Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(32)
To leave the castle undetected, as always, Malfleur moved through the cavernous dungeon, through the crying of its new captives—the countless women who survived her guards only to be locked up, made to share cells with their own rotting dead.
Now, in the fresh night air, Malfleur pulls the vulture mask from her face and dismounts, finding her way to the mountain stream where she has set her trap, wondering what she will have caught tonight, though it doesn’t really matter, so long as it is still alive. So long as her killing blade is its first.
Unlike some of the fae, Malfleur does not believe in luck. But tonight she feels lucky. After all, she has ensnared the most fascinating creature yet—the pale, trembling beauty, the prize of Deluce.
Beauty like Princess Aurora’s is more curse than gift. Malfleur has seen how that kind of beauty acts like an intoxicating drug, how it demands only more of itself. How it begs.
How it withers.
Malfleur and her sister, Belcoeur, should know. Beauty is what killed their mother.
She may have despised the woman—her original tormentor—but Malfleur still relives her mother’s suicide every day. Like a meteor shower it ravaged the sky and then was over, leaving a blackness, a blankness. Malfleur knew why her mother did it: she couldn’t stand that she’d begun to grow warped and wrinkled with age, that her daughters’ looks had surpassed her own.
It happened just before Malfleur had left to study magic all over the world, sending back gifts and discoveries to Belcoeur all the while, even though she didn’t want to be near her twin anymore, with those bright eyes, that big hope, that great and tender love. Soft. Suffocating.
Their father, King Verglas, had turned in on himself already by then, had begun to hoard his tithe, which was knowledge. She couldn’t bear to witness that, either. She felt cut off from him more than ever.
So when she discovered that her father had conquered the ?les de Glace in her absence and had remarried the blithering North Faerie, at first the news could hardly touch her. After Belcoeur’s betrayal, and after the only response she could find within herself was to kill Charles Blackthorn, Malfleur withdrew to the mountains, unable to face society, the past a terrible riddle that would taunt her, she feared, until she died or went mad like so many other faeries.
Back then, she had felt guilt—and hurt—of a kind that only the deep and stagnant mountain bogs could equal. It had consumed her, had nearly sunk her in its dark, slurping mire. She vowed, at that time, never to kill again.
But as she discovered and began to practice transference, it was like something awoke again—a black-winged bird flew up and out of the swamp her life had been, cawing and crying and carving out a new way forward.
It was Blackthorn himself—young Charles—who had first inspired the idea of transference, though of course it would be many years after his death at her hands that she thought of it again. The elder Blackthorn and Verglas, her father, had arranged another hunting visit, and this time the Blackthorns were guests at the Delucian palace. Things were so different back then, Malfleur recalls: the way the human and fae monarchs socialized as though even the rise of humans to such power could never pose a threat to the fae.
Charles had gone out riding with his father and hers, and returned later with a fox, which she found him skinning in a room off the kitchens. He said he loved to handle all the preparation of the animal himself. Tying up and hanging it by the feet. Brushing the fur clean of burs before making studied, precise cuts around the ankles in order to begin the careful removal of its skin. Once it was separated from the flesh and guts, the meat and the fat had to be scraped away. And then there was the slow stretching, tacking, and drying of the hide.
Charles confessed to her—never taking his eyes away from his meticulous dissection—that he’d always been fascinated with the fae. He had an endless series of questions about magic: what it felt like, how it worked, why the system of faerie tithing had even come about. Questions she didn’t always know the answer to, but which stirred her own curiosity. It was only the third time she’d seen him since their first meeting and the memorable game of whist. She was now sixteen, he eighteen. She cleaned his knives for him while he worked.
After he was finished with the fox, he washed his hands in a bucket drawn from a well, then retrieved something from a pouch tucked inside his doublet. She didn’t say aloud—or even admit silently, to her private self—what she felt when he produced the glistening white pearl she’d given him from her mother’s necklace a few years earlier. She didn’t want to name it, for that would make the feeling smaller and mundane. She couldn’t call it a romance, what was taking seed and spreading its roots through the dark soil of her heart. She couldn’t, because that would make it a silly thing, predictable, a story that must demand one of two conclusions, neither of which appealed to her. For as much as everyone lives in fear that he or she might be destined for tragic ends, Malfleur was equally revolted by the idea of a happily ever after. Perhaps because both actually suggested the same thing to her: an ending.
No. Hers would not be a love story—not then, and not ever.
It was during their discussions of faerie magic that day so many years ago now, when he made the suggestion that eventually led to transference, though at the time it struck her as ridiculous. They had left the kitchens and begun to stroll the palace grounds, the brackish sea air blustering off the cliffs and billowing up into the cloudy sky, making the famous Delucian fog writhe and whirl. As they walked, his hair shuffled in the wind, bright and out of place.