Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(54)

She looks up at him, curious. An apology? That’s a first.

He seems to shrug, though it’s hard to tell in all his armor. She stares at the key worn on a chain around his neck. If she lunged quickly enough, could she grab hold of it through the bars? Would her injured leg hold up? Could she strangle him with the chain and then unlock the cage and run free?

He bends to one knee. It would be so easy now. She is poised.

She hesitates.

He slides a fresh book through the bars. “Perhaps you’ll like this one better?”

And then he is standing, stepping back, as though he has just left raw meat inside the cage of a beast. Is that how they all see her? Is that what she has become? She has not seen herself in weeks. Even in the guest quarters she was given no mirror—nothing that could easily have become a weapon in her hands.

After he is gone, she glowers at the book.

But eventually curiosity takes over and she opens it, scans the title and contents. It’s hardly even a book—more of a manual, really, about breeds of horses. She tosses it aside, and begins stalking again, restless. Why didn’t she leap at him when she had the chance? Next time she’ll be ready.

But it’s as if all the Vultures sense her aggression—they’re ready too, and keep their distance when they come again, each approaching only to deliver meager helpings of food and then quickly retreating.

The party is tomorrow.

What does Malfleur have planned?

Aurora goes back to the books, debating whether she can turn them into some sort of weapon. Stack and climb them, or pull one of the Vultures close to the bars, then bash his head in with them. She kicks the pile of them over.

The book of horses lands by her feet.

She stares at it. It suddenly reminds her of something. Of someone.

She thinks of that flash of red hair—of the knowing looks she has sometimes seen in one of the Vulture’s eyes. Of her suspicion that she recognized him.

Gilbert.

It seems impossible, like so much else.

And even if she’s right—what good would that information do? He’s shown no mercy toward her before—none of them have. There’s been a certain softness that she has detected, in moments here and there, from one of her trainers. Could it have been him? She might just as easily have imagined it, though, and he has never suggested he would actually help her.

Even if Gilbert is one of the Vultures, how will she find him again? And is he even Gilbert enough to want to help her? If it is him, he’s a stern, vacant shadow of the boy who once tumbled around the fields and mucked the stables and dragged his hay scent in through Isbe’s window throughout their childhood.

Hardly a spark remains of the flush-faced teen Aurora once caught leaving love notes in Isabelle’s bedroom wall—notes he must have dictated, since he couldn’t write, and knowing too that Isbe couldn’t read them. He really had loved her sister once. Aurora only realized the truth of it recently—in Sommeil. How the notes had not been a childish prank, but the act of a man who sensed his love was unrequited, yet still had to speak it, in some secret way.

The swirling magic, and the fury, that have been clouding Aurora’s mind and tensing her body melt a little at this memory. She digs down, seizing on the tiny candlelight within her, wavering but not yet blown out: the real Aurora, beneath the stifling weight of the magic. She’s still there.

Aurora imagines holding her palms cupped around that flame, protecting it from going out. There’s a story in here, somewhere. Somewhere in here, there is hope.

Gilbert. Isabelle. True love. Secrets.

The love notes.

If only he were more Gilbert. If only he remembered.

What if that love for her sister still burns within him—a tiny flame, just like hers?

Quickly, an idea flashes into her, as though entering not through her mind but directly through her heart.

Hands shaking, she tears a page from the book, then bites her finger open until it bleeds.

With the blood and the tip of a fingernail, she scratches out a hasty note. She folds it, just like the love notes were folded into Isbe’s wall, and pokes it out of the horse book. Then she props it through the bars, and waits. For the impossible to happen. For the right Vulture to return.

Several other guards come and go, seeming to ignore the pile of books altogether.

And then—and then—sometime late in the night, a vulture appears. He cannot have come to bring her food; it is too late for that. She waits, poised; she doesn’t try to lunge for his neck. She tries, instead, to catch and hold his gaze. For a moment, it seems to work. She could swear the hardness in his eyes wavers, ripples like a stone thrown into a pond. And she’s certain that her hunch is correct. It’s him. It’s really him.

But then he collects her books and walks away, not seeming to notice the note tucked within.





22


Isabelle


The basalt flame produces a faint smell, almost herbal, and a strange, gently undulating, blue-black heat. Isbe is back in the library of the ice palace, and it must be near dawn. She has not slept. Though the flame did not work on her slipper, she moves determinedly through the cavernous room, so different seeming in the dark—so much vaster and echoing.

For moments here and there, she has the most unusual sensation of being able to see—not literally, but abstractly, somehow. The absence of light, and shape, and form seems to be its own kind of substance. How can nothing be something? The air, even, dances around her, full of unfelt bodies. She shakes her head, trying to clear it, to make sense of what she’s feeling. She wonders if the smoke from the torch is affecting her thinking.