Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(66)

Does it?

William takes her hand and puts it to his face again, then kisses her open palm. “Go and see her,” he says.

Aurora is in the library, which is now full of injured soldiers on makeshift cots. The contrast between the heroic tales shelved here and the reality of war at their fingertips is not lost on Isabelle, and she pauses for a moment, reconciling to it. She thinks too of the frozen library in King Verglas’s palace, a room full of histories and ideas and contradictions, a room radiant with light and yet frigid with ice. Here, now, there are no ideas at all. Philosophies and pasts don’t matter—it is all blood and bodies, needs and tasks and action.

Isbe stands out of the way and waits for Aurora to notice her. The old Isbe would have bashed through the busy room and made her presence undeniable, would have sought out Aurora the way she sought out everything in the world—arms first, then chest, then mind. But this Isbe is different. She hugs the wall with her back, feels herself becoming shadow. The shadow is the child, and the child is the shadow.

She clutches the ice slipper still in the inner pocket of her cloak. She doesn’t feel reassured by it. She feels nothing. The world is upside down. Aurora, who she thought had run off to find love, to live her own life and her own story, is not who she thought she was. Aurora, who has always been the one solid thing she can hold on to in this world, has become yet another mystery. She was always Isbe’s light—and what is a shadow without its light?

As she waits, Isbe feels more and more invisible, as though she is disappearing, or folding inward. All of her life, she has had to be strong, and somehow that made it easy to be so. Until now.

And then, gentle hands find her shoulders, sweep down her arms, and wrap her in an embrace.

The crisp softness of Aurora that used to signify, in Isbe’s mind, her beauty, is gone. She has grown firm and taut, muscular. She is still shorter than Isbe, but her long hair no longer smells of peaches and sun-drenched fields. Instead it carries the faint medicinal scent of the room, of bitter herbs used to cure and staunch wounds, of sweat and blood and metal.

Beneath those, there’s a smell that is all her own, something that reminds Isbe of a warm summer evening.

Relief is a new current of breath in Isbe’s chest. She is still Aurora—changed and yet not.

Isbe hugs her back.

And as she does, something inside her breaks open.

Isabelle, Aurora taps into her palms, but Isbe is shuddering, her face wet with tears. She’s too overwhelmed to reply. She doesn’t even know why she’s crying—can’t put words to it.

Aurora leads her out of the library in a huddle and takes her back to her old childhood room, the one she slept in for eighteen years before moving into the royal chambers with William.

Isabelle, what’s wrong? Aurora taps again.

Isbe goes to her old window, the one where the garden trellis used to hang. The one through which she ran away a few short months ago.

Too many things are wrong. There is nowhere to start: that she only discovered her mother’s identity after she was already dead. That the war has come to this. That evil will win, despite everything. That she has spent all this time striving in vain to save Deluce—and so much time away from the one person who mattered the most to her in the world.

“You lied,” is all she can finally muster.

Aurora takes her hand again. I had to. You would have come after me otherwise. You would have tried to stop me from what I had to do. I had to try, Isbe. I had to try on my own to do the right thing—without you.

“But what did you do? Where did you go?”

Aurora takes a breath, and then taps. I went to see Malfleur. I tried to kill her.

Isbe gasps, her emotion dipping to make space for shock. “But—but I could have come with you. We could have done it together.” Why does saying this cause her so much hurt, so much embarrassment, that she wants to cry all over again?

You had much to do here, without me, Aurora points out. And you would have wanted to protect me.

Isbe realizes her mouth is gaping open, and clamps it shut. Because what can she say? Aurora is absolutely right. She would have gone after her. She would have stopped her. She would have tried to save her. Over and over and over again. Of course she would have. It was her job. Without that job, what good was Isbe? What good is she?

Anyway, Aurora taps on, it didn’t work. She goes on to explain everything—what really became of Heath, and how the other prisoners remain trapped, still, in LaMorte, in Malfleur’s dungeon. She tells Isbe of her contract with Malfleur, and too of her feelings for Wren—fraught with confusion but realer than anything she has ever experienced before.

Isbe listens in a mix of fascination, awe, and something else—a raw sting in her throat that borders on resentment. Aurora has grown so brave, has come into herself, while Isbe has become a kind of shell.

She begins to pull her hands away. The story is too layered and too much. She needs to be alone.

But Aurora takes her hands more firmly than before, and taps again. You must not despair, Isbe, she insists. We need you now more than ever.

“Now more than ever? Haven’t you heard, Aurora? War’s over. Malfleur won. We leave at dawn.”

“No,” someone else says, coming into the room. “No, we don’t leave. Not if Aurora’s plan works.”

It takes a second for Isbe to recognize the voice. The girl from Sommeil. Wren. “What plan?” she asks cautiously.