Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(19)
Wren let go of Aurora just as suddenly and rolled onto her back, blinking up at the ceiling.
“Yes,” Aurora whispered then. “That was close.”
In the morning, as she had done every morning of their journey, Aurora held out her wrists for Wren to bind them.
In this way they manage to cross weeks’ worth of land, moving slowly but steadily westward, passing undetected even through the lush Vallée de Merle, where a falcon eyes them from above, steering at a slant through the sapphire mist.
The border along the river should have been fortified by the Delucian army, but instead they see only razed villages, huts leveled into the mud. Abandoned roads and empty barns that bring back eerie visions of Sommeil itself—a crumbling, desiccated land, left by an unfit ruler to rot.
And always, in the distance: steam clouds, cradling Mount Briar and snaking throughout the territories.
In LaMorte, the terrain becomes increasingly rocky and steep as they make their way up a narrow mountain pass. The pass is deserted, and they’ve given up their plague ruse by now. Wren carries the loose rein in her pack, and Aurora has flung the black fabric from her head, tucking it into her belt so that she can breathe and see, though the higher they climb, the thinner the air becomes, and the heavier Aurora’s heart grows, pumping urgency through her chest. It’s hard to breathe, hard to think. They have not eaten in three days.
So when she smells the faint, distant scent of smoked meat, something in her lurches, desperate. She begins to run, jaggedly, uphill.
“Aurora,” Wren calls out, trying to follow her. “We don’t know where it’s coming from; we can’t just—”
But an eager, wild hunger leaps in Aurora’s veins, pushing her ahead, toward the wisp of smoke in the trees. . . .
As she runs, she sways, dizzy with the desire that has awakened like a beast inside her. She holds out her arm and can see the blue veins rising underneath her skin. She staggers over to a scrawny birch tree and leans against it to catch her breath, and her balance. The sky spins. She blinks rapidly.
Wren finally catches up, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. “We’re not three days’ from Blackthorn now. We can’t risk getting caught. It’s not worth it, Princess.”
“But—”
Her vision goes hazy at the periphery. Wren’s face swims in and out of focus, her concerned dark eyes, her gaunt cheekbones, her hands shaking as they reach for Aurora. . . .
We are going to die out here, Aurora realizes. The thought is sharp as an arrow, cold and hard as ice. It hits her square in the chest.
Breathless, she falls.
When Aurora comes to, the thick scent of smoke and river trout fills her nostrils. She gags, and then convulses from the pain in her empty stomach. Wren hovers nearby, and an old woman with long gray hair is ladling thin broth into a rough clay mug. There’s a blanket draped over Wren’s shoulders, and one covering Aurora too. Thick pine needles surround Wren, and for a moment Aurora is sure the girl has somehow become a bird, alighting in a tree.
Aurora sits up slowly. She blinks at the steaming mug in the elderly woman’s hands. It cannot be true. They haven’t seen a hot meal in weeks. Without thinking, Aurora takes the mug and unself-consciously dives into her broth, gulping it down, hardly noticing the flies that dart in and out, vying for a drop of its warmth.
And then a little boy clambers to her side, crying, “She’s awake!”
“Flea?” Mud streaks the boy’s face, soot in his light hair, and Aurora almost sobs in response to his wide, crooked-toothed smile. It is Flea. “But how?” she whispers.
“Survivors. We found them,” Wren says. There are tears in her eyes, tracks through the dirt on her cheeks. Guilt, as dizzying as her hunger, moves through Aurora. “Or rather, they found us. They escaped Malfleur’s army and have been camping out here, in hiding,” she explains, gesturing around them at what Aurora can now see is a rudimentary camp sprung up literally among tree branches. Haphazardly hewn boards crisscross the tree branches to form platforms connected by planks, like forts built by children playing make-believe.
But that is where the innocence of the scenery ends. There are hundreds of Sommeilians, Aurora can now see, huddled in crowded clumps half covered by makeshift tents, dirty sheets, and clothes hanging off the branches, drenched in the smell of sweat and waste. There are tiny blackened areas both in the trees and on the ground from small, cautious, hastily blotted-out fires. And the flies—they’re everywhere, clustered on the arms of sleeping children, drawn to the filth . . . and worse. The broth turns in her stomach. Aurora is sure she can smell, can feel, death in the air. These people are dying—of hunger, of cold, of sicknesses they were never exposed to in Sommeil. Their whole world has been decimated, gone up in a magical and lethal smoke.
She feels a gush of protectiveness and despair. These are her people—she vowed to help them. And, she realizes as she looks around her, they are all women and children.
“Apparently they’ve been depending on a few kind locals for help and shelter,” Wren goes on to explain. “People like Constance,” she says, gesturing to the old woman, who is, even now, putting an arm behind Aurora’s back to steady her.
“Thank you,” Aurora says. Constance doesn’t seem to hear her, but she smiles, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening. “I will get stronger. I will help. I will—”