Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(57)

There are no longer two figures in the song, but one.

The shadow is the child, and the child is the shadow.





23


Verglas,


the Ice King

The king is startled to find his young visitor sleeping in the center of his library the next morning, and regrets that he did not refer to the room properly—that he did not tell her it was in fact a tomb.

And here she is, shaking and nearly frozen to death in half sleep, lying on top of the coffin of his former wife. The North Faerie.

He probably should have pointed out before that it was a coffin and not a desk.

He studies her in the morning light, oddly struck by the beauty of it.

He doesn’t call for help. He wraps her in bearskins himself and places her gently beside a blazing fire. She shifts in her sleep but does not wake, and he thinks, unexpectedly, of his daughter. Not Belcoeur, the one whose smile used to play like a sad, lilting melody over a sun-drenched field, the one everybody found easy ways to love. No, not that daughter, but her twin, Malfleur. Though he cannot be sure, he suspects that he once loved Malfleur best—loved her in a fraught and difficult way. She had been his tiny storm cloud, lined in silver. A tight, dark kernel of a faerie, bursting inward.

He might have done a better job in those days. He didn’t anticipate his regret, however. One cannot. Now he sees it is something we must grow into with age, like an overlarge robe. He might have protected her from her mother, whom she took after in all of the worst ways—the rages. It all stemmed, he thought, not from an inherent anger, but from the constant disappointment of a mind desperately seeking absolutes: most beautiful. Most powerful. Most anything.

He pulls something from his pocket. It is a formal invitation that arrived recently by sleigh post. The penmanship is left-slanting but otherwise perfect. He remembers that handwriting. Malfleur must have penned each and every one of the invitations herself.

It must be quite a party she’s got planned.

And if he knows his daughter—he once thought he did, anyway—she has no doubt convinced every important noble in the known kingdoms to attend. But King Verglas will not be going. He won’t give her the pleasure of his curiosity. He is beyond all that.

He returns to the library, paces the tomb of his second wife, the North Faerie. She had been with child when she was killed. He removes a velvet-lined box from the ice coffin. Inside it are all the figurines he once carved for the child who was never born. A collection of woodland creatures: raccoons and deer and mice. A fox went missing long ago. These, like Isabelle’s slipper, were all made of winter glass, meant to last the ages. Now they are not toys but relics—reminders of a future that never came to be, a future that remained trapped in the past.

Because of Malfleur.

Perhaps it isn’t all his fault, he thinks, the way Malfleur turned out—so murderous and hard. He believes she was in some way warped and jealous from the start, born dreamless, like a living shadow.

Is that really true, however? Perhaps it was only his belief that it was true that made it so. This is another thing he ought to have explained to the young princess. She might have found it interesting: that we sculpt truth out of the world’s formlessness, and thus it is often precisely what we already believe that comes to pass. When it is decided that a person is broken, she may experience a life of sequential breaking. When it is suspected that a faerie may be black of heart, it is that very suspicion that begins to blacken it.

He checks on Isabelle. Her eyelids have begun to flutter.

She will want to leave, and he will soon only remember her visit as a spark across the arctic sameness. He will help. He will show Isabelle and Byrne the shortcut—the tunnel that leads right out of the palace kitchens and beneath the ice labyrinth. It’s the path the North Faerie took many nights when she was his secret lover, before they married and grew tired of each other. Before his own daughter Malfleur jealously attacked her, practicing some new talent she called transference.

But that was all very long ago now, and the stories are kept safe in the walls, where he will never have to feel them.

When his guest has recovered some hours later, he waves and murmurs good-bye to her and her servant, Byrne, wondering if he will miss them, and whether any of us will ever find what we are searching for, or if it is simply the searching for that makes us who we are.





24


Malfleur,


the Last Faerie Queen

Malfleur arranges the sheer black veil over her eyes. She’s standing behind a heavy brocade curtain, at the top of a staircase, preparing herself for her entrance. She can hear the milling guests in the grand ballroom below.

“Hand me the latest tally,” she demands of one of her Vultures.

He passes a scroll to her.

“Hmm. Very well,” she says after a quick scan. She gives it back.

She has checked, and checked again, but her father’s name has not appeared on any of the guest lists. So, he is not coming to her party.

Just as well. She supposes he has not forgiven her for killing his flimsy wife, the North Faerie, all those years ago. Perhaps he knew, or has since discovered, the most disturbing part of that old debacle. The reason for all that blood, permanently dyeing the throne red.

The North Faerie had been with child when Malfleur killed her.

She hadn’t meant to kill her, but that didn’t really matter. In some ways, it was a kind of mercy. Perhaps another child by her father would have posed a threat to Malfleur’s own safety. She might have had to kill that child, once it was born, anyway.