Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(12)
“Don’t you see?” he says. “Your sister never even wanted this marriage. Why won’t you just marry me?”
The memories rush at her: the heat between them, the way his lips lingered on her skin that night in the wine caves. His hands, his words, soft and pressing. How close she felt to him then. How beautiful, powerful, changed.
“Please, Isabelle. I ask you a third time, and I don’t think I can ask you again.”
Devastation brings its own brand of heat to her cheeks. “We can’t just pick up where we left off, William. You know as well as I do. Aurora woke up, and you were perfectly willing to throw away what we had in order to wed her—”
“Which had been our plan and what you wanted!” he protests, pulling away. “And listen: Your sister clearly didn’t choose me.”
“But you,” Isbe counters, turning her face high, feeling bold with the truth of it. “You didn’t choose me.”
“Yes, Isabelle. I did. I chose you, and I choose you again.”
She folds her arms over her chest, maybe to keep from falling over, or falling into him, or falling completely away from herself. She doesn’t know.
Except she does know. “You only chose me when there wasn’t a choice at all.”
He can’t deny that, and he doesn’t.
But she won’t linger in his silence, won’t wallow in the truth he likes to distort in order to satisfy whatever whim of feeling passes through him at the time. Just like a man, to want what he wants only when he wants it.
And she doesn’t need an escort, either—she can find her way to the stables on her own. After all, she has been running there—running from the palace, from its rules and its cruelties—all her life.
Her fury and confusion are muffled by the life’s worth of memories brought on as soon as she steps into the barn. She has not been here since escaping with Gilbert the night before the council intended to send her to the convent in Isolé for good.
The barn scents overwhelm her with their familiarity: equine sweat and sweet feed, worn leather and hay dust and dank wood. The horses snuffle quietly. Those that survived the Sleeping Sickness were left wary, restless. She has the urge to soothe them but knows they must sense the unease in her own heart.
She passes Freckles’s empty stall, and stops. For a moment, she thinks she can hear her favorite mare nicker softly. Her throat tightens and she reaches between the bars, but no velvety nose nudges her hand.
She clicks her tongue anyway. Tss tss tss.
There is no shuffling of hooves or flick of a mane. Silence.
She leans her forehead against the stall door, breathing deeply, letting the pressure in her chest rise and fall, rise and fall. But it does not lessen.
She knows she must accept that Freckles is dead, and so, truly, is the young girl who used to ride her, the king’s wild bastard daughter. The king is dead too—has been for years now. And Gilbert?
She has heard nothing of his fate, though she did send a messenger to Roul’s village. He has not seen his brother. No one has. It can only mean one thing, yet Isbe refuses to believe it. She feels that Gilbert is alive—can nearly hear his easy laughter in the distance. Then again, she feels like she can hear Freckles whinnying in the far fields too—wants to believe the mare has simply sneaked away, breaking from her stall as she’s done so many times in the past. But that is an illusion, a wish.
No good ever came from wishing.
Isbe has always resisted the temptation to wish for things she knows she cannot have, because she fears the disappointment will break her. But it’s more than that: even the beginning of a wish taking shape in her heart hurts—sends an actual physical pang through her body, a kind of vibration that scares her, like a bolt of painful lightning running straight through her chest. Like a curse.
She takes a deep breath, trying to settle herself.
When Isbe first lost her sight, she began to feel that the world was made mostly of a darkness—and that this darkness was itself a kind of material, a fabric that contorted into shape and meaning only by necessity. Until a person heaved a breath or spoke, or ruffled the air around her, that person had not yet existed. Things and people alike would disappear back into that amorphous fabric just as easily as they came. But gradually Isbe grew to believe in the world she could not see, to have faith in it.
She reminds herself to have faith in it still.
She selects a different horse and begins readying the saddle, losing herself in the tightening of buckles and the smoothing of the stallion’s coat. It takes a moment for her to sense the presence of another person.
Isbe freezes.
Whoever has arrived just now is definitely not a stable hand, whose footfalls would be easy and confident, perhaps accompanied by a low hum or whistle. The person who has entered the stables is shadowed, movements muted in a way that makes him or her seem larger and more fearful. Or perhaps she only thinks so because of the mingled sounds arising around her, of snorts, huffs, stamping hooves.
A woman clears her throat. “How delightful,” she says, in a voice like a cannonball’s slow roll down the bore. Loaded.
Isabelle turns. “Mother.”
Reverend Mother Hildegarde is as large of body as she is of spirit, Isbe recalls, having first met her at the convent of Isolé, where she and the prince took refuge on their grueling journey from his palace in Aubin to her home in Deluce.