Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(69)
A princess. A stranger. Her hair gold and dancing upward over the cliffs, like a flame.
And the queen knows, with a terrible suddenness, that this flame must be snuffed. She lunges toward her.
But Aurora ducks and rolls out of the way, revealing something—no, someone—who stood behind her like a shadow.
Malfleur halts, confused, as the shadow comes to life.
She squints between Aurora and the girl, realizing that she is the bastard daughter of the king. She has never laid eyes on Isabelle before, but has heard the rumors of how she has traveled Deluce, trying to rally the peasantry against Malfleur. Understanding dawns on the queen now—this is some kind of trap. Aurora lured her here with purpose.
But what purpose?
She looks at Isabelle’s face, broad and angular and animated, and then she gives a quiet gasp. The eyes, unseeing, are familiar somehow. She could swear they are Belcoeur’s eyes, except that they do not lock with her own in mutual recognition. The girl is blind.
Malfleur wants to laugh. If this is a trap, it is dismally disappointing. Without further thought, her dagger slides from its hilt at her belt and fits at home in her fist. She swirls toward Isabelle in one fluid motion, launching the knife toward the blind girl’s heart. A look of uncertainty crosses Isabelle’s face, and then she counters Malfleur’s blow with something in her hand. Malfleur stumbles and sees that she has parried with a glass object. No. Ice?
It has been carved, if she’s not mistaken, in the shape of a delicate shoe.
The queen nearly laughs as she swivels and lunges a second time with the dagger, but once again, Isabelle, without being able to see her, meets her blade with the glass slipper, which does not shatter. The third time, the queen puts her magic into it, and her thrust is too powerful for Isabelle to block. The shoe flies from the girl’s hands and catches the light of the day that has burst open over the water. Malfleur, fixated with the need to know what it is, fumbles to catch the sparkling slipper, letting her own knife fall to the ground.
As the shoe meets the queen’s open palms, it instantly begins to melt, and Malfleur finds herself frozen in its reflection, her own face disappearing, giving way to something else—a flurry of fractured images. Breathlessly, her whole body goes hot and cold as she is pulled into the ice, into the reflections, into a story of a different time and a different place, and some distant part of her understands with sudden clarity: this is winter glass.
Her father spoke of it once.
No, he is speaking of it now.
He is bending over her, and she is on her knees in snow, weeping. But she is not herself, she is Belcoeur, her sister, and younger, the age she was when she retreated forever into Sommeil.
She is her twin and she is sobbing into the snow, begging her father to help her, to help them. It would be wrong to bring the child with her where she plans to go—it would be a kind of death. And besides, she cannot bear to look at the child, the little girl, her own daughter, who bears such a strong resemblance to Charles.
“Father, help me,” she begs.
And so he does. The old, white-bearded king tells her about winter glass. “Take me to the child,” he says, and she leads him back across the snowy woods to the little cottage. Hunting season has long passed, and the forest is quiet, empty of travelers.
Inside the cottage, a little girl is curled up in her bed in a nursery room, watched over by a maid called Oshannah. A candle flickers by the side of the bed. The girl is not even three years old, and has only just begun to speak.
“Mama,” she says. “It is too cold to sleep. Read me a story.”
She—Malfleur, who is Belcoeur, who is dead and yet not dead—reads her daughter a story. A tale she wrote herself, about a pair of sisters named Daisy and Marigold, who play in the tall fields until the sunlight is swallowed whole by the dark of night. The little girl yawns and flutters her eyes closed, beginning to sleep, to dream.
“Father,” Belcoeur whispers to King Verglas. “She deserves to be free. She would never be free with me in Sommeil. But what can I do to keep her safe from Malfleur?”
The king tells her to go out and break the scrim of ice over the well, then to draw a bucket of water.
When she returns, shivering from the cold, King Verglas takes the bucket and pours it, very slowly, almost tenderly, over the young girl’s sleeping form. He mumbles to himself as he pours, and she can feel the magic of his words, of the story of this moment. The moment becomes the water, freezing it into a full-body armor of winter glass, including skirts and two dainty little slippers. He even fashions the child a satchel of unbreakable arrowheads, all while the girl remains asleep.
“As long as she is in possession of this armor,” he says, “she will be safe. The ice holds the secret of her identity inside it—the memory of you as her mother. Now no one can know who she is—not even herself—and so she can never be found, except to be found by herself.”
It is another riddle—King Verglas is fond of them, she knows, and a beat of fear passes through her, becoming regret on the other side. Has she made a mistake? It is too late to ask, and too late to ever know. She must leave, at once. Sommeil awaits her. A world where none of this pain exists. A world where Charles was never killed, where she never loved him to begin with. A world where her sister never broke her heart.
She kisses the girl on the forehead one last time, and in that kiss, Belcoeur, who is Malfleur, who is witnessing the entire history of the winter-glass armor in a single moment, feels the fluid and fleeting passage of time under her cold lips, and sees the daughter wake and step out of her armor, no longer remembering her own name. The girl has no recollection of Belcoeur, either. Still, the girl keeps the armor with her always, as a relic of a past she can’t recall. The girl grows up to have her own daughter, whom she names Cassandra, and to whom she passes on what remains of the armor and arrows.