Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(24)

Her pulse quickens. Chasseur.

The guards have already moved loudly ahead, entering and slamming the front doors of the noisy tavern attached to the inn. She can smell cooking meat and the sour scent of old ale. Normally she’d dine with them, demanding a tally of their latest recruits or finding someone who could pen a letter for her to send to William. It had made her heart race with pride two nights ago, when she was able to report more than three hundred recruits in a single village—made her feel certain she is helping Deluce. And it made her feel closer than ever to William, despite their being apart.

“Actually, Byrne, there’s a detour to be made.”

He pauses. “Yes, miss?”

“Are the others . . . dispatched for now?”

“Indeed, all of them inside the tavern, awaiting you any moment.”

“Good,” she says, stepping back up into the carriage. “Because they can’t know. You’ll have to tell them I’ve gone to bed early without any supper. Now let’s hurry.”

“Without your guard, Highness? It would be unsafe to—” he protests.

“Nonsense. You must do as I ask. And Byrne?” she calls in a whisper.

“Yes, Miss Isabelle?” He leans his head through the carriage door.

“Your discretion will be required.”

It will be dark soon and the roads unsafe to travel, even in a royal carriage—or especially so. But Isbe doesn’t care. She races down the lane toward Gilbert’s older brother’s cottage, her gloved hand trailing the fence for guidance, her heart leaping several steps ahead, her thoughts chasing one another in circles. What will Roul think of her now? Has he any news? How can she ever truly apologize for what she has allowed to happen? Was it a mistake to keep this visit a secret from the guards?

Surely Prince William would understand her concern for the man who had tried to help her seal Deluce’s alliance and who sacrificed both his luck and, probably, his life, to the effort. But a hidden part of her knows she can’t tell William about Gilbert. There is something too precious there, in her past, to share. Something that was unfinished, forever left open, unresolved. She loves William—she has given him her body, her soul, her independence, everything she knows of herself. But she can’t give him this too.

It is six-year-old Piers who spots her first, racing out into the yard, whistling and hollering and throwing his arms around her.

“Isabelle,” Roul says, coming up behind the boy. Emotion clots his throat.

Aalis’s mix of babble and whining follows closely. She is likely in the baby sack tied to Roul’s back, from the sounds of it, and Isbe realizes the little girl may not even remember her—it has been no more than a couple of months, but the memory of a toddler is fickle.

Roul wraps his arms around Isbe and she hugs him back, hard, as a desperate, wrenching wave unfurls in her chest, carrying mixed feelings she had hardly even realized were there: sadness and longing and guilt and hope.

“Oh.” Roul suddenly pulls away. There’s an awkward pause, and Isbe is unsure what’s happening. Then she realizes. Roul is bowing down before her.

Humiliation knots in her stomach, and her cheeks continue to burn even after Roul invites her inside his cottage, which feels somehow smaller than it did this winter when she first came here with Gil.

“We had not thought to see you under these . . . circumstances. Are you lodging close by?” he asks her, a faint formality entering his voice.

“Actually, I was hoping I might . . . stay here tonight,” she says, the admission painful to her own ears. She can’t safely return to the inn tonight, not without her guard—and not when she can never quite tell if she’s in hostile or welcoming territory.

But it’s more than that. She wants things to be the way they were, just for one night.

He is silent for a moment before replying, “It would be our honor, of course. Please, make yourself . . . well . . . comfortable.”

“Here, let me at least . . .” She ruffles Aalis’s hair, and picks the girl up, then allows Piers to pull her over to the rickety table, where she plops down, taking in the smells of filth and farm animal, which are far preferable to the putrid stench of the Boar’s Neck tavern creeping into the inn’s rooms.

“We been heard all kinds a talk about ya, Isbe!” Piers declares, clambering loudly onto a stool. “Maribelle, she says ya gone ta give all us magic powers what like the fae got.”

“Well, I don’t know about that—”

“Yeah, she says you got a magic shoe.” Magic. Isbe smiles at the word, then realizes that he is not wrong. Though she’d thought about it before, it only now begins to sink in that the slipper has to have been touched by the fae at some point. So how did her mother come to possess it?

Piers is rocking back and forth on his stool, clattering its legs excitedly as he goes on. “An’, an’, an’ she says ole queen Maffer shoots fire outta ’er mouth like a dragon. But Jacques, he says Maffer gone ta make us knights in ’er army!”

“That’s enough, Piers,” Roul says, setting down a small, rough portion of lamb’s meat and bread for them both, and gruel for the children.

Isbe shivers. The knights of LaMorte. The idea that Malfleur will make all her soldiers into knights with special privileges is a claim Isbe has heard chanted in many of the villages in southern Deluce. It still shocks and scares her how easily so many peasants have been swayed to believe stories just as outlandish as the ones Piers is spouting—how many truly seem to think joining up with Malfleur’s army is their best bet, and are either oblivious to her evil or willing to overlook it in exchange for power, weapons, the dream of being treated as important. She hopes she has managed to persuade at least some of them that they are wrong, that the faerie queen will never reward any of them. That they’d only be enslaving themselves to a despot.