Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(55)
She learned once from a palace chef that frogs will leap out of boiling water to save their own lives, but if the water’s temperature is only gradually raised, the frog will not notice; it will remain in the water until it is cooked to death. She feels lulled by the flame’s wavering heat, suspects she will succumb to something terrible in it. She fears the torch in her hand, and the icy whispers of the walls around her.
“My ancestors discovered the secret from the island’s hot springs,” Dariel had explained after she pressed him for answers about the ice. “The springs are thought to be healing, and our people frequently bathe in them to restore our spirits and release tension,” he told her. “It is not uncommon to experience visions in the springs. Ecstasies. The steam comes from deep beneath the earth and seems to release the secrets held in the ice. Many believe there are real histories wafting through the steam and then dissipating in the air.”
“So I have to go to a hot spring,” Isbe replied.
“No,” Dariel explained. “You do not. All you need is a basalt flame.”
“A what?”
“It is a kind of torch made with bits of black rock from deep below the ice—the kind that heats the springs. But I must warn you—many men say these are the rocks of the underworld, the place of polar darkness, and that the visions they bring are not real but our fantasies come to haunt us.”
A chill went through her. “I’m not afraid,” she said, though what she meant was, I’ve come this far. “But how will I find the story I’m looking for?”
Dariel thought for a moment. “You won’t. You must trust the ice. The story will find you.”
It’s exactly what the king told her, and oddly, this reassures her. She would have to trust the ice.
She has no other choice.
Now she runs her bare fingers, chapped and blistered from the ice, against more ice. Searching, searching.
The flame makes the walls melt, but only a little, like beads of perspiration. Everything’s slippery, and she has no idea where she is in the room. She has a sense of touching infinity. She shivers, hot and cold and hot again. The softening ice sends whispered words, phrases, even emotions that seem to reach out to her and wind their way inside her mind.
Where is the heart, the heart . . .
The phrase repeats and repeats, detangling itself into sense. Where is all the hart?
Isbe feels herself disappearing into the words and their story, becoming not herself and not a person at all but a kind of witness—she’s all the figures in the tale and none of them at once.
There are woods. There is a mad clattering of hooves. A king’s fury radiates between the tall trees striping the world all around him. This is his forest. The royal forest. The king is Isbe’s father, King Henri. She is him and she is not him, but she can feel his righteous anger. All the hart are being driven from the woods, his wood and thus his game. No one is allowed to hunt the hart but him.
And yet someone has gone against the king’s wishes. The Hart Slayer, that’s what Henri has come to call this criminal—a mysterious hunter who is not only shooting his game but delivering his prizes to the doorsteps of random peasants throughout the area, making a mockery of the king and his laws.
The king is enraged. This hunter must be captured and hanged. An example must be made. Hunting is his chief joy, and now that joy has been ripped away, replaced with humiliation.
His royal guard has decorated the outskirts of the forest in posters declaring the king’s offering of a massive reward for the head of the Hart Slayer. Sketches drawn from the brief glimpses of him by loyal villagers show a scrawny man of average height and unkempt hair. The hunter’s only true identifying features are the special arrows he uses on the hunt. Some people have made a hobby of trying to find these arrows—all of them made of some sort of material that resembles clear glass, except that it does not break.
Winter glass, Isbe thinks, suddenly coming back to herself.
Her hands are shaking. She realizes they are drenched and numb, the icy water melting down along her outstretched arm and trickling down her dress. But she must know more. She moves along the ice, seeking the voices again, that swishing of heavy cloaks against horses’ backs and hooves on dense forest floor, that sense of galloping speed and that wondrously palpable feeling of anger.
On this day, the king is determined—more determined than ever—to catch a hart. He must have a win. He must feel the still-beating heart in the creature’s warm chest before he drives in the final, killing wound. He will not stop until he has completed the hunt.
And then it happens, at last—a shift in the underbrush. The presence of an animal, lithe, skirting in the shadows, and tall. Fast but not fast enough. There is a clearing ahead; he knows these parts well, knows them better than he knows himself. Excitement and victory fly through his veins, nearly lighting him up from within, as he reaches for his bow and arrow, and aims, aims . . . aims.
He is a hair’s breadth away from firing the shot, when something stops him, and the figure emerges, a scared look in its eyes.
No. Not its. Hers.
It is no deer, but a maiden.
There is no specific moment when the king, Isbe’s father, falls in love with this maiden. It happens quickly, but in increments. He finds himself thinking of her all day and soon can dream of nothing but her at night—the maiden so poor she grew up not in a house or cottage but a hut built into the side of a tree, not in a village but on the outskirts of untamed land. Isbe’s hands slide along the ice, and the torch burns hotter and hotter as the story of their chance meetings in the woods unfolds—once, twice, and three times, before Henri admits who he is: the king of Deluce. By then it is too late; the maiden has fallen in love with him, and he with her.