Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(68)



For Malfleur, magic has always been so wrought, so hard won. It is not a natural grace but an unholy gathering of everything unnatural, a knotted and dense thing, tangled and burning and immortal. It feeds on death.

Her father once told her of a theory that dying stars draw in the light from surrounding stars and become an ever-expanding hole of darkness that is both self-devouring and self-sustaining. That is exactly what Malfleur’s magic is: desperate to destroy, and thus to thrive.

The morning’s post-rain wet clings to her skirts, weighing them down, but still she feels intoxicated, immortal, as though she might take off soaring as she pushes away from the war camp, where her soldiers rest and plot and strengthen, awaiting the next round of supplies, readying themselves for another attack. This time, the castle will easily be theirs. They’ve put a stranglehold on Deluce’s prize, and there is now no way out but into the mouth of death. Onto the waiting blades of her soldiers’ lances.

The final siege will come. But first Malfleur must meet her pet eye to eye, must reclaim her. She gave Aurora a taste of her own magic, and now, no matter how far the princess runs or where she tries to hide, there’s a thread that binds them together.

She clutches the message she received last night.

Meet me where dawn breaks on the cliffs.

Perhaps they will duel, or perhaps Aurora will simply beg for her forgiveness. Perhaps all of this—Aurora’s escape and now her invitation—is part of an invisible dance. Malfleur can feel the thread between them thrumming with a faint vibration, tugging her onward, closer and closer to the palace of Deluce.

She hasn’t been here, to her childhood home, in sixteen years. Not since Aurora’s christening, when she cursed the baby princess in a way that now strikes Malfleur as almost whimsical. She had not foreseen then that by cursing Aurora with the promise of death, what would actually occur would be a kind of gift—that the princess would become hers.

Aurora was a far more successful experiment than her other human pet, the one called Heath. His mind had been too brutish, too masculine, too narrowly defined, whereas Aurora’s was a wide-open landscape, fertile with possibility.

She will have her back, and soon. She longs to stroke her beautiful hair and teach her new things, to watch her talents blossom and her magic spark into magnificent flame all around them. She cannot be very upset with Aurora for breaking free—she designed her to be untamable, didn’t she?

The palace rises up before her, piercing the still-dark sky. Fog wraps itself around the castle, smoke curling through it like a long-lost twin. For some reason, Malfleur thinks of that old lullaby, the one she created to spread the story of her dominance over her sister. One night reviled, before break of morn . . . the shadow and the child together were born.

The wooden barricades are splashed in scarlet, blackened from fire. Bodies lie everywhere, a massive blanket of masks and bloodstained iron shields. Malfleur must pick her way through them, even as a vulture flies overhead, tilting, ready to drop and scavenge.

This place has changed greatly since she lived in it—and nearly all of its secret passages have been blocked in with plaster. But a little plaster is nothing to her magic. When she reaches one of the secret entrances—known only to those familiar with the castle a hundred years ago, when it was at the height of its glory—she presses her hands against it and shuts her eyes.

The plaster crumbles under her touch. The past dissolves back into the present. She winds her way inside.

Aurora is waiting for her at the exact spot along the cliffs that Malfleur expected—a narrow promontory on the northeastern bluff. She’s standing on the ledge looking out over the Strait of Sorrow, her pale gown and light hair billowing gracefully in the breeze; the first spark of sun outlines her silhouette in gold.

The princess turns at her approach, as if she has in fact sensed her coming, just as Malfleur has followed her senses here to find her. She can feel that the magic has lessened and faded in Aurora, but still it’s there, a quiet pulse, battering and flapping like a fallen dove. She will scoop it up in her hands; she will fix it. She will get the formula right this time.

Queen, Aurora says with her mind, or her eyes, or her body—or perhaps with her magic. Malfleur isn’t sure when she began to “hear” Aurora, who still cannot speak. It happened seamlessly.

“I’m here,” Malfleur says soothingly.

You said you cannot be killed except by the hand of one of your own blood.

“That is true. I am protected. I cannot die.”

I wonder, then, what would happen if I leaped over the edge, her eyes say. The wind gusts, lifting Aurora’s hair, revealing her long, thin neck. It is a strange question.

“I would leap after you,” Malfleur answers calmly.

And?

“And we would fly.”

Something changes in the princess’s face—at first, Malfleur believes it is a flicker of excitement, that the word “fly” has touched something in the princess’s soul, has made her understand what they can be together, what Malfleur can make her. But then the queen sees that it is not excitement or joy. She could swear now that what she reads on Aurora’s face is in fact sadness.

Or pity.

Fear seizes Malfleur’s chest. She feels something radiating out of Aurora—it is magic, an offshoot of her own, but she has no control over it. It belongs to the princess, and it is icy cold, and powerful. It is like an invisible shield, and the queen suddenly realizes that perhaps all this time she has not been understanding Aurora’s words, has not been speaking with her at all, but speaking instead with her own imagination. The real Aurora stands before her, but not the one Malfleur wants her to be. Not the projection of herself.

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