Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(18)

It’s just as she expected. A stretch of skin there, about the width of three fingers, is cold and firm as marble, as solid and inanimate as stone—is stone.





9


Aurora


Aurora never knew how vast Deluce’s countryside was until now, as she allows herself to be tugged along dirt roads, across muddy pastures, and through woods dense with the crackle of pine needles and half-thawed tarns. With the dark veil over her head, her breathing feels forced, her sight limited to stray chances of light and shadow. Her stomach grows hollowed and hard. Her feet bleed. She does not know it. She hopes, at least, that this is enough to show Wren she’s serious. Nothing has ever felt this serious.

The idea of Malfleur sitting high in her castle in LaMorte, training the refugees of Sommeil to become her newest soldiers—perhaps even poisoning them with her own brand of sinister magic, casting spells over them to hold them under her command—drives Aurora forward, making her more determined than ever that her plan must work.

She must convince Malfleur to let the Sommeilians go. She must free Heath.

Even if it comes at an unthinkable cost.

“What can you possibly offer Malfleur in exchange for helping us?” Wren keeps asking, and each time, Aurora tells her only that she knows what to do, and that Wren should trust her.

But Wren does not. And Aurora knows that if she reveals her plan to Wren, the girl may try and stop her.

Of course, Wren is not the only one. Aurora’s certain that William and Isabelle will try to stop her too. Which is why, when she gets the opportunity, Aurora pens a letter to send back home, in her steadiest and most convincing script. In it, she writes the story she wishes were true, the story that ends in her finding Heath, healthy and alive. The story that ends in true love.

Wren gives the letter to a courier on the outskirts of Bouleau, and then they trudge onward.

At dusk and dawn each day, Wren and Aurora forage vainly for food, both of them growing thinner, subsisting mainly on leaves and berries and even, on one cold night, bits of beetle-filled dirt that make Aurora retch. One evening, she spots a lone doe in the woods. It stares at her with glossy eyes, and her whole being cries out with the agony of her hunger.

After that, Wren begins to open up a tiny bit, to lift the stormy silence she’s been holding for long stretches at a time. Even if she still blames Aurora for the destruction of Sommeil, her anger seems to be softening, and this lets in a tiny hint of hope. Wren tells her stories from her childhood, tells her about how she used to follow Heath into the Borderlands to watch him hunt. The awe with which she saw his mind funnel into focus, his arm muscles going taut as he raised his bow and arrow and aimed. The gasping thrill as an arrow found its mark.

But the stories of Heath bring a new kind of agony to Aurora, ushering a return of her guilt—after all, Wren was in love with Heath before Aurora arrived—as well as a resurgence of all the emotions he awakened in Aurora when she first arrived in Sommeil: the terror when he held the tip of a knife to her neck at the cottage, the intrigue when he relented and helped her. How he guided her across the meadow when she injured her ankle, then tended to her in her room, his hands fumbling but gentle. How he caressed her cheek, brushed her hair out of her face before she pulled away, stunned and overwhelmed and inflamed. She longs to see him again. To finally put a name to all that remains unfinished between them.

And to tell him that it was never meant to be. He was not, and is not, hers to fall in love with. If they had both stayed in Sommeil, perhaps she would never have realized this. But now it seems clearer than ever. Her desire for true love had been like a lit spark that, in his presence, flamed and grew. He was the first person to really touch her. Of course she wanted it to be him—wanted that first touch to be the beginning of their love story.

But as she’s lying beside Wren in the night’s long hours of darkness and breath and rustling wind, she finds herself seeking out any excuse to be touched, to be reminded of its possibility. She begins to wonder whether it was really Heath at all that she’d been drawn to in Sommeil, or just what he represented: a whole new world of sensation. Had she confused the longing to be touched with the yearning to be loved?

Now, even the way the horse rein wraps her wrist during the days, rubbing the skin raw, means something. She feels connected to herself, to her body, and, increasingly, even to Wren.

Which perhaps explains what happened the other night.

It had been rainy, near midnight, and they were asleep in a barn when a farmer, reeking of alcohol, stumbled inside, muttering that he’d seen trespassers and that they’d better show themselves if they didn’t want to be killed. Aurora and Wren were lying side by side for warmth, hidden in the upper floor behind large bales of hay. They froze, and Aurora automatically clutched Wren’s hands, both of them holding their breath until the farmer at last gave up his fumbling, drunken search and left.

When they were sure he’d gone, they finally exhaled, gasping with stifled, relieved laughter. “That was close,” Wren whispered, letting go of her hands and grabbing Aurora’s arms instead. The marvel of it—of being held—rushed through Aurora, signaled a change in her. She felt awake and alive with it. She wanted more of it.

Wren’s face, outlined in faint light, was so near to Aurora’s that she might have inched just a little to the left and kissed her. The thought came to Aurora with a surprising smoothness, as though it had been waiting there in her mind for some time. In the moonlight piercing through the dripping rafters, Wren’s lips looked like a miniature bow, curved and taut.