Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(50)

“Why not?”

“Only the person to whom the story belongs can release it.”

“But how do we find out who the story belongs to?” she asks, growing frustrated.

“I don’t have the answers, child. Only the slipper knows its own secrets. Our stories find us, not the other way around.”

Another riddle. Isbe is starting to feel the effects of all her travel—she’s exhausted, exasperated. “Never mind the slipper, then. Will you stand by Deluce, and make us more winter glass?”

He is quiet.

“Think of the suffering, if we should lose,” she says. “The thought of Malfleur ruling over all the land is ter-rifying.”

The king lets out a rattling breath and shifts his heavy robe. “Life requires suffering, my dear. Why should it be left to me to intervene?”

“Because it matters!” She has stood without realizing it. “Because if that doesn’t matter, then nothing does.”

“It is not up to any one god or faerie, man or woman, to decide what matters for other people, and what does not,” he replies calmly. “But let’s say I was to help you.”

She sits back down.

“What might you give an old king in return for his assistance?”

“What might I give you?” she repeats. She puzzles for a moment, reminded of her very first conversation with Prince William, when she arrived in Aubin and begged him to take her side against Malfleur. At the time, she’d imagined he would agree simply because he believed in her cause, understood the rightness of it. But in the end, she’d been forced to strike a deal, offering Aubin what his country really needed—access to Deluce’s oil. “Well, what is it you want?”

“All that winter glass . . . enough for a whole army?” he says, instead of answering. “It would require quite a bit of information, in order to make it. Information you don’t mind locking away, possibly forever. The history of an entire nation, for example. It would be quite dangerous, don’t you see?”

Another chill moves through her.

He goes on. “And no good faerie does his work without a price. Especially for something so perilous.”

“But . . .”

“All of history,” he says, “shows us how to forget. They say this glacier we stand on has been melting and continues to melt, even as we breathe, and that one day, thousands of years from now, the ice will be gone, and with it, the world’s memory.”

Now she is starting to feel scared. The idea of whole histories becoming locked away does seem risky. Is it worth the risk, though, to save her kingdom?

“Of course,” he adds, “in addition to the information I would need to freeze into the armor, I would have to ask for a little extra something for myself, you see.”

She takes a deep breath, bracing herself. “What else do I have that I could give you to make it a fair deal?”

“It has been a long time that I have lived up here alone,” he says. “And my own past, unfortunately, is riddled with painful truths.”

She begins to recoil from his words, but the old king laughs. “Don’t worry, I am not asking for your company. But . . .” He shifts again, and if she’s not mistaken, there’s a wobble in his voice when he continues on. “I would ask for your memories. You are young. The experiences you’ve had, the joys you’ve felt, and the love you’ve shared with your sister, Aurora . . . these are pure memories, aren’t they? These are the kinds of things a person wants with him when he dies.”

He wants . . . her memories of Aurora?

Isbe stands up again. “No.” The word is out of her before she can think twice. “No. It is too much to ask. Without those memories, who would I even be anymore? I’d be split. Broken.”

The king sighs. “You’d find new meanings, new memories. It’s like I said, Isabelle. The mind is a prism. The light refracts through it and turns fractures into rainbows.”

“You never said that,” she says, stepping away from him. Edging toward the door. “You said the mind is a prison.”

He laughs that dry laugh again, but makes no move to stop her from leaving. “Ah yes. Well, it is both.”

She can’t give King Verglas her memories—there’s got to be another way to get the armor she needs.

The king, despite his strange ways, has offered her and Byrne rooms in the palace, but Isbe is far too upset to sleep. The king said he wouldn’t help her, not without Isabelle relinquishing what’s most precious to her. Her memories of Aurora.

And on top of it all, he has nothing new to tell her about the slipper, no light to shed on her own past, or how her mother came to possess the magical shoe in the first place. He says only the shoe knows—well, what good does that do? If only she could somehow read the shoe—or any of the ice secrets the king keeps—maybe then she could learn how he makes winter glass . . . or information with which to bribe him. Stories he doesn’t want told.

The palace is enormous and mostly empty, making it extremely difficult to navigate as Isbe fumbles her way along its halls. She keeps expecting to run into a maid, and finally lands on a narrow door at the end of a hall that likely leads into servants’ quarters. Perhaps there she’ll at least locate someone who can help. She pushes through the door and is surprised to find herself, not in a corridor, but out in the open.