Winter Glass

by Lexa Hillyer

  Let the prince and Isbe wage a war. Aurora will seek out the evil faerie queen herself.

  The idea isn’t precise in her mind, not yet. It is still coming into itself, just as the fog over the strait shifts and morphs into the mold of the cliffs, holding their shape for moments at a time. And yet the rightness of what she must do sends a tingling, burning heat through Aurora’s whole body.

  She must travel to LaMorte and confront Malfleur. Demand the safety of her captives. Offer her something she cannot refuse in return.

  And what’s the one thing Malfleur can’t refuse?

  Careful not to wake Wren, whose long hair still smells of smoldering cinders even after being washed, Aurora tiptoes through her room, bending to select a wreath of half-opened crocuses from a tufted bench. Next, a piece of vellum and an ink-dipped pen. When she is ready, she pushes aside a heavy tapestry on her wall and enters the secret passageway to Isabelle’s room.

  She moves through the long, narrow passage, running her hands along its stone walls but feeling nothing. And that dull silence only reinforces what she must do.

  When she enters Isbe’s room, quiet as a cat, her sister does not stir. Aurora moves closer, gazing at Isbe’s sleeping form—one bare leg kicked out from underneath the covers, her short hair curled into cursive patterns across the pillow, making it look as though she is somehow in motion.

  That is how Aurora thinks of Isbe—continuously moving, running when she should be careful, reaching out to meet the world with the ends of her fingers, always alert and listening and alive to sensations. Unafraid.

  She’s struck by the memory of one of their early adventures at the edges of the castle grounds—Aurora must have been around seven, Isbe nine. They raced, tripping and laughing, to the cliffs. Aurora was certain Isbe wasn’t going to stop in time, would simply run straight into the open air and float across the fog. She cried out silently in a blend of terror and elation—had her sister simply flown, Aurora would not have been surprised. Isabelle was magic, she thought. Invincible.

  Aurora stands over her sister now, frozen with the certainty that she will lose Isbe. That she cannot stop her—has never had the power to stop her—from throwing herself headlong into her future. The truth of it pounds against her chest like the Delucian surf, hard and drenching. But she will not cry.

  She must go where she can be heard. Where she is truly needed.

  Besides. Prince William will look out for Isabelle, Aurora knows. She has seen the way his eyes travel over her face, the way his arms reach out almost instinctively to keep her from harm, the way he speaks to her with a bluntness that betrays a keen trust. Aurora may not know the prince well, but he is a good man, she can see. Kind and smart.

  Aurora can’t be certain what will come next, only that this feels painfully, beautifully right.

  She sets her letter, and the wedding wreath, on top of a bureau before she leaves.

  When she is back in her own room, Wren shifts, fluttering open her eyes. Aurora stands hovering near her, and Wren startles slightly. “What are you doing?” she whispers.

  “I need your cloak,” Aurora whispers back, packing, hurrying.

  “What? Why?” Wren asks, sitting up.

  “I am going to save Heath,” Aurora says. The promise arrives with a surge of determination. “And all of you.”

  Already Wren is up and out of the bed. “I’m coming with you.”

  Another feeling comes back to Aurora now: the moment when the wooden door to the hall of tapestries wobbled, cracked, and her ax, at last, broke through.

  5

  Isabelle

  “This is your fault,” Isbe tells William.

  “My fault your sister and her maidservant friend have vanished with the dawn?”

  “Shh,” she hisses, pulling him from the doorway, where murmurs echo against damp limestone as the bustle of guests fills the courtyard. Canopies billow in the crisp spring wind. Garlands of hawthorn and fern hang from lattice archways, their musky scent permeating the fog. Banners bob and dip, thwack and clap. She can hear the harsh cries of a few children tossing acorns—the ten-year-old phantoms of herself and Gilbert and Roul.

  Isbe folds and unfolds the letter in her hands. In it, Aurora stated that she abdicates the throne in order to be free to marry whomever she chooses. And, as Isabelle is already of age and the only other daughter of the deceased king, Aurora has officially named her queen, upon marriage to William of Aubin.

  Sister. I want to go back to Sommeil, Aurora had said, a whisper of urgency in the cadence of her fingers. But I don’t want to leave you again.

  And yet you have, Isabelle thinks. For the impossible dream of an unfinished romance. Aurora has clearly gone off to find the hunter she met in Sommeil. Heath.

  Isabelle and the prince follow the corridor farther away from the inner bailey, toward a quiet alcove near one of the northeast stairwells. “Obviously, no one can know about this letter,” she says now, trying to swallow back the tremor in her voice. “The people will revolt if they think she has abandoned us on the day of her coronation. We need to go after her and Wren.”

  “They can’t have gone far,” William offers. “I’m sure the guards will locate them before nightfall.”

  He is probably right—after a frantic search of the palace, the royal carriage was discovered missing about an hour ago. Even if they got a head start by leaving in the dark, everyone knows that the spring mud makes travel by carriage cumbersome. Still, this is the second time Aurora has strayed from the confines of the castle grounds in her entire life, and Isbe knows all too well what happened last time.

  “How can you be so dismissive?” Isbe grabs his arm, forcing him to stop pacing. She feels him turn to her, the dark heat of his defensiveness. “Your bride ran off on the morning of your wedding! Don’t you realize how damaging this could be if the guests find out? And what do we even know about the girl with ash in her hair?”

  “We know,” William says quietly, “only what the travelers told us last night—that Malfleur rallied, pressured, or possibly imprisoned many of the survivors of the fire. If your sister has indeed fled straight into the jaws of the enemy with the notion of finding one man, then she has done something both valiant and excessively reckless. I can’t say that either quality surprises me,” he adds, a bitter quirk to his voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . ,” he replies, then quiets for a moment as a pair of servants rushes past them, carrying clattering trays. Once they are at a safe distance, he continues, “I mean that you and Aurora are not so unalike, after all.”

  “It seems a particularly bad time to throw around accusations of rash behavior,” Isbe snaps, “or any insult, for that matter. Your tone is not befitting of a prince—or a bridegroom. Certainly not a king.” However, his point has given Isbe a new thought. “Now if you’d be so kind as to indulge another reckless decision, please call a servant to escort me to the stables at once.”

  The prince lets out a breath too forceful to be considered a sigh. “I suppose you plan to go after her, despite the fact that we’ve already sent our best men.”

  “Our best men,” she says, “may not prove as useful in anticipating my sister’s next reckless move.”

  “I said valiant and reckless,” he corrects.

  She shrugs, dismissing the half compliment.

  “Isabelle,” he says more determinedly. Instead of calling for a servant, he leads her past their alcove and into the solitude of a stairwell, where his breath suddenly turns louder, heavier. “Don’t.”

  Silence.

  “Don’t go after her. Stay.”

  Still she can’t respond, afraid any words would be sand against her throat.

  “Stay and marry me in her place.” There they are. The words she wanted him to say before, has been waiting for him to say. His lips are close to her ear; his body hovers in front of hers, his cloak almost enclosing them both.

  She takes a step backward, but he
r shoulders hit the curved wall beside the steps. He has her hands in his now. He tugs on them, ever so lightly, but it sends a tingling current through her.

  “Don’t you see?” he says. “Your sister never even wanted this marriage. Why won’t you just marry me?”

  The memories rush at her: the heat between them, the way his lips lingered on her skin that night in the wine caves. His hands, his words, soft and pressing. How close she felt to him then. How beautiful, powerful, changed.

  “Please, Isabelle. I ask you a third time, and I don’t think I can ask you again.”

  Devastation brings its own brand of heat to her cheeks. “We can’t just pick up where we left off, William. You know as well as I do. Aurora woke up, and you were perfectly willing to throw away what we had in order to wed her—”

  “Which had been our plan and what you wanted!” he protests, pulling away. “And listen: Your sister clearly didn’t choose me.”

  “But you,” Isbe counters, turning her face high, feeling bold with the truth of it. “You didn’t choose me.”

  “Yes, Isabelle. I did. I chose you, and I choose you again.”

  She folds her arms over her chest, maybe to keep from falling over, or falling into him, or falling completely away from herself. She doesn’t know.

  Except she does know. “You only chose me when there wasn’t a choice at all.”

  He can’t deny that, and he doesn’t.

  But she won’t linger in his silence, won’t wallow in the truth he likes to distort in order to satisfy whatever whim of feeling passes through him at the time. Just like a man, to want what he wants only when he wants it.

  And she doesn’t need an escort, either—she can find her way to the stables on her own. After all, she has been running there—running from the palace, from its rules and its cruelties—all her life.

  Her fury and confusion are muffled by the life’s worth of memories brought on as soon as she steps into the barn. She has not been here since escaping with Gilbert the night before the council intended to send her to the convent in Isolé for good.

  The barn scents overwhelm her with their familiarity: equine sweat and sweet feed, worn leather and hay dust and dank wood. The horses snuffle quietly. Those that survived the Sleeping Sickness were left wary, restless. She has the urge to soothe them but knows they must sense the unease in her own heart.

  She passes Freckles’s empty stall, and stops. For a moment, she thinks she can hear her favorite mare nicker softly. Her throat tightens and she reaches between the bars, but no velvety nose nudges her hand.

  She clicks her tongue anyway. Tss tss tss.

  There is no shuffling of hooves or flick of a mane. Silence.

  She leans her forehead against the stall door, breathing deeply, letting the pressure in her chest rise and fall, rise and fall. But it does not lessen.

  She knows she must accept that Freckles is dead, and so, truly, is the young girl who used to ride her, the king’s wild bastard daughter. The king is dead too—has been for years now. And Gilbert?

  She has heard nothing of his fate, though she did send a messenger to Roul’s village. He has not seen his brother. No one has. It can only mean one thing, yet Isbe refuses to believe it. She feels that Gilbert is alive—can nearly hear his easy laughter in the distance. Then again, she feels like she can hear Freckles whinnying in the far fields too—wants to believe the mare has simply sneaked away, breaking from her stall as she’s done so many times in the past. But that is an illusion, a wish.

  No good ever came from wishing.

  Isbe has always resisted the temptation to wish for things she knows she cannot have, because she fears the disappointment will break her. But it’s more than that: even the beginning of a wish taking shape in her heart hurts—sends an actual physical pang through her body, a kind of vibration that scares her, like a bolt of painful lightning running straight through her chest. Like a curse.

  She takes a deep breath, trying to settle herself.

  When Isbe first lost her sight, she began to feel that the world was made mostly of a darkness—and that this darkness was itself a kind of material, a fabric that contorted into shape and meaning only by necessity. Until a person heaved a breath or spoke, or ruffled the air around her, that person had not yet existed. Things and people alike would disappear back into that amorphous fabric just as easily as they came. But gradually Isbe grew to believe in the world she could not see, to have faith in it.

  She reminds herself to have faith in it still.

  She selects a different horse and begins readying the saddle, losing herself in the tightening of buckles and the smoothing of the stallion’s coat. It takes a moment for her to sense the presence of another person.

  Isbe freezes.

  Whoever has arrived just now is definitely not a stable hand, whose footfalls would be easy and confident, perhaps accompanied by a low hum or whistle. The person who has entered the stables is shadowed, movements muted in a way that makes him or her seem larger and more fearful. Or perhaps she only thinks so because of the mingled sounds arising around her, of snorts, huffs, stamping hooves.

  A woman clears her throat. “How delightful,” she says, in a voice like a cannonball’s slow roll down the bore. Loaded.

  Isabelle turns. “Mother.”

  Reverend Mother Hildegarde is as large of body as she is of spirit, Isbe recalls, having first met her at the convent of Isolé, where she and the prince took refuge on their grueling journey from his palace in Aubin to her home in Deluce.

  “I suppose you know why I’ve come,” the woman says calmly.

  Isbe flushes, remembering how she had wondered if Hildegarde might turn out to be her own mother—though the hope hadn’t been all that unreasonable. After all, Hildegarde indicated she’d been stationed at the palace for many years prior to Isabelle’s birth, and in fact had struck a deal for Isbe’s safety, though that had apparently been contingent on a payment that the convent never received.

  That’s right. The money.

  Isbe bristles, tightening her grip on the leather reins in her hand. “You have a funny way of bargaining.”

  “I’m not bargaining, my dear,” Hildegarde replies. “I’m simply here to ask for what is fairly due me and my own. Now that the sleeping sickness seems to have fled the land, I thought it might be the safest time to come and see you.”

  “You’ve come to persuade me to forgive you.” Isbe did not think it possible to feel more divided. On the one hand, her awe for Hildegarde’s bravery is whole and unmatched. But then again, she can hardly forget, let alone forgive, the fact that Hildegarde sold her out to Malfleur’s mercenaries, who cornered her and the prince in the village not more than two miles from the convent, from whence they intended to escort them all the way to LaMorte, perhaps to become lunch for Malfleur’s Vultures—or leverage.

  If it hadn’t been for the bravery of Sister Genevieve and Sister Katherine, well . . . Isbe can’t think about that right now.

  “No. I do not ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness is, like the word indicates, something that must by its very nature be given, not sought. It belongs to the will of the giver.”

  “You risked our lives for your own gain,” Isbe says, feeling both disgusted and torn. “Fortunately for you,” she adds, turning back to her horse and tightening the stirrups, “I have more important concerns right now than retribution. I have a princess to rescue.”

  Hildegarde has the gall to snort.

  Isbe drops the leather strap. “What was that?”

  “Noble. Very noble of you,” the woman replies, shifting her massive weight with the faintest of creaks in the wooden planks.

  Isbe turns back to the horse once again but remains still, regretting the way the reverend mother’s voice holds sway over her, makes her want to hear more.

  “It is a worthy cause to save the life of a princess, especially a beloved sister,” Hildegarde admits. “But is it not worthier to save the lives of twenty peasants, or
a hundred, or possibly thousands?”

  Isbe steps out of the stall and faces the woman—they cannot be more than thirty or forty paces apart. “It is neither my right nor yours to value one life over another. I only seek to help where my efforts may be of real use.”

  “Well, it is certainly too late for Josette,” Hildegarde says harshly.

  No. Not her, too. Isbe recalls the young girl who suffered from pneumonia at the convent.

  The nun betrays no emotion about the death of the little girl, but her voice is low and determined as thunder. “However, you could be of use to me.”

  “I suppose I could plead your case to the council,” Isbe says slowly, thinking of Maximilien, the only one left. Would he care? She might find a way of persuading him. “Perhaps I could get you your gold, if I wanted to . . . but how am I to know you won’t return to your ruthless ways?”

  “I don’t consider arming a house of women with both education and weapons ruthless. I consider it a means of survival. And besides . . .”

  Hildegarde leaves a heavy silence that makes Isbe fidget.

  “It’s what your mother would have wanted.”

  “My . . .” Isbe’s mind has suddenly gone blank, and she’s tempted to swing her arm forward into thin air, seeking something solid.

  “She was—well, let’s say that I admired her greatly. At first, anyway.”

  “At first?” Isbe is still stunned . . . and suspicious. Why should she trust Hildegarde after she’s already lied once?

  “Cassandra was so much better than the king she settled for.” Hildegarde’s voice holds a sneer. “She came from peasantry but abandoned her roots. She folded her past life away when she moved into the palace, like a secret into a seashell.”

  “Her past life . . .” A wash of dread moves through Isabelle, leaving her fingers tingling.

  “I had my suspicions about her. King Henri, he had no idea who she really was. Your father wasn’t the brightest, I’m afraid. He let his appetites make his decisions—”

  “Stop.” Isbe feels a wave of revulsion. “I don’t want to hear this. I’ll get you your funds. . . . Just please, leave me now.”