Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(6)

3


Belcoeur,


the Night Faerie

Fire, like the open throat of the death faerie—his ash breath.

Sommeil burns.

Servants scream, fleeing the castle amid the acrid scent of smoldering clothes and flesh. Belcoeur crawls out of the rubble, toward the flaming Borderlands. In her palm: a charred thread. Huddled into herself, she pulls. She unravels. Her fingers move deftly, taking the threads of her own dress and rebraiding them, weaving the chaos of her heart by hand until there is no more gown, until she is exposed, nearly naked, skeletal. Old. Dying. This is the true Belcoeur. The world of lies—dreams—that sheltered her softly, like a spider’s web, is coming down in a tremulous haze.

But even in ruin, hope blooms. There—moving toward her—something white. Something gold.

Belcoeur gasps, letting the threads drop from her hands. “You came.”

There is such a thing as wanting something too much—waiting so long and so fiercely for it that when it finally arrives, it cannot satisfy the hole its absence created.

She stares. There is no rush of joy in Malfleur’s return; instead, Belcoeur feels only the halo of loss surrounding her sister, the unfillable gap between wish and reality. She is newly conscious of her own aged body—its protruding bones, covered in a thin layer of underclothing and lace. Her knobby shoulders and hunched back. The unraveled, ashen dress strewn around her on the ground. All lives, Belcoeur realizes—faerie or mortal, long or short—are but an unspooling of the inevitable.

“Sister,” Malfleur whispers, kneeling before her.

And still, hope flutters and starts. “Sister,” Belcoeur chokes out. Fresh tears form at the corners of her eyes. “Will you help me?”

Malfleur seems to take in the disaster around them for the first time—the raging fire, the trapped people, the falling trees and crumbling towers. “I need to know something first,” she says calmly. Her eyes gleam black and cold. Belcoeur remembers, quite suddenly, that her sister does not dream—has never dreamed. Her eyes contain that dreamlessness. It is not a lack, but a gift, a form of power. “What did you do with the child?” Malfleur asks.

“The child,” Belcoeur repeats. The child. The child. Thorns prickle up around her heart, vines squeezing in on her lungs. She tries to breathe, but the smoke has gotten denser, the sky darker. “I don’t . . . I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Yes,” Malfleur seems to hiss. “You must.”

“Please,” Belcoeur whimpers.

“What happened to the child?”

“I . . . she . . . I left her. Left her there. Tucked her into bed one last time. I kissed her good-bye. She looked so cold. So cold.”

“You left her,” Malfleur repeats slowly.

Belcoeur nods, the memory sapping all that remains of her strength. Her head is too heavy to hold up any longer. Her arms start to give, and she lowers herself onto the ground, one cheek in the dirt. How foolish, to think her sister had come in time to save her.

She has only come in time to see her die.

“Yes, I left her. My baby. Frozen forever . . .” A sob chokes back the rest.

“Wake up, Daisy,” Malfleur snaps, and for a second, the old nickname shoots one last frantic fumble of hope through Belcoeur’s veins. “You didn’t bring your daughter into Sommeil. You left her behind. And did she live?”

But that was more than a century ago now. And there are some things we cannot have, no matter how badly we wish for them.

Belcoeur shakes her head against the ground. “She died.”

And then Malfleur’s icy fingertips have grasped the back of her neck.

Suddenly Belcoeur begins to cough and sputter. “What . . . what are you doing?” she asks desperately, struggling now, fighting against whatever is happening to her, as an incredible pain sweeps through her bones.

“It’s called transference, my dear Daisy,” Malfleur says. “And I’ve been perfecting it for many years. It won’t take long now, and then . . .”

But the physical torment is so great, Belcoeur can no longer follow the words. She scrabbles against the grit and grass, tearing open the skin of her palms.

“Your magic,” her sister is saying. And then, “It will be mine.”

A wild agony rips through Belcoeur’s flesh, parting her lips in a wail that cuts off abruptly, a snapped string. She is reduced to silence, to the sudden clarity of pure pain. There is no space left for sadness, or loss, or love.

With her last breath, the queen of Sommeil turns up her bleeding hand; the blood sizzles, becoming smoke. Transference.





4


Aurora


There’s a knocking at the gate. Aurora sits upright in bed. Her first thought is that the war has arrived, just outside her door. Malfleur and her army of Vultures. Some shadowed, hidden part of her almost yearns for it—for an escape from this new prison. When she woke from Sommeil, her sense of touch and her voice had vanished, just as she’d feared and knew they would. Now this tower, this castle, this life is slowly burying her alive, eating away at her like the moths and termites that destroyed Queen Belcoeur’s tower, turning it into a crumbling relic she could never leave. The waking world hardly resembles the one she left behind. The roar of waves against Deluce’s cliffs sounds alien to her now, full of an anger she never noticed before. It’s the not knowing that tortures her the most—what happened to Heath, and Wren, and Belcoeur, and little Flea. Were they even real? Was what she felt real? And was that love?