Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(16)
What did change her mind? A nun, she thinks. God, perhaps—a distant figure to whom she’s given little thought before now.
Or maybe . . . her mother. Her heart. A tiny shoe made entirely of glass.
Or maybe she hadn’t fully made up her mind until she stepped into her room to find the wreath Aurora had left behind, and was flooded with the sudden understanding of what her sister wanted. She wanted her own chance at love.
And she wanted Isabelle to have the same.
I realized I couldn’t lose you too, she is tempted to answer, which is also true.
But the truest reason Isbe changed her mind is not because it was what William said he wanted, or what, deep down, she wanted, or what anyone wanted, for that matter. It was because Hildegarde was right: Deluce needs Isbe. Not just a bride, not just an alliance, but her.
“I couldn’t let this dress go to waste,” is all she says, tilting her face up toward William’s.
“No. With everything at stake, we wouldn’t want that.” His finger traces the line of her jaw, and all the humor that welled up in her explodes into nervousness, the full tilt of what she has done registering abruptly, like when Freckles used to spook, leaping into the unknown with Isbe desperately clinging to the reins. She holds on now to the prince’s doublet, flat against his firm chest.
His hands wrap around her waist, pulling her against him. His lips meet her temple and linger there, then drift to her cheekbone. He kisses the corner of her mouth. She parts her lips, inhaling. But this kiss remains incomplete—his breathing has altered, just subtly—he leans in and lifts her up, carrying her backward across the room, and she’s half tempted to push him away, to say what a terrible, doomed idea this is, after all.
He sits her at the edge of the bed.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says now. “That I can help.”
“I’m listening.” He takes her hand and kisses the inside of her wrist.
“If Malfleur can convince so many men to join her ranks, why can’t we do the same? While you advance the army, I can recruit. Increase our numbers—”
He stops her with a kiss. “Yes,” he says. Then he kneels before her, his hands on her knees. “I wish.” He sighs. “I wish it wasn’t like this. That we didn’t have to speak of war. That I didn’t have to leave tomorrow.”
She knows he must ride to meet with a new brigade of soldiers tomorrow—that she may not see him again for at least a fortnight. There’s so much to be done, but it all feels impossibly far away.
“Nothing ever comes of—”
“Wishing,” he fills in. “So you’ve said many times. And still I do.”
His words feel too heavy for this moment, especially when her heart feels so eager, so alive it might burst from her chest like a spring bulb finally breaking through frozen soil. “We have tonight, at least,” she reminds him, touching his face—the strong jaw, the serious mouth, the small knitted scar.
“What shall we do with it?” He turns her hand over and kisses her knuckles, his patience a form of torture.
It suddenly occurs to Isabelle that she has been waiting for this—waiting and dreading and wanting and then pressing that want back down within her—ever since that night in the caves, the air pulsating with the cool memory of merlot. “I’m sure we can think of something,” she says.
Then his hands have found the border of her skirts, have shifted them, ever so gently, have found their way under all the layers of fabric and ribbon and fuss, have discovered her legs, bare beneath the silk. He pulls back the dress, revealing only her left knee. He kisses the tender spot just to the inner side of it. Isbe flushes, heat coursing up her leg and through her whole body.
Then he whispers against her skin, so softly she hardly hears the words, though she can feel their tickle across her thigh. “Yes. I’m sure we can.”
In the morning, he is gone. The dress was, thankfully, designed for only a single use, and it now lies half in shreds somewhere on the cold floor, along with the wreath and the veil.
She wants to reach over and find the prince there beside her; she wraps her arms around herself instead. Last night was . . . there are no words for last night. But now is the dawn of a new time, and a new Isabelle.
She is married. The word seems odd to her, delicate and yet binding, like the soft click of a lock.
She floats somewhere between before and after—she’s gone ethereal, and might in fact no longer exist. She should be afraid, but she is not. Already another idea is forming. Her mind skims through the sheets and the sensations and the sighs, and travels back to the one thing that now tethers her to the present . . . packed safely in a velvet-padded box beneath her bed, the tiny gift of her mother’s—heartbreakingly fragile, yet sharper and more real than anything. The strange, the beautiful: the slipper of glass.
PART
II
WHOSE BLOOD MUST SLAY
8
Wren,
Formerly a Maiden of Sommeil,
Indentured to the Mad Queen Belcoeur
Wren has never liked secrets. She imagines them as smooth, invisible stones that fit inside your palm—at first, they give you a sense of importance, of meaning. But then you learn that you can never put them down. They startle you awake at night with their clumsiness. In the water of dreams, they pull you under.