Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(3)
“Exactly that and only that,” William responds, and she could swear she feels his gaze sweep across her skin, lighting it on fire. He is always so cutting with his words, so frustratingly precise, so pointed—like darts driven into a map to mark a location.
“You’ve expected more, then.”
“Expected. Hoped.” He clears his throat. “As you know, there have been clashes in the western villages. Bouleau and Dureté have fallen, and we were unprepared.”
We.
“Queen Malfleur may be holding back the extent of her forces for now,” he goes on, “but I have persuaded Maximilien that our next step is to shore up our defense along the Vallée de Merle. In the meantime, we are sending scouts into the mountains to assess the cause of Malfleur’s delay. I’ve shown my new bombard design to the forge, and we’re moving forward with—”
“William,” Isbe inserts. “If I may interrupt.”
“You’ve certainly never asked permission before.” There’s a familiar amusement in his voice.
It’s intolerable! He finds these little ways to insinuate that he knows her intimately, when in fact, as of a month ago, she was hardly aware that a third prince of Aubin existed—and, to be sure, he’d never heard of her.
Never mind what had happened between them just seven nights ago, the kisses that left her lips swollen; his fingertips on her shoulders, her neck, her collarbone. . . . Never mind the fact that she too feels the same connectedness—feels that even when he surprises her, he does so in a way that further clarifies and satisfies her sense of his Williamness.
“Sarcasm is ill-fitting on you,” she says now with a huff. “I don’t believe, William, that our problem is one of strategy.”
“What do you mean, our problem? Our problem is Malfleur.”
“Or maybe Malfleur is just a symptom.”
“That symptom is murdering your people.”
“Only those she has not persuaded to her side.”
“The sword’s blade can be very persuasive,” William says dismissively, but she can hear the rhythm of his pacing as he considers what she said. “So too can the bands of thugs doing her dirty work, much like the ones who captured us back in Isolé.”
“Perhaps,” Isbe admits, remembering how they’d been seized and tied together by the wrists, how certain she’d been that they were going to die. “But what if there’s more to it than that? Everyone knows Bouleau and Dureté are the worst villages.”
“Worst?”
She cringes. “Poorest, I meant. Unhappiest. I heard a story about Dureté. That the lord who rules there is a faerie whose tithe is compassion. I heard he lived for years in constant tears, while all those who worked his fields grew angrier and more heartless by the tithe. As he took their compassion, they became hard. Is it any surprise, with such inequities, that they fell to Malfleur? Perhaps our greatest weakness is not a lack of assets or intelligence but an issue of, well, attitude. I can’t help but think of the many tales we heard along the Veiled Road. . . .”
The atrocities performed by Malfleur’s mercenaries are countless—barons and lords throughout the land brutally murdered and strung up in the village greens, a mockery made of their wealth and power: bodies stripped bare and mutilated (eyes removed, bloody guts leaking out of the M-shaped wounds carved into their exposed fat bellies), their fancy furnishings torn to shreds. Most horrifying of all were the fresh recruits, Delucian peasants dressed in fabrics made from the destroyed possessions of those lords, raiding and torching their manors, or sometimes hundreds of them taking up residence and wreaking havoc, feasting and celebrating while Malfleur’s soldiers offered them weapons and promises of liberation.
To anyone who knows anything about Queen Malfleur, those promises should seem thinner than the brittle layer of ice that laces the creek Isbe used to scramble across in winter, delighting in the crackle as it shattered beneath her—yet another one of her dangerously foolish (or if you asked her, fearless) pastimes. So what’s making people believe the faerie queen’s promises, if not a deep, preexisting anger within them? This, Isbe is convinced, is Malfleur’s greatest weapon: a dangerous flame that lives inside all of us, that blooms and burns when stoked.
And there is something worse, Isbe knows, than suffering backbreaking work, a hungry belly, or the burden of enormous levees and taxes, and that is the experience of being treated as though one’s life simply does not matter. Isbe knows that feeling.
William has approached her; the velvet swish of his floor-length cloak against the stone floor mirrors the warm rustle of his voice. “I remember the rumors, yes. And everything we witnessed.” He pauses.
Isbe is momentarily overcome by the prince’s limelike musk—part bitter, part sweet. She now associates that scent with a prickling sensation throughout her body, sort of like pins and needles, but searing as the spray of stray sparks from a forge.
“And I don’t disagree with your assessment,” he admits. “However, the problem you’ve identified is one that can only heal over time, with the careful rebuilding of Delucian society. We will lose thousands of lives in the meantime if we are not focused on aggressive tactics, fortifying the biggest and wealthiest fiefdoms first, along with those most exposed to Malfleur’s path to the palace. We must stall her advance until we can detect a weakness, which we will then go after with clean, swift, vicious action.”