Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(56)
After some convincing, he persuades her at last to be his. She thinks she will be plucked from obscurity and brought into the royal family. It is what every young girl dreams will happen. To her credit, this maiden—Cassandra is her name—hopes that her love for the king will do some good for this world.
It will not, however.
It will do good only for the king himself. Cassandra will become his favorite mistress, because after he whisks her away to the palace and covers her in lavish dresses and tripled strands of sapphires, the Hart Slayer stops hunting in the royal forest. Cassandra, the king believes, has brought him good luck, and gradually he forgets his ire, forgets the affront to his ego the illegal hunter had caused. Even the people who were helped by the Hart Slayer—many as poor as Cassandra herself—go on about their lives and begin to forget their mysterious benefactor ever existed.
But Cassandra will never be queen and she will never be wife, and in two years’ time, when she has only just given birth to the king’s bastard daughter, she will be forced out and sent away, leaving her only worldly attachments behind: the child, whom she names Isabelle, and a small item given to her by her own mother—a tiny slipper made of unbreakable glass.
And as she flees the castle, a confidante—the minister of religion, a young woman named Hildegarde—shakes her head at the girl. “There is so much more you might have been, Cassandra.”
Cassandra sets sail in a stolen fisherman’s vessel, and finds, to her surprise, that a life at sea suits her. At first the life is not easy, and she struggles to survive by casting fishing nets woven of the silk veils she once wore at the palace, and tied with clove-hitch knots of her own hair. But the solitude soothes the pain of her past; the constant movement keeps her from ever having to be too still with her thoughts.
The singing voice she had once preserved for her younger days spent roaming the forest she now lets loose, and with it, she finds she is able to tame the wild beasts of the sea. Narwhals encircle her craft, drawn by her lilting songs. Fish frequently fly into her nets as if willingly—more than she could ever consume on her own. More than enough to gift. She finds a kind of calling again—a purpose. Over time, her past—everything she was and wanted to be—slips away into the dark and anonymous waves.
Years pass that way, bringing Isbe to what must have occurred only recently—no more than a year ago, maybe two: the day Cassandra herself slips away, her song swallowed by an angry storm, her ship sunk.
Isabelle experiences every writhing, startling pain as her mother lets go of the fight and allows herself to drown, and it is only in the final moment of letting go that Isbe comes to, gasping.
Isabelle staggers through the vast library, wanting only to lie down, but there’s nowhere to lie that isn’t cold and full of haunting whispers. She’s awash in an unexpected sense of loss.
Shards of the story flash through her mind: the glass arrows and the glass slipper. Her mother’s voice, the same one she has heard so many times in her mother dreams, singing her own version of the rose lullaby. The voice that made the seas friendly, drew fish straight into her nets.
Isbe recalls her own first journey at sea, when she and Gil stole across the Strait of Sorrow toward the shores of Aubin onboard a whaling vessel. She remembers that the sailors spoke of a mythic figure—the Balladeer—who sang to calm the waves, and who was known for leaving desperate villages with bounties of fresh-caught fish.
And now the truth feels so obvious she thinks she might drown in it: her mother was the Balladeer.
And she understands something that her father never could.
Cassandra wasn’t lucky.
She didn’t make the Hart Slayer stop hunting simply by falling in love with the king.
She made the Hart Slayer stop hunting because she was the Hart Slayer. Another anonymous hunter known for helping the poor. Isabelle’s mother was the Hart Slayer, a figure about whom epic poems have been written. And she gave it all up to come to the palace. She gave up her calling for love.
But if she hadn’t done that, Isbe never would have been born.
And now, Cassandra is dead—just as Isbe is discovering the truth. Too late.
Too late to ever know her.
The sudden grief is too much, and the notion of winter-glass armor now feels further away than ever—a fool’s dream. A silly girl’s wish.
How she hates the pain of wishes.
She feels more untethered and alone than ever before, and so very tired—more cold and more tired than when she crawled through half-frozen sewage to make her way into the palace of Aubin. She stumbles across the room and reaches out for something to steady her, somewhere to rest, and finds the ice desk where the king sat earlier, when they first spoke. She rests the torch down on the desk, its flame still burning.
Isbe dreams of the ocean’s unlit depths. One night so mild, before break of morn, amid the roses wild, all tangled in thorns, the shadow and the child together were born. The words of the lullaby—her mother’s version—weave through the darkness of her sleep and begin to take on a new meaning. It is no longer the tale of faerie twins Malfleur and Belcoeur and their infamous rivalry.
What the song is trying to say, her dream self sees now, is that innocence and darkness are inevitably threaded together in one tangled being. A paradox, like the fact that we are all born with the seed of fate inside our chests—that life itself is the gradual opening of death’s red rose.