belcoeur’s chest. She would never breathe again without feeling the pain of it.

And still, there would be worse to come.

Her vow never to love. Her promise to shun Charles forever.

The long months of begging for forgiveness. Of being ignored over and over as Malfleur returned to her travels, leaving Belcoeur to feel as though one half of herself had died. The terror of watching her twin become darker, more remote, changed, until Belcoeur’s only source of consolation was her dreams, which she had begun to collect and, using her magic, weave into elaborate tapestries where she would spend days trying to forget, forget, forget, only to return from them panting, air racing into her lungs like angry hornets filling her with the sting of the life she no longer wanted to live.

She called this body of her greatest work “Sommeil.”

More time passed, and the wounds began to scar, the dreams a kind of salve—a salvation, really. They replaced her life, a prettier version of only the best times, while her waking existence took on the form of a blurred memory fading with each day. She had never used her magic so much as she used it then. It got so that she couldn’t enter a room without sapping the power of dreaming from everyone in it.

In the sliver of twilight between waking and dreaming, she sometimes saw herself for what she had become: the type of faerie whom humans misunderstood, dreaded, abhorred.

Some nights she saw Charles again, despite her promise not to.

But she couldn’t say if any of these nights, and the agonizing ecstasies they contained, were real or imagined.

There is no way to know now. Not after what happened. Not after . . .

Belcoeur gags on smoke, the fumes strong in her nostrils. There’s the scent of old things burning:

Lace fire.

Flower fire.

Bone fire.

This young woman who struggles to free herself from her grasp is a stranger, not her sister. Her sister has not come.

And that’s when the final piece of her abandoned life comes back to her. It was a short time later—less than a year after the incident—when Belcoeur began to notice a different kind of change. Her belly had grown round and hard, swirling with beginnings: the kick of a foot. The hiccup of tiny lungs. Someday soon, she realized, a child would be born.

Desperate, she wrote to her sister, begging her to understand. Begging her to forgive, so that Belcoeur might be free to love Charles again. Her wish came true when Malfleur responded.

Everyone deserves true love, my dear sister, she wrote. And the child will know its father.

Accompanying the letter was a magnificently carved chest—in and of itself one of the finest gifts her sister had ever sent her. With trembling hands, Belcoeur took the key that had been wrapped in the letter and used it to unlock the lid.

The first thing she saw inside the trunk was a flash of gold—the peaks of the Blackthorn crown Charles wore every day except when riding.

Then she noticed the blood. . . . And the meaning of her sister’s words came crashing down like an ax.

Belcoeur screams now as she screamed then, yanking the oversized crown she has worn for over a century off her head and throwing it to the ground before the visitor.

Her vision is blurred by tears over all she has lost—her child, her sister, her love.

For what she sees within the crown before her is the final memory, the final truth: Charles Blackthorn’s severed head.





34


Isabelle


“Careful!” William’s voice flies up at her from below, rough and salty in the fog.

The rope ladder sways under Isbe’s feet, banging against the craggy cliffside, and for one second she imagines what it would feel like to simply let go and allow the Strait of Sorrow, a few hundred feet below, to swallow her. . . . She’d make just a small, unmemorable splash in the grand scheme of things. The image reminds her of a story Aurora once told her, about an arrogant boy named Icarus who fashioned a pair of waxen wings. He flew too close to the sun, which melted his wings; then he fell to his death in the waters below.

“Are you trying to make a point about the dangers of excessive pride?” Isbe had asked, putting on a fake pout.

“No,” her sister had replied, tapping into her hand rapidly. “I’m making a point about wax.”

Isbe swallows hard, trying to put the memories from her mind. She can’t let herself give in to this urge to mourn her sister when she’s not even dead. If she starts to grieve for Aurora, for Gil, for all of them, it will mean the end. She keeps climbing down, her hands slick on the rungs.

The idea had come to her quickly. After the shock of seeing Aurora’s unmoving form, they had ventured up to the wall walks to survey the surrounding land. William saw animals asleep in the barn. He saw royal banners fallen under piles of muddy sleet and snow. He saw death. He saw the vines. And, in the distance, he saw something that made even the worst of the destruction seem but a prelude: the black wave of Malfleur’s army descending Mount Briar to the west.