Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(10)
Though the girl is only a maid by station, she has a strength of conviction many nobles lack. She reminds Aurora of Isbe in that way. But her accusation sounds a lot like the ones Heath hurled at her in Sommeil.
Aurora’s sick of everyone doubting her. “If that’s what you really think, fine,” she says, struggling to keep her voice steady. “I will handle things my way, and you may handle them yours.”
She leaves Wren in her room. She walks through the darkness with no torch, feeling both the helpless clumsiness of her body in the cool, ambivalent night, and the creeping numbness, the solitude, of having just stormed away from one of the only people in the world who can communicate with her.
She walks down the long, wide corridor that leads to Prince William’s visiting chambers, thinking of rousting him again, of seeking his help in rectifying the dire circumstances of the Sommeilians. But as she approaches the closed door to the guest wing, she already knows what the prince’s answer will be: Heath is a recruit of the enemy. Deluce’s duty is to defend its own citizens first.
She makes her way outside instead, moving among the still gardens, which glisten with dew in the moonlight. Thinking. Simmering. Who will help them? How can she possibly prove to Wren that she’s wrong about Aurora, that Heath was wrong too, that they all were? That her rank doesn’t determine her role. That she can be strong too, just like Isbe.
Aurora had been the one who drew out Queen Belcoeur, after all, the one who got her to reveal the truth at last. Belcoeur had told them that Malfleur killed Charles Blackthorn—cut off his head and sent it to her in a treasure chest along with a cruel note that said “Everyone deserves true love.” Malfleur did it because she felt betrayed that Charles had chosen her twin sister over her.
But there is still something missing to the story, Aurora senses, something that has been troubling her ever since she put on Charles Blackthorn’s True Love crown and woke herself up. Of course she doesn’t know Malfleur beyond the stories that have become more myth than history. But still, she just can’t quite believe that Malfleur, evil as she may be, would go to such lengths to make Belcoeur suffer over the love of a man. The fae can be petty, certainly. But to get so upset, just over a man, a mere mortal? It’s only a hunch, but Aurora suspects there’s more to it than that.
That there’s something else Malfleur was really bitter about. If Aurora had to guess what’s always been most important to the evil queen, it would be power. Magic.
Aurora pushes back inside the palace, past the guards, who only eye her noncommittally, and remembers how she dragged that heavy ax through Blackthorn Castle in Sommeil, lifted its weight over her head, and smashed down the door to the hall of tapestries, working away at the illusion, even as her arms throbbed with exhaustion. Hacking at the wood again, and again, and again, until finally it splintered and started to give. . . .
Let the prince and Isbe wage a war. Aurora will seek out the evil faerie queen herself.
The idea isn’t precise in her mind, not yet. It is still coming into itself, just as the fog over the strait shifts and morphs into the mold of the cliffs, holding their shape for moments at a time. And yet the rightness of what she must do sends a tingling, burning heat through Aurora’s whole body.
She must travel to LaMorte and confront Malfleur. Demand the safety of her captives. Offer her something she cannot refuse in return.
And what’s the one thing Malfleur can’t refuse?
Careful not to wake Wren, whose long hair still smells of smoldering cinders even after being washed, Aurora tiptoes through her room, bending to select a wreath of half-opened crocuses from a tufted bench. Next, a piece of vellum and an ink-dipped pen. When she is ready, she pushes aside a heavy tapestry on her wall and enters the secret passageway to Isabelle’s room.
She moves through the long, narrow passage, running her hands along its stone walls but feeling nothing. And that dull silence only reinforces what she must do.
When she enters Isbe’s room, quiet as a cat, her sister does not stir. Aurora moves closer, gazing at Isbe’s sleeping form—one bare leg kicked out from underneath the covers, her short hair curled into cursive patterns across the pillow, making it look as though she is somehow in motion.
That is how Aurora thinks of Isbe—continuously moving, running when she should be careful, reaching out to meet the world with the ends of her fingers, always alert and listening and alive to sensations. Unafraid.
She’s struck by the memory of one of their early adventures at the edges of the castle grounds—Aurora must have been around seven, Isbe nine. They raced, tripping and laughing, to the cliffs. Aurora was certain Isbe wasn’t going to stop in time, would simply run straight into the open air and float across the fog. She cried out silently in a blend of terror and elation—had her sister simply flown, Aurora would not have been surprised. Isabelle was magic, she thought. Invincible.
Aurora stands over her sister now, frozen with the certainty that she will lose Isbe. That she cannot stop her—has never had the power to stop her—from throwing herself headlong into her future. The truth of it pounds against her chest like the Delucian surf, hard and drenching. But she will not cry.
She must go where she can be heard. Where she is truly needed.
Besides. Prince William will look out for Isabelle, Aurora knows. She has seen the way his eyes travel over her face, the way his arms reach out almost instinctively to keep her from harm, the way he speaks to her with a bluntness that betrays a keen trust. Aurora may not know the prince well, but he is a good man, she can see. Kind and smart.