Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(45)

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Violette asks, gazing not at either of her guests but at herself in a gilded mirror on the wall.

Wren shifts.

“My lady,” Lord Barnabé says, sitting up straighter. “I must speak to you privately about a matter of mutual concern.”

Violette looks startled—perhaps by his urgency, or perhaps by his presence, since she hasn’t really acknowledged that either of them is even here. She is still staring at herself in a mirror.

“My lady,” Wren jumps in. “It is I who must speak to you urgently.”

“Me?” The lady looks almost, if Wren is not mistaken, scared. “But . . . but . . .”

“I have heard,” Wren says, beginning to doubt herself before the words even come out—could Aurora have lied about the tale? “I’ve heard you have great power.”

“Me?” Violette repeats. Behind the makeup and the elaborate clothing, she seems like a nervous girl. She is still staring at the same mirror.

“Yes,” Wren goes on, less certainly. “I was told you have the power to amend a curse. You did so once before.”

“Once before . . . ,” Violette repeats.

Lord Barnabé turns to Wren. “You know about that?” His face has gone suspicious. “Who told you that tale?”

“I—it was—the Princess Aurora herself,” Wren replies.

“So she knows, Binks,” Violette says, almost to herself.

Wren juts out her chin. “Yes. I know you altered the curse on Aurora—a curse placed on her by Queen Malfleur—so that the princess would not die when she touched the enchanted spindle but would instead fall into a kind of trapped sleep.”

Violette flinches but does not meet Wren’s eyes, even in the reflection.

“I came to find out,” Wren goes on, desperation pushing up against her ribs and into her throat, “if you can do so again. For . . . me.”

Barnabé—Binks, as Violette called him—stares at Wren again, then lets out a startling laugh that sounds more like a small dog barking in the distance. “You? I haven’t a clue who you even are, girl, but you must know the kingdom has more dire concerns than a cursed girl looking for a cure.”

“A cursed girl,” Violette repeats, playing with her skirts, aligning them so that the silk catches the light and shines. Wren is beginning to wonder if the woman can think for herself at all or only repeats words she hears aloud. But then, just as Wren experiences that thought, Violette catches her eyes in the mirror—for just a fleeting second. “I can’t help you,” she says, so quietly Wren almost missed it.

“Can’t? Or won’t?” she asks.

Violette stiffens. “Of course I can.” She seems to consider what she has just said and as she thinks about it, she puffs up a little, shimmying her shoulders a tiny bit, as if to remove dust that has settled there.

Hope leaps in Wren’s chest. “You’ll help me?”

“No,” Binks says, at the same time that Violette asks, “What is the curse?”

Wren stands up, but seeing how Violette flinches, she does not approach the woman, treating her instead like a deer that has frozen under the gaze of a hunter. She recalls the way Heath used to hold himself so still in the Borderlands before loosing his arrow through the silt-colored dawn. Heath. Her brother in spirit, in practice, in action, in every way that matters. She hasn’t seen his face in so long she is beginning to remember it only as a collection of fragmented feelings—confidence, patience, intensity, delight, and the perfect peace of spotting one’s prey within the line of sight, just before the arrow’s shot.

She glances cautiously to Binks, then back at Violette. And then she begins to explain her story. Slowly and carefully, so as not to leave out any details that could be important. How Belcoeur placed a curse on her great-great-great-aunt, and in turn on her entire bloodline, a curse limiting their ability to ever leave Sommeil, to leave her. The curse said if they ever tried to leave, they’d turn to stone. She tells the story of Malfleur appearing in Sommeil and killing her own sister, watching as Queen Belcoeur’s blood became smoke and she writhed under her twin’s touch. How the trees changed and the whole forest seemed to disappear, replaced by another forest altogether, and she came to realize that Sommeil was over, was gone, and now she was here, in Deluce. And the curse on her had come true.

Binks huffs. “Prove it.”

With shame and nervousness, Wren lifts her skirt a few inches to reveal her stone ankle. She pulls at the shoulder of her dress to show a glimpse of the stone there as well.

Binks’s eyebrows rise in shock. Then his face scrunches again in skepticism. “Don’t trust her, Violette. There’s a kink in your logic, my dear,” he says to Wren.

“No—”

He holds up a hand to silence her. “If what you say is true . . . if Belcoeur has recently died, the curse she made should have died with her.”

“But that’s impossible. I saw her die. And yet the curse still holds,” Wren says.

“Not impossible,” Violette says, her voice worming its way creepily into their debate. Both of them turn to face her. She looks back at them, frozen, as if exchanging with them directly, instead of through a mirror, is overwhelming, like staring at the sun. “You said your bloodline was bound to hers. Well, perhaps someone else of Belcoeur’s bloodline still lives.”