Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(67)

Aurora begins to tap an explanation, but she stumbles—there are not enough words in their secret language to say whatever it is she wants to say. You are the heart, she taps. You are the hunter’s daughter.

“I don’t understand.”

Wren steps into the room and closes the door. “Your mother was the Hart Slayer.”

“I know that now,” Isbe says slowly.

“Some of the fae have reason to suspect the Hart Slayer was a descendant of the faerie queen Belcoeur,” Wren explains, her voice crystal and bell-like in Isbe’s stunned silence. “And it is a descendant of Belcoeur who will save us all from Malfleur.”

“But . . .” Isbe flounders. She wants to protest, but there’s a tiny spark of hope in her chest that flares at these words, at a feeling of truth and possibility in them. The shadow is the child, and the child is the shadow. There is only one story, and it is every story, braided together into a single cord.

Still, how is it possible that she is destined to kill Malfleur? “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore,” she says, pulling away from Aurora and sitting down on the edge of her old bed. “I don’t even know myself.” The words drag through her throat, and she is afraid she is going to cry. She doesn’t want to cry again. Tomorrow may be her last day, and she doesn’t want to die like this—weak and frightened.

But I know you, Aurora insists, taking her hand once again and sitting down beside her. You are the brave and wild Isabelle. The one who always risks everything for the good of others, and never for herself. You have always sought your role in other people’s stories, but when will you step into your role at the heart of yours?

“But I did,” Isbe counters. “I am queen of Deluce! I married Prince William. How much more central could I be? And still it’s not enough.”

Aurora taps gently. Maybe that was just you playing my role. Maybe your story is different.

Isbe pulls away. “I need to be alone.”

Aurora hugs her again, and then she and Wren step out of the room.

That night, Isbe lies awake, bereft, like a tiny ship floating out in the wide sea, with no land in sight. Just the vault of stars above and blackness all around. She reaches underneath her pillow, where she has stowed the slipper of winter glass. It’s so tiny, she suddenly realizes it could have belonged to a child. She doesn’t know why the thought has never occurred to her before.

The shadow is the child, and the child is the shadow. Her mother’s voice moves through her mind, bringing strands of the lullaby—no words now, just the melody, both mournful and soothing.

She knows she doesn’t need the slipper anymore. Doesn’t need to know its secrets.

She needs to let go, to say good-bye.

But instead, she holds it close to her chest, feeling its iciness prick through her clothes to her skin. The slipper may not have any real story to tell her—but it is still her last connection to her mother.

Every story, she sees now, is different depending on who’s telling it, anyway. Malfleur is the villain in Aurora’s tale, but the hero in many others. Just like the two versions of the rose lullaby—the one everyone knows, in which Malfleur kills Belcoeur, and the one she learned from her mother, Cassandra, who learned it, perhaps, from her mother, Isbe’s grandmother, who was, maybe—if Aurora and Wren are right—the daughter of Belcoeur herself. In that other version, the sisters were friends, and played together until darkness did win the light from the day.

Isbe knows Aurora’s right—she needs to stop chasing other people’s stories. But what is her own? She recalls once again what it felt like when she first lost her vision—how she desperately needed a hand to pull her out of the darkness, needed someone to make her believe in the world again. She is that little girl now, lost and scared in the unknowable expanse, while Aurora, just a baby, cries silently, unaware of what has happened to Isbe, caught up in the bubble of her own world. From that day on, she has always thought it was up to her to keep Aurora safe.

But the day her sight was tithed—that was Aurora’s christening. It was Aurora’s day, the beginning of her story. Isbe’s own tale had begun before then. She had been abandoned, left behind by her real mother, to run wild, abused and neglected by her father and stepmother, until Gil found her and became her first friend. That is Isbe’s story. That is who she is.

She knows now: she must be the one to give herself a hand up and out.

She must step forward, blindly, into that darkness once more.

She must try.

To kill Malfleur.

Luckily, Aurora has a plan—the thought of it glows before Isbe, lighting up the night, crystal and pure, like ice. But it is not ice at all; it is a guiding star. And in its glow, she begins to see herself again.





30


Malfleur,


the Last Faerie Queen

Blackbirds take up the first chorus, swirling overhead in the remaining dark. Malfleur steps through the fields’ tall, sparse weeds, all a predawn gray that pretends at silver.

For a moment, as dew vanishes at her fingertips, the faerie queen wonders if she is dreaming.

But that is impossible, because she does not dream. Her twin stole that power from her before either of them were born, sucked it out of her heart.

Malfleur has always wondered whether Belcoeur also absorbed some of Malfleur’s magical gift; if that’s why magic always flowed so easily through her fingertips, like the gold thread she spun.