Spindle Fire (Spindle Fire #1)(82)

“Please,” she whispers again, her voice cracking. She’s come so far. She’s tried so hard. And it hasn’t been enough.

Maybe, all along, she knew it wouldn’t be.

Maybe all of this—her entire journey—has been a terrible, beautiful distraction from what she knew, deep down, she must do: let Aurora go.

She can’t remember the last time she wept, but the tears come now, haltingly and then hard, wetting her face and rattling her whole body, causing her to gasp. She feels out of control, like a laundered garment pulled loose by the wind and flying off the line, flailing over the sides of the cliffs. She can’t stop; tears drip from her cheeks and fall onto Aurora’s pillow, and onto her closed eyes.

Isabelle cries, quietly and fully, solitude a weight crushing down on her.

Isabelle cries, and Aurora sleeps.

She’s not sure how much time has passed; all she knows is that she can’t cry anymore. She takes a deep, shuddering breath. We’re at the end, William said to her. I need to know where you stand.

Isabelle pushes to her feet. There are still so many questions she doesn’t have answers for—who to love, who her own mother is. She doesn’t know what she wants. Doesn’t know how to save her sister. Doesn’t know how to live without her.

But she knows now what she must do.

She must say yes.





35


Aurora


A deep, breathless blackness pulses within her and around her, clogging her lungs.

“Let go of me!” Aurora screams, trying to wrench her dress from the queen’s desperate clutch. “I am not who you thought.” Her words twist strangely into the air, mingling with the smoke blurring her vision. After all, she isn’t who she thought she was, either. She had been a damsel like those in the stories she’d read all her life, waiting to be rescued. Her lack of touch had not only protected her from feeling pain, but also from understanding its purpose.

The white hair of the queen flickers as Aurora finally yanks herself free and runs toward a window, heaving it open. But the outside is just as dark as the inside, and even in the heat and smoke she feels the great power of Sommeil embracing her. Its desire, its denial.

Through that tenebrosity of want, she sees leaping flames. Gathered shadows. Voices—many of them—are shouting. Thin silhouettes running, tripping over one another, some holding long poles, pitchforks, spears. Fleeing. Screaming.

Ashes blow through the sky, a black cloud spreading toward the castle from the wall.

The Borderlands are on fire.

No one can get out.

They will all die.

Aurora stares, momentarily hypnotized, as in one quick breath the hunger of the fire blooms and spreads. Then she is once again scrambling through the darkness of the castle’s twisting passages, punctuated only by the hot flash of the flames.

She has lost Wren. She has lost the queen. Lost herself.

The ashes spread as the fire beyond the wall grows. It is hot, too hot. She can’t think. Her hands have gone numb. It feels as though her very voice is burning away inside her throat. She coughs, she chokes, she falls.

And then she feels cold metal against her palm. She realizes her eyes were clenched against the smoke, but she forces herself to part them. They sting and water as she examines the object in her hand.

It’s Belcoeur’s crown. It is large, though—the size of a man’s head, not a woman’s. Because, Aurora realizes quickly, the queen has been wearing Charles Blackthorn’s crown for all these years.

And it isn’t burning. It isn’t even hot, but blissfully cool.

Of course. Because it is an object from the real world. It’s immune to the power of Sommeil. Immune, even, to the queen’s magical fire.

She feels how heavy the crown is in her hands. There’s something engraved on the inside. She squints. True Love, it says.

With her hand on the gold crown, she begins to breathe a little easier. The crown, she realizes, can save her. She just needs to think clearly, figure out how to save the rest of the people. She can’t think in this heat, in this smoke.

She can see she has made it down to the first floor. Through the windows, people are still screaming, frenzied, racing through the grounds, attempting to break free.

The sun is still rising.

The castle is still burning.

She places the crown on her head.

The heat disappears, and she is able to gasp, sucking in fresh air. Life. Life. She is going to live. She has saved herself, and she will save the others too.

The light is so bright it is blazing, blinding.

Aurora blinks, still gulping, still shaking as the flames release her.

Once. Twice. And again.

The third time she opens her eyes, she figures out what has happened.

She has awoken.





Acknowledgments


In his memoir And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran writes of his blindness, “But we get nothing in this world without paying for it, and in return for all the benefits that sight brings, we are forced to give up others whose existence we don’t even suspect. These were the gifts I received in such abundance.” Lusseyran’s often ecstatic experience of life beyond the convenience (and confines) of sight—and his notion of the world’s unexpected gifts—was a huge inspiration to me in the writing of Spindle Fire.