Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(64)

Aurora and Gil grab the prince underneath his arms.

William shakes his head. “I am needed.”

Gil looks into Aurora’s silent eyes, then back at the prince. “You are not meant to die here. Come.”

He and Aurora heave him up to standing. There is so much pain in the prince’s eyes, Gil can hardly face him. The man looks broken.

“Wait,” William says, staring at the spread of violence—the tangle of bodies, the shouts of men attacking, and the screams of men falling.

It seems hopeless, and Gil knows if they don’t hurry, they are going to die—and so will everyone in the castle village.

More Vultures pour over the wall on the south side.

Despair threatens to strangle Gil—images of his mother and father, his brother and his brother’s children, flash before his eyes. All the faces he will never see again. Deluce is going to fall. It’s over. It’s all over.

And then the prince is gasping in his arms, and he turns his attention back to William and Aurora.

But the prince isn’t gasping, he is shouting. The din has become so loud around them that Gil can hardly hear, and he leans closer.

“I have an idea,” the prince says.





28


William,


Once Merely the Third Prince of Aubin,

Now Both Crown Prince of Aubin and King Consort of Deluce

He can’t feel his legs. Men—Delucian men—fall from the walls, shot down by Malfleur’s forces on the other side. All around him, men are dying. Technically, they are his men.

Someone is dragging him, a young man close to his age. And Princess Aurora, on his other side. Where has she come from? It is as though she has emerged from some storybook, but playing the role of a different character. Maybe he is dreaming.

Darkness clouds his vision, making him light-headed. The world goes mute and black.

He is a boy again, and his brother Edward has just smashed his latest model against a wall, putting a crack in the marble. Philip, the oldest, is off somewhere studying: removed, cold. There is no one to defend William. He runs to his father, the king, showing him the broken model. Not the cannon design—that would come later, and meet a similar fate—but an earlier model he’d molded to resemble a ship.

The fleet. Where is the fleet? Has no one come to help him?

“Will you tell Eddie he must fix it?” the young prince asks.

His father looks at the object and then at his son. “William. You will face many setbacks in your life. It is your job to see the victory in failure.”

William forces his eyes open, forces his mind to focus and his breath to speak. “I have an idea,” he says to the young man carrying him.

The cannons. The faulty cannons, of his own design. The ones that brought him so much shame just weeks ago because they backfired, exploding on his own men, decimating a huge fraction of his forces and causing them to have to retreat midbattle, even as Malfleur unleashed a wicked fire that melted their weapons at first touch.

He has several more of these cannons stored in the armory—the relics of his most epic failure yet.

See the victory in failure.

They need to staunch the flow of the offense—a wound leaking inward like an infection. What they need, in fact, is an explosion from within.

There is no time to lose.

He sounds the command.





29


Isabelle


By some miracle—and a series of explosions that left both sides devastated—the Delucian castle has fended off a siege, but scouts say more troops from LaMorte are on their way, camped less than a day’s ride from the castle. If the castle falls to Malfleur, the war is as good as lost. The news reaches Isbe and Byrne even as they hasten back across the choppy waves of the North Sea. Everything adds to her remorse, from the angry thrashing of the waves to the barking of geese veering overhead as their ship makes port in one of the small, secret harbors amid the Delucian caves, known only to the military—and, of course, those who build their childhoods on eavesdropping, such as Isbe.

She berates herself every step of the way, as she and Byrne disembark and find the treacherous switchback path up the side of the cliffs. She shouldn’t have left William to defend the kingdom—her kingdom. She shouldn’t have refused the Ice King’s offer.

She did learn one thing: that her mother was the Hart Slayer. But that changes nothing. How she wishes that it mattered. How she wishes she could see Aurora one last time, before all of this is over. These wishes are so strong, she cannot resist them as she usually does, can’t tamp down the feeling that rises within her, a burning all along her bones, painful almost to the brink of shattering.

She misses her sister. She is afraid.

They have hardly surmounted the bluffs when they are accosted by soldiers and dragged through the castle village. She has no will to protest, and they are not interested in listening anyway.

Isbe can hear and sense the devastation—the lingering smoke and the bitter taste of burnt oil in the air, and beneath that, the rotten stench of death. It’s like the sleeping sickness all over again, but so much worse. There is an eerie quiet—not stillness, but movements that are deliberate and laden with sadness: the slow turn of cart wheels passing awkwardly around rubble. Unstable structures still in the final throes of collapse, dust lifting from crumbled stone.