Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(25)

That they are important.

She hopes that will be enough.

Because if Deluce remains this divided, it will fall.

“So . . . have you still had no word?” she asks Roul. She can’t bring herself to say Gilbert’s name aloud.

“No,” he whispers. “Nothing.”

Even though it’s what she expected, disappointment floods her, makes it difficult for her to swallow her food. “I would understand it if you hate me,” she whispers.

“Isabelle—”

“It’s my fault,” she rushes on, the confession pushing at her lungs, begging to come out. Guilt that she’s even here, when the prince has no idea. Guilt that she didn’t come sooner.

“He didn’t want to go,” she says. “He thought it was a terrible idea. He tried to talk me out of it. If I had listened . . .” Her thoughts have traveled down this road often enough. But she can’t finish her sentence, because it’s impossible to say how different things might be now. The only certainty is that Gil would be alive. He would be here.

“Isbe, you can’t think that way. You must know,” Roul says quietly.

“Know what?”

He puts down his spoon. “Gil would have followed you anywhere.”

She jolts awake to the sound of Aalis crying. It’s the middle of the night. Isabelle must have been muttering in her sleep again and awakened the little girl. She hurries over to the tiny pile of straw close to the now-cold hearth and picks up the crying girl, swaying her in her arms, holding her young warm body against her own.

“Shhh,” she says, as the child begins to quiet. She breathes in the smell of her wispy, unwashed hair and thinks of the fact that Aalis’s mother died only a few months ago. She wonders what Aalis remembers of her. The girl settles into Isbe’s arms with the comfort of a little hedgehog burrowing into its home.

Isbe can tell by the weakness of light through the window that it’s not yet dawn. Roul will want at least another hour or two of sleep before the next hard day of labor.

“One night so mild, before break of morn . . .” She begins to sing the lullaby that always calmed her sister when they were young. Aalis’s sniffles seem to lessen, so Isbe continues, substituting the lyrics from her mother dreams, repeating the phrases until her throat aches.

At some point, she notices Aalis has fallen back to sleep. She lays her down on her pallet and tucks herself back into her own bed.

But as she drifts off again, she senses another presence in the room, in the doorway.

“Gil?” she whispers.

“I heard Aalis cry. Is everything all right?” he asks, stepping softly into the room.

She turns toward his voice. “Gil, is that you?”

“Of course it’s me.”

She feels confused, her head full of cotton. She gestures to Aalis, who is snoring softly, then whispers, “Let’s talk out there.”

She walks through the doorway and feels as though she is following a ghost.

He is silent, and she begins to doubt whether he’s really there.

“Gil?”

“Yes.” His voice reaches her, but she can’t tell where he’s standing.

Suddenly, she feels hot, confused, shaky. Gil is here.

Gil is here.

How can this be?

She is shivering uncontrollably, torn between racing into him and cowering. She turns away from his voice, overwhelmed, and feels her way around the kitchen automatically, relieved to discover the bucket from the well still has some water in it.

“What are you doing?” Gil asks.

“Heating the water, of course,” she answers, moving about in a numb fog. She locates the tinder and flint stacked four paces from the hearth, as Roul had shown her, and begins to light a fire, the flick and slash of stone on metal cutting through the stiffness of her thoughts. Still, her hands shake.

“But why?”

She’s confused by his question. “It’s the least I can do to help.”

The fire finally crackles to life, and she stands, remaining by the hearth to allow her legs to warm up and her head to clear. Think. Think.

She can feel Gil’s warmth and closeness when he comes up behind her. For a moment, it seems like he is going to touch her, but he doesn’t.

“I’m afraid this life is harder on you than either of us knew it would be,” he says quietly.

A protest forms on her lips. “No,” she whispers, turning to face him at last.

“Isbe.” His voice has gone low and wavering. She is terrified by what he might say next, and by what her own face must show. Gil is here. He is here. Unthinkably, impossibly.

He takes her hands in his, and the touch sends another shudder through her. He traces a finger along her cheek like he did on the boat, just before they were separated. “Isbe,” he repeats. “Isbe.”

“Isbe.” Roul’s voice shakes her out of the heaviness of sleep. She is freezing cold, her blanket and cloak cast somewhere off to the side.

And then she knows.

She wants to cry, openly and plainly, as Aalis did.

Because Gilbert is dead. He must be. Drowned out there in the open sea. She failed to find him, failed to save him. Instead she has gone on to fall in love with, and marry, a prince. And yet what she can’t admit to William is that she fears her questions about Gil will haunt her forever. She fears that their unfinished love will flutter like a moth in the secret closet of her heart, slowly eating away at the silks and fabrics of her memories, until one day it is the only thing left.