Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(27)
“What makes you think I even possess such a thing?” Binks sits back in his pillowed seat with a muffled squeak.
“Just a hunch,” she replies calmly. A man who devotes his life to gambling—trading in goods, gold, luck, and secrets—is one who likely keeps tidy records of who owes him what.
“What might you need this information for?”
“What I need, sir, are their men. As many as I can get. You may have heard there’s a war on.”
A pause. And then: “What happened to your hair?”
It’s an obvious attempt to unnerve her. She reaches up to touch her hair, which has been gathered neatly at the base of her neck. He can’t possibly tell how short it is, save for one stray lock, which she quickly brushes behind her ear. He has, she’s sure, simply heard the rumors: the foreign prince’s wild, short-haired bride. The king’s bastard daughter taking to the campaign trail to rally the peasantry.
“What happened to your staff?” she counters.
He grumbles. “Say I have what interests you. . . . What will you give me in return? I’ve heard you possess something of interest to me.”
Isabelle tenses. “Do I?” He can’t be asking for her luck, can he?
“The stories have preceded you. Of a certain unbreakable slipper. I might find quite a value in this special token of yours. I might even throw in a tailor or two—you know a man who’s good with a needle could certainly help improve the look of those military uniforms.”
Isabelle scoffs. “You would trade your own men for a symbolic shoe?”
She hears the soft sigh of his chair as he shifts and seems to reconsider. “Perhaps not,” he says slowly. “I would need to see it first.”
Her hand moves to the pouch tied to her belt protectively. “Lord Barnabé . . . Binks. I don’t have time to bargain with you. You may have noticed that I am now officially your queen. Decisions about the fate of this kingdom’s nobility are mine to make. What I can offer you is that I won’t have you executed at my earliest convenience.”
He guffaws, but she raises her hand. “Or,” she adds, “worse, have you publicly stripped of your title and prominence, what remains of your wealth and”—she gestures—“frippery.”
This seems to shut him up . . . for a moment.
Then he shoves his chair back. “I won’t stand for these empty threats and insults.”
“I assure you,” she says calmly, “they aren’t empty, but your coffers will be. I’ll give you some time to collect the information I have requested, and will expect the names delivered to the palace by special messenger.” At this she can practically hear him cringe, thinking of the expense of a courier in times of war. “In one week’s time.”
“But—”
“One week, Binks.”
She waits until she has made it all the way out of his mansion and into her waiting carriage before she allows herself to smile.
11
Aurora
The underground tunnels of LaMorte are lined with iron torches holding a kind of moss that burns all day without fading, even in the close, oppressive heat. Steam swirls, beckons, melts. Through it, a greenish glow glances against the rocks and dirt walls, making them seem to undulate. Like lungs, Aurora thinks.
Once, a plague physician visited the palace in Deluce, and tried to explain to Aurora how the disease had come to infect her mother’s lungs, described them as soft passages that inflate and deflate with breath, vulnerable to invasion. Though she’d been banned from Queen Amelié’s chambers, Aurora sneaked into her mother’s rooms and crept to her bed, hoping for a word, a sign of life. Maybe the queen would bestow a last wish, she’d imagined, or at least a harried maternal warning. Perhaps there’d be a cool, dry kiss pressed against her forehead, a bony hand clasped around her own. A gaze that showed what her mother had never actually, in so many words, said. Not just that Aurora was pretty or that Aurora was good. But that Amelié loved her.
All she’d seen, though, was the queen’s porcelain skin, her cheekbones cutting like blades into the dusty air of the heavily boarded bedchamber, her closed eyes, her stillness. A whisper of pained breath. A droplet of blood at the corner of her lips.
Aurora keeps thinking of that cold and dreadful morning—her mother’s last—as she moves through the tunnels underneath the mountains.
She leads the refugees of Sommeil and LaMorte, a brigade of women armed with anything they could find—clubs, anvils, pickaxes, and sticks—through the mountains’ lungs, realizing they are like a sickness, spreading, taking hold, approaching the heart.
Her discovery has made her stronger, braver. She’d been right—she’d found the heating channels connecting the furnaces. The next morning, she led the women away from the camp, back to the stones, and pried them apart.
And then they were inside.
Even as she wipes perspiration from the back of her neck, Aurora feels another kind of certainty flowering within her: she’s convinced now that true love is something subtler and more complicated than she used to believe.
Wren has been keeping her distance. She never explained why she stalked off in the woods the other night after their argument. She hasn’t said why she doesn’t want to be friends, and Aurora has respected her distance. She knows how to be patient. She has spent her whole childhood that way: waiting, silent, while others lived. This was why she’d had to go. To leave not only the palace, but everything it contained. Even Isbe.