Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(31)

She feels as though she has tucked a lit flint beside a pile of dry twigs—at any moment, it will catch fire. Which is both the most dangerous and the most thrilling thing she has ever done. She has, after all, stoked the engine that scares her even more than Malfleur’s military: her power of persuasion.

Isbe told her the way whole villages in Deluce have given themselves over to the queen, given up their liberty for a taste of violence and power, willing to turn on their own people if it means seeing the Delucian aristocracy, who have for so long thrived on the thankless labor of the masses, finally fall. She wonders what those same people would think if they learned that Malfleur had taken Aurora in as her own. It might seem a kind of alliance. Would such a pairing undermine the faerie queen’s stance, or turn the tides in her favor?

Aurora shudders. She is terrified by what she’s about to say—but she knows that Malfleur is only going to keep killing unless Aurora does something to make her change tactics. “Besides,” Aurora adds slowly, “I can convince Deluce and Aubin to come under your rule. Peacefully.”

“My dear,” Malfleur says now. “Might I remind you that you are already my prisoner. I may do with you whatever I like.”

“I will only make the offer once,” Aurora says, trying to keep from shaking. “What is your answer?”

Malfleur looks at Wren and then back at Aurora. Her eyes narrow; her mouth pulls again into that terrifying smile. “My answer . . .”

Aurora feels her decision like a knee to the gut before she even says it.

“. . . is no.”

Aurora has lost count of the days she’s been in her cell.

The first few days, she occupied herself with studying the locks on the doors, analyzing their mechanisms, trying to divine a clever way to undo them, succeeding only in undoing her own composure and crying out in silent anger. She chased the moving patch of pale spring light through the high window, curling up in it, crying until she was too exhausted to cry, or to feel. She pounded over and over again on the side door connecting her cell to Wren’s, but got only a dull, repeated thud in response—it was enough to signal that Wren was still alive, but the wood was too thick for Wren’s voice to carry.

And because of that, because of her solitude, Aurora finds herself once again voiceless.

Scraps of stale bread and sometimes even the stringy tendons of recently slaughtered meat appear at her door at varying hours, never consistently enough to assuage the panic of starvation, though—the dizzying sensation of disappearing. She is smoke. She is bone. She is thirst. When she rises to stand, the walls tilt, the light sways. The darkness comes, and with it, fuzzy pinpricks behind her eyelids that are crude copies of stars, bursts of unconsciousness. When she dreams, it’s of ink bottles full of blood.

She longs to be with Wren, to confess what she feels. To beg forgiveness. She has failed Wren, failed all of the refugees of Sommeil and LaMorte, failed Isbe and William and all of Deluce too. She begins to believe what Malfleur said of her, that she only came here out of self-interest. Not to try and reclaim her voice, which had never been at the very forefront of her wishes—but to prove something to Wren, to everyone. She had wanted desperately to be the kind of person Wren would admire, to be a hero.

But maybe heroes are only for stories.

By the time Malfleur returns to her, silhouetted by a tepid beam of moonlight, Aurora has come to the very brink of loss—has felt everything she knew about herself draped out over the ledge, hooked on by a single finger.

She is, she believes, ready to let go.

The queen moves like a piece of darkness. Aurora has the wild fear that if she shifts, even breathes too hard, Malfleur will prove but a phantom, a delirious creation of her mind. And she needs her to be real. She clings to it.

“Shhh,” the queen says as she kneels down on the floor in front of Aurora.

It’s all Aurora can do not to gasp in surprise—at her closeness, at the shock of seeing the queen bending to her level, like a nursemaid about to comfort a child from a nightmare.

“I have been busy, as you can imagine.” Her voice is removed and devoid of pity, her eyes thoughtful as they take in Aurora’s decrepit state without reaction.

Aurora’s hands shake. She doesn’t know what to think, what to feel, what to do. She can only wait, hoping to be put out of her misery one way or another, at last—and yet still, stubbornly, clinging to hope.

“I have not changed my mind . . . ,” the queen says slowly. “Entirely. But I have been thinking.” She works her jaw, and Aurora is struck by the way she can see the bones shifting beneath her pale skin, even through the musty thickness of the moonlit cell. “I will give you something.”

Aurora hates the way her whole body trembles, the way a sob launches up into the back of her throat, waiting there. How hunger like a sleeping demon uncurls and begins to gnaw . . .

“Not your voice, but . . .”

Water. Ink. Something to eat. Something to bring on sleep, or even death. Anything.

Malfleur’s teeth glint in the dark. “Something better.”





12


Malfleur,


the Last Faerie Queen

The night forest whistles with the flight of frightened creatures as she charges on horseback into its mist, alive with the need for blood. She must have it. The desire for it is not new, but in recent years it has intensified, provoking her to go to greater lengths to get it—and driving her to greater heights.