Winter Glass (Spindle Fire #2)(72)

But if the stories are true, if Wren left Aurora, then this cannot signify true love. Can it? Indeed the story seems, as the old Ice King, Uncle Verglas, might once have said, like a paradox.

And Violette dislikes paradoxes almost as much as she dislikes insects, visitors, and expectations. Fears them, actually, nearly as much as she fears being alone in the dark.

She sinks the winning ball—or is it the losing shot?—into a corner pocket. Or is it a socket? Her hand begins to tremble. She begins to contemplate terrible, demonic things. Like what people would think if they found her hanging by her neck from one of her chandeliers, and whether the chandelier would hold her weight, and at what angle her head ought to be cocked so as to appear the most tragic—the left or the right.

She begins to cry quietly, because dying that way seems awful and yet she knows she deserves it, for all of the innocent people whose sight she has tithed over the years. For her willingness to side with Binks and, in turn, Malfleur.

Now even the great and powerful Malfleur is dead, and so is Belcoeur, and even Claudine. Their cousin Almandine is but an addled and vacant-eyed living corpse. What is to become of Violette? What is to become of any of them?

Despite their propensity for long lives, the fae have been rapidly vanishing from this world, and she knows it. Who will save them? Are they meant to be saved at all?

Perhaps there is some other curse at work, one she does not know about. Perhaps there is time yet to amend it, to undo it. After all, no one knows exactly how a faerie curse works—a curse is almost always more powerful than the faerie who uttered it.

Yes, surely it is not too sentimental to hold the view that the future of all the fae lies in Violette’s own delicate hands.

But then, saving her kind would mean risking a lot of things, like exposure to sunlight and other people’s opinions. She shivers and stares down at the billiard table. In addition to the surface, the playing balls are also made of mirrors. In them she sees a series of reflected eyes, all of them rolling this way and that. All of them judging her.

With the butt of her cue, she shatters the table.

In the cracks between the shards, she has a momentary revelation. She sees the truth, the real tragedy, so clearly it might have shattered her—except that, thankfully, the sun angles through her window and catches the light of the broken mirror, now become mirrors plural, many-angled, and in them all, she is haloed and safe.

Violette heaves a sigh of relief, and fixes a stray hair.

What was it she had been worrying herself over? Something to do with true love. A quaint thing, really. A good story, anyway, if she does say so herself.

One of the best kinds.





Epilogue


(the Real One)





Gilbert


A giant, steaming manure pile.

That is the state of Deluce. Who knew winning a war could look so much like losing one?

Roul was killed when his village was overtaken by enemy forces.

His children are, even now, on their way here, accompanied by a local milkmaid—a young widow who will be entrusted with their care. This young widow is said to be as pretty as she is kind.

Gil knows what will be expected of him. It is understood, without anyone ever saying so, that he will marry the beautiful stranger.

And perhaps he will. He is no faerie, after all; he certainly cannot predict the future, and it’s unlikely he has much power over it whatsoever. The future, he has always thought, is like an untamed colt. It will trample anything that comes underfoot.

It only wants to be free.

It breaks Gil’s heart that he has lost a brother, and that Aalis and Piers are orphaned. And yet he knows that his own losses are nothing compared to what others have seen. Everywhere, there is devastation, disorganization, bitterness, and death.

In fact, next to all that, actual manure looks rather inviting.

Gil finishes mucking the last stall, his arm muscles singing with the bend and lift of it. The familiar stable smells fill him with a kind of homesick joy. Thrushes dust through the shimmering, sunlit mist outside, and the horses shuffle their hooves, sniffing the arrival of spring, soothed by it, or by Gil’s return, or just by the stillness of the morning.

And that is where Isabelle finds him, brushing Cobalt’s coat, which gleams so black it’s almost blue. Cobalt gives a low whicker at her arrival, and Gil turns to see her there, framed by the open stable doors, as he has seen her so many times before, though this is the first time since his return.

The sun has grown so bright behind her that it takes a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to her. She steps forward, and he can see her face. For a moment, she is Isbe at twelve, come to harass him out of boredom and dare him to abandon his chores for the fields. Then his eyes focus, and she is this Isbe, in possession of her full height, her cheekbones wide, and for the first time, in his eyes, regal. She has changed, irrevocably, he sees. She is no longer the wild-haired, crooked-grinned child, nor the fierce-lit young woman he’d fallen hopelessly and secretly in love with.

He finds that his jaw has dropped open, and though she wouldn’t know it, he sheepishly clamps his mouth shut. He finds too that he is shivering slightly, despite the heat of the day breaking out, pushing back the cool shadows of dawn.

“Gil,” she whispers, as though speaking in the language of the horses. “Is it really you?”

He can’t find a reply—his tongue has gone to straw dust.