Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(81)
His hands slide down her arms. He kneels before her. “Then accept me as your prince and rule by my side.” His words are the crest of a tidal wave, and she stands there in disbelief as it torrents on. “You’ve shown you can do it. Through your bravery, your cleverness, your determination—some might call it stubbornness.” She almost laughs. But she doesn’t. She can’t make a sound, can’t stop the wave that is still barreling toward her. “You are the type of ruler who might actually inspire the people to listen. I want to do this together. With you. Marry me.” The wave crashes.
Silence.
“Marry me, Isabelle,” he repeats. The dazzling, shocking aftermath, lighter than air. The foam.
“But . . . I can’t—”
“You can,” he says. “The question is, will you.”
She’s too dizzy to stand. She can’t quite believe this is happening—he’s proposing . . . again. She gets down onto her knees as well, and he lets go of her hands so she can touch his face: the firm ridge of his cheeks, the softness of his mouth, the emotion—the hunger—buzzing through his skin. “William . . .” What to say? How to tell him? How to—
“Isabelle,” he whispers, he insists. Now his hands are on her face, on her lips, on her jaw, tilting her back slightly so that her neck is arched.
Time seems to stop, and Isabelle remembers being a child, no more than two, watching a white feather float from a down coverlet a maid was shaking out. It fell so slowly, idling back and forth on the air, she felt sure it would never land.
And then all at once she is no longer a child, and no longer waiting.
It is late. William is asleep beside her, what remains of his torn cloak forming a thick, soft blanket beneath them. It’s the normal kind of sleep, not the sickness; she made sure to test it by waking him repeatedly until finally he growled half teasingly and kissed her until he succeeded in convincing her to stop. Now she lies awake in the darkness, touching the corner of her mouth where his first kiss landed, his lips merely brushing hers—remembering. How quickly things unspooled from there, and then his lips were parting hers and his hand was at the small of her back, pulling her up against him, and she was kissing him back. . . .
And it was different than her first kiss with Gilbert, which was wild and unexpected, clumsy and exciting and messy and sweet, like a day in the fields with Freckles, flying across the open grass, the wind tangling her hair. Escape.
With William, everything was the opposite: slow, deliberate, full of meaning. She had never felt more present in her own skin, every touch like a raindrop in a pond, rippling outward from a single spot.
But now.
She can’t sleep. She’s afraid that if she does, this will all go away and she’ll lose what it felt like to be beautiful, to be chosen. That if she sleeps, she will dream, and in that dream she will hear her mother singing, and the song will lure her to stay asleep forever, where it’s safe—or else, worse, that waking from it will shatter her.
Wind whistles along the craggy cliffs, the mouth of the strait sloshes below, and she knows she has to make a decision. William has asked her to marry him, and, although she said yes with every part of her, she did not actually say it.
She sits up, letting his arm slip gradually off her, and pulls on her cloak. She fumbles along the floor until she finds her mask, discarded several paces away. Then, quietly, she pushes back the thick velvet curtain and moves along the row of wine casks, barrel by barrel, counting them. By forty-eight, she has reached the lip of the cave. And though it’s the most foolish, willful thing she’s done in a list of very foolish and willful things, she reaches for the ladder, and climbs.
She’s drawn back to Aurora’s bedside as if she were sleepwalking, as if some external force has guided her there instead of the plain fact that she knows her way, knows it in her bones and in her hair and in her fingertips. She will always know her way around this castle, and she will always come back to her sister, because Aurora is intrinsic to Isabelle. She is the truest part of Isabelle. She is her heart.
She kneels, as she did before William just hours ago, and once again takes her sister’s hands. “Please,” she whispers.
Aurora’s chest softly rises and falls. Rises and falls.
In the quiet, Isabelle can almost hear Aurora’s strange, unabashed laugh. But she has the forlorn impression that Aurora is not here—that this Aurora is but a snow sculpture they’ve made, and some detail, as yet undetected, is out of place. It scares her, almost, this other Aurora in the place of her real sister, who is gone.
She leans down and puts her lips to Aurora’s cool forehead, and kisses it, like she would sometimes do when they were little, on nights when stories of the plague frightened them, when they could hear the hacking coughs of the sick through the walls and knew that come morning, another maid or groom would be carried away from the palace on a plank, a faceless form beneath a thin white sheet. And then, they learned later when they were older, the body would be burned in a massive fire before being thrown into a shared grave.
On nights like those, Aurora would whimper and cling to Isabelle, and Isabelle felt braver because of it. But now she feels more alone than ever. Even after everything that just happened between her and William—maybe because of it . . . and because she still can’t stop thinking about the fact that she doesn’t know whether Gilbert is dead or alive . . . and that it may be her fault if he’s dead . . . and that she doesn’t know what she wants, other than this one thing: for Aurora to wake up.