Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(20)
“They’ve been watching Malfleur for weeks now,” Wren says.
At the mention of Malfleur, her whole body goes alert. “And?”
Wren shakes her head, gently pushing Aurora back to a resting position. “When you’re rested,” Wren says, “we’ll talk with the others.”
But the warmth of the broth has spread through her belly, and Aurora is beginning to feel more alert. “No,” she says, touching Wren’s hand and removing it from her shoulder. “We’ll speak to them now.”
They make their way through the maze of branches and planks and platforms—Aurora awed by the ease with which some of the others move about, adapted already to this half-life.
In a crowded tent, Aurora listens to horrifying tales of the faerie queen whose storm of evil makes Belcoeur’s actions seem like a weak breeze in comparison. How Malfleur and her vultures dragged their men away in chains. How she has sapped the youth from nearly all the women in her territory. Aurora has heard the rumors but has never seen evidence of them before. Now she stares in wonder at Constance, who looks as though she may keel over in a matter of months—her gray hair frayed, her face loose, and her skin dappled with age. She is, in fact, Aurora learns, only fourteen years old. One of the many orphans of LaMorte, her youth—her life—stolen from her.
The thought sickens Aurora.
“We must stop Malfleur. I have a plan, but I need to get into the castle. I need to gain access to her.” The truth, the determination of it, is like a javelin driving through her, trim and sharp and deadly. She grips the floorboards beneath her, as though to keep herself from springing out of the tent and racing the rest of the way to Blackthorn.
“Our scouts have been watching the castle all day every day,” one middle-aged woman is saying. Her fingernails are cracked and black with mud. “We’ve not seen the queen depart the gates once.”
“But,” inserts another, as old-looking as Constance—and possibly just as young, “there have been back-to-back attacks in Rocheux and Rigide.” She extracts a drawing that Aurora recognizes as a rudimentary map of the LaMorte territories.
“An’ the queen spotted at both.” The first woman gestures to two places on the map. “Workin’ a kind a’ fire what could eat right through a man’s sword. Fae work, to be sure.”
The others nod solemnly, fear in their eyes.
Aurora studies the markings on the map. The villages of Rocheux and Rigide lie on opposite sides of the third-largest peak, which means it would be seemingly impossible for the queen to appear in both locations within a day of one another . . . and certainly not without ever leaving the castle.
Aurora doesn’t doubt that Malfleur’s power is great. But the accounts of the Sommeilian scouts stretch the limits of possibility. Disappearing and reappearing, phantomlike and at whim . . . these are abilities Aurora has never read about in any of the faerie histories. And she has read them all.
And fire that can melt a sword in battle? Great magic, dark magic, always comes at a price, even—or especially—for the fae.
What price did Malfleur pay for such power?
A chill moves through her. If their stories are true, then Aurora, along with all of Deluce, is up against someone far more capable—and more sinister—than anyone realized.
She looks around at the other women in the tent, their bodies weak, their eyes fatigued but fierce. “We must prepare,” she says.
A light rain falls for several days as Aurora and Wren recuperate, hiding out with the scouts on a perch overlooking Blackthorn from morning ’til night, watching soldiers come and go, with no sign of Malfleur. Aurora’s arms and legs have taken on new contours from navigating the treetop campsite and climbing steep terrain. Her body has grown tenser, tauter, stronger, even as her determination has done the same.
All the while, the dampness seeps into her worn clothes and deepens the ache and cold in her bones.
This evening, there’s agitation among the group. There was another raid yesterday, at the foot of the mountains, not far from their camp, and the queen was spotted riding her silver-haired stallion through the wreckage, her cloak billowing in the thick smoke as fires raged and people screamed.
The Sommeilians argue late into the night about whether the risk of relocating outweighs the risk of staying. Most don’t want to leave: they’ve learned the landscape here, the hospitable areas where the soil is fertile. They’ve identified which leaves can be ground into powder for broth, which acorns can be broken open to produce sweet nut meat, and which wild things ought to be avoided at all cost, like the fork-tongued salamanders said to be venomous and the flying squirrels that carry disease in their fangs.
To avoid the mounting tensions, Aurora splinters off with Wren at sunset to forage. She has come to like these moments, when the world appears charred and quiet. She has been getting used to the thin mountain air too, pine filled and smoky, to the constant chill, the fear that radiates out along the branches of their camp like a contagion.
Still, tonight she’s agitated. If only she had her palace library at her fingertips. She’d be able to flip through all the histories of the fae in search of a clue that might help explain how Malfleur’s powers have grown so mighty, how she’s able to leap from place to place around the territories without ever seeming to leave her own front door. Even in the time of the great winged faeries, nearly a thousand years ago or more, there were no stories of disappearing and reappearing, of traveling like a phantom throughout the land. Could it be a combination of flight and invisibility? Could Malfleur have produced doubles—replicas of herself scattered in key areas of tension all over LaMorte? Could she be creating elaborate spells of illusion, sort of like the enchantments Belcoeur inflicted on the castle in Sommeil?