Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(39)

The wolf is close enough now that she can see the sharpness of its fangs. It is about to lunge. Without thinking, Aurora chops away the ropes that bind Wren’s second wrist, then grabs her. Wren is trembling, as though about to break in her hands. Aurora holds her tight, brings her mouth to Wren’s cheek, to her neck. Right near the spread of stone, where her throat bobs in fear, Aurora kisses her, softly, with hunger. Then she whispers, “Run.”

Aurora spins, throws the sword—not at the wolf, but instead at the tree.

She cannot kill anymore.

All her anger and confusion fly with the sword into the tree itself. She feels the magic flood through her again, making her vision burn black.

All the chirping birds go silent . . . and fall from the branches onto the grass in synchronized thumps. Dead.

Aurora collapses to her knees, suddenly weak from the surge of power. She glances up to see the branches, now empty. Then out in the fields, where Wren is racing away—a blur. Then, at the wolf, who has torn through the underbrush into the copse and is ravaging one of the birds.

Aurora breathes heavily. She has inadvertently saved herself. And Wren. Maybe. Nearly.

The wolf is occupied with the feast of fallen flesh—hasn’t yet noticed, or smelled, Aurora.

She wants to heave into the grass. She takes in a slow breath instead and rakes her hands through the grass, finding a cluster of flowers and mushrooms. Some kinds can heal, some can nourish, and others can kill. Wren had said it both of fungi and forms of love.

Wren, who is now gone, who must now hate her even more than she did before. Wren, whom she has both saved and lost.

Carefully, without making a sound, she plucks a handful of the mushrooms and stuffs them into a pocket. Then slowly—ever so slowly, so as not to draw the animal’s attention—Aurora steps backward and away.

Farther and farther, carefully, quietly, with precision, until the wolf is once again a spark—a shifting darkness between the trees, still devouring the bounty of feathered treats. Dusk is coming on.

Aurora begins to breathe.

And then there are hands around her arms.

She turns to face her trainer. Stares at his black mask, at his expectant eyes. And that’s when she knows what she has truly done—or almost done.

She would have killed Wren. The girl she is fighting for in the first place. The girl she might have loved—still loves. If love is even possible anymore, and not a decaying, rotten thing in her chest, dead as one of those swallows. She struck Wren . . . with the intention to do harm.

Everything that has just happened finally hits her. Sobs wrack her body. She leans in to her trainer’s strength, holding on to his cape and armored chest to keep herself from crumbling to the ground. What has she become?

She would have killed Wren. Would have, had it not been for the strange enchantment of stone on her flesh—a mystery Aurora can’t explain to herself. Did she create the stone with her own magic? But it has never worked like that before—her magic has always sought to destroy, not to protect.

She would have killed Wren, but she did not. Instead, she helped Wren escape. Yes, Wren has run free.

But Aurora has lost herself.

The true test.

The trainer, Vulture, leans toward her, and his voice whispers down at her from within the mask. “All is not lost.”

Fear and hate shudder through her.

“You feel remorse,” he says, “which means you are not gone.” No Vulture has ever broken from his stoicism.

She looks up into his eyes and gasps.

She could swear she knows him.

But he blinks, and the impression is gone.





16


Wren,


Formerly a Maiden of Sommeil,

Indentured to the Mad Queen Belcoeur

She cannot help the others until she helps herself. She cannot help them if she is dead. That is the mantra Wren repeats in her mind as she flies from the mountains and across dew-stung forests, ravaged by the cold winds and aware only that she cannot allow heartbreak to catch up to her.

She saw what Aurora has become, and though she didn’t understand it exactly, she sensed something terrible—something inhuman—had happened to her. It sickened and scared Wren beyond anything—even beyond the burning of Sommeil, her home, her world. In another life, she might have wanted Aurora to be her home, but in this life, she sees now, the barriers are greater than status, greater than shame, greater than the curse of a jealous faerie. A dark magic has come between them.

And it doesn’t matter anyway, because whether Aurora had succeeded with her sword or not, Wren was going to die. Wren is dying. She has been turning to stone, gradually but certainly. It began at her ankle and spread up along one calf. Then sprouted behind an ear, traveling downward toward her chest. Soon it will be evident where others can see it: on her face, and hands. And then in her heart and lungs, stopping their beat and breath.

That is the secret Aurora could not know. That Wren is cursed too. But Aurora undid her curse—she woke up. And Wren has tried so hard over these past weeks to salvage hope for herself too. Maybe there’s some way to undo it.

But she’s running out of time.

She was very little when her aunt first told her of the stone curse. Wren recalls sitting on the floor before a warm hearth, smoke curling up beside them as she learned the tale of the curse that had supposedly been passed down in her family from generation to generation, but had never been tested or proven. It seemed more like myth to her then—a mere bedtime story meant to reassure her of her rightful place in Sommeil. It was said that her great-great-great-aunt Oshannah was Queen Belcoeur’s favorite handmaiden; she went with her everywhere, and for a time, was even granted access in and out of Sommeil when the world was first created. Belcoeur doted on Oshannah, like a sister or daughter—a companion in her desperate loneliness—and soon, Oshannah longed for freedom. The weight of Belcoeur’s need was too much.