Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(17)

Some secrets are given to you without your having any say in the matter. They become worn and polished inside your hand. You begin to forget their heaviness. You begin to lose track of where your skin ends and the stone begins.

It is late. Wren leaves the small campsite where Aurora lies sleeping and moves through low trees toward the soft babble of a nearby creek. Kneeling in the damp moss, she collects a pool of silt-laden water in her hands and splashes her face. Again. Again. She looks up at the watery clouds, smears of darkness against the greater black. She heaves in a breath, willing herself to be calm.

But she knows she cannot remain calm. Not when she is holding the weight of a terrible secret.

Not when she knows she must be dying.

Wren searches for her reflection but finds only fractured images in the rippling stream: eyes that don’t align, a mouth that wavers and splits, skin that is at turns moonlit and shadowed. There’s no evidence of her concealments in those features, but they haunt her nonetheless.

The first is one she has trouble giving a name to. It is a fine layer of feeling, chiffonlike and subtle, that invades her senses whenever the princess speaks, or moves, or lies close to her in the bleakness of the evening. She does not know the true meaning of this sensitivity, only that it runs against the grain of her bitterness. She doesn’t know what to think of Aurora. She’d resisted Aurora’s half-cooked plan at first, then finally insisted on being a part of it, if only to make sure Aurora was true to her word—if only to be reconnected to others from her world.

If only to save herself.

But the second secret burns clear and bright behind her eyelids whenever she closes them, draws chills through her limbs when she sleeps, ravages her breathing with quick gasps and shudders she pretends come from the bitter wind rather than the truth within. It is the reason she knows they must hurry.

It has been several days since they abandoned the royal carriage. Neither Wren nor Aurora could really figure out how to drive it, a terrible harbinger of the journey to come, and Wren knew it. Besides, the road itself was temperamental at best, nonexistent at worst. And of course, there was the fact that the carriage’s royal insignia was practically a call-out to bandits and thieves. The last thing they wanted was to travel to LaMorte conspicuously.

It was this last thought that had given Aurora an idea: What if they made themselves as conspicuous as possible? She ripped the thin black underlining from the carriage seat cushions and dismantled the harnesses from the carriage rod, then insisted Wren help her topple the carriage into a ditch by the woods and release the horses, sending them galloping riderless back to the palace.

The princess then draped the torn black fabric over her own head like a long veil and tied a rein to her wrist, holding out the other end to Wren.

Now as they passed through woods and villages, following the direction of the sun’s movement, Wren led Aurora like a condemned prisoner. They no longer had to fear widespread apprehension—in fact, Aurora had been banking on it. And Wren had to admit her idea was working. Whenever they confronted a distrustful traveler on the road, Wren would recite the lines Aurora told her: “My ward is a survivor of the sleeping sickness. I’ve been charged with taking her to quarantine in the Vallée de Merle—have you not heard of it? No one else was willing to do the job.” If probed with further questions, she began to plead for assistance, confessing that she could not look the prisoner in the face as the disease had so mangled the woman’s appearance as to make the sight almost unbearable.

So far, at the mere hint of contagion, people have offered the two journeyers a wide berth. No one has lingered long enough to question their story. No one knows enough to contradict it—for of course there is no quarantine in the valley that separates Deluce from LaMorte.

No one has guessed that the woman beneath the veil is the princess of Deluce herself.

At night, the two women have made camp on the outskirts of farms, in goat pens and chicken coops and sometimes, when the weather has allowed, right out in the open, beneath a wintry sky alive with starlight.

And this has all been enough, almost enough, to quell the pull of the inevitable—the monster Wren had thought to outrun, to outlive, but which has caught up to her at last. Wren once told Aurora that she never wanted to leave Sommeil, that a whole new life outside of it would only serve to diminish everything that had come before. But she was lying. Of course she wanted to believe in it—to maybe one day see with her own eyes the waking world of which Heath so often spoke in animated whispers. But even Heath didn’t know it, the beautiful, simple irony, formed like a crystal with perfectly equal sides.

How Aurora’s curse undone would activate an even older curse—the one on her.

It was for this reason, more than any other, that Wren ought to hate Aurora. But she doesn’t. Not exactly. Not when Aurora seems to be the only person willing to take up her cause.

Still, she doesn’t trust her. Wren doesn’t trust anyone easily. After all, she’s never had to. The people she grew up with in Sommeil were ones she saw every single day of her life. There had never been a stranger to meet until Aurora. And no matter the princess’s intentions, she has unwittingly ruined Wren’s life, destroyed a world of people she swore to help, and set in motion an old curse Wren had always hoped was just a myth.

Now, in the thin, wavering light reflected by the creek, Wren pulls her knees into her chest and carefully rolls back her skirt. She removes her shoe to expose her ankle bone, a miniature planet in the expanse of darkness. She rubs the inside of her foot, feeling the divot between bone and tendon, and swallows back her dread. The curse is real.