by Lexa Hillyer
“My pet,” the queen says to her through the bars, her head tilted slightly, as though she is curious, “you thought it would be that simple.” Now her expression morphs into a crooked smile. “I am not so easily killed.”
Aurora refuses to look her in the eye.
The queen carries on anyway. “My father put a curse on me that I would die by the hand of one who carries my blood. He didn’t realize, I suppose, that this curse was more like a blessing. I became invincible. I have done away with my sister, and there are few living relatives left—if any—who might attempt it. I do not fear my father. He doesn’t have it in him. And I certainly cannot fear you. You may be my pet. My little protégé. But you are not my blood.”
Aurora sinks to the floor of the cage as Malfleur walks away, her footsteps clicking down a long corridor. The queen stops and turns around. “Get some beauty sleep, Aurora. You’ll need to look your best for the party.”
Then she’s gone.
Despair presses down on Aurora. Humiliation. Futility. And above all, anger—burning, flaming, making it hard for her to see or to think. How could she have come so close, only to fail?
No. She grabs the iron bars, pulling until her arm muscles feel as though they will tear from her skin. She channels her anger, wondering if she can bend the bars to the will of her magic—it floods through her, blacking out her vision. When she comes to, the bars are still there, though they now bear dents in the shape of her fingers, and the skin of her palm is sizzling and raw. She has burned herself, though she cannot feel it.
She paces her cage like a mountain lion, then kicks at the bars. Hurls herself at them. Lashes out as if her whole body were a silent scream. She knows she will injure herself, already has. She will become a bloodied mess, worse than after her fight with Heath.
Heath. Could he break her out of here? Could they kill Malfleur together? But how? She doesn’t even know where he’s kept.
She punches and pulls on the bars until her fists are bruised and dripping red, blood crusting underneath her fingernails. This is impossible. It was a waste—all of it. The journey to LaMorte. The covert break-in of the palace. The confrontation. The contract. The training. The careful preparation. All of it has led to this—another prison.
Has she really come anywhere at all from the scared girl she had been only a couple of months ago, alone in her tower room in Deluce, mocked by a starling?
Home. To go back. To start over again. That feels impossible too—because she has changed. She can’t go back to that powerless person she used to be, waiting around in a flouncy dress for a prince to fall in love with her.
Still, she has nowhere else to go.
And even now, despite the ultimate failure, she’s incapable of giving up. She wants what Malfleur has: Freedom. Power. Authority. Meaning.
The image of the queen wiping a scarlet smear from her mouth returns to Aurora now. It was blood.
She wants that: to taste life while its heart is still beating.
In the morning, a Vulture leaves her a secret stack of books, and she thumbs through them, dust rising from their pages, but cannot find the attention or the patience to read. That joy—one of her greatest and her few—has wilted. It seems to her that all the books she ever read until now were like lush flowers, distracting her from the real threats of the world.
“I’m sorry, Princess,” he says, watching her toss one of the books aside.
She looks up at him, curious. An apology? That’s a first.
He seems to shrug, though it’s hard to tell in all his armor. She stares at the key worn on a chain around his neck. If she lunged quickly enough, could she grab hold of it through the bars? Would her injured leg hold up? Could she strangle him with the chain and then unlock the cage and run free?
He bends to one knee. It would be so easy now. She is poised.
She hesitates.
He slides a fresh book through the bars. “Perhaps you’ll like this one better?”
And then he is standing, stepping back, as though he has just left raw meat inside the cage of a beast. Is that how they all see her? Is that what she has become? She has not seen herself in weeks. Even in the guest quarters she was given no mirror—nothing that could easily have become a weapon in her hands.
After he is gone, she glowers at the book.
But eventually curiosity takes over and she opens it, scans the title and contents. It’s hardly even a book—more of a manual, really, about breeds of horses. She tosses it aside, and begins stalking again, restless. Why didn’t she leap at him when she had the chance? Next time she’ll be ready.
But it’s as if all the Vultures sense her aggression—they’re ready too, and keep their distance when they come again, each approaching only to deliver meager helpings of food and then quickly retreating.
The party is tomorrow.
What does Malfleur have planned?
Aurora goes back to the books, debating whether she can turn them into some sort of weapon. Stack and climb them, or pull one of the Vultures close to the bars, then bash his head in with them. She kicks the pile of them over.
The book of horses lands by her feet.
She stares at it. It suddenly reminds her of something. Of someone.
She thinks of that flash of red hair—of the knowing looks she has sometimes seen in one of the Vulture’s eyes. Of her suspicion that she recognized him.
Gilbert.
It seems impossible, like so much else.
And even if she’s right—what good would that information do? He’s shown no mercy toward her before—none of them have. There’s been a certain softness that she has detected, in moments here and there, from one of her trainers. Could it have been him? She might just as easily have imagined it, though, and he has never suggested he would actually help her.
Even if Gilbert is one of the Vultures, how will she find him again? And is he even Gilbert enough to want to help her? If it is him, he’s a stern, vacant shadow of the boy who once tumbled around the fields and mucked the stables and dragged his hay scent in through Isbe’s window throughout their childhood.
Hardly a spark remains of the flush-faced teen Aurora once caught leaving love notes in Isabelle’s bedroom wall—notes he must have dictated, since he couldn’t write, and knowing too that Isbe couldn’t read them. He really had loved her sister once. Aurora only realized the truth of it recently—in Sommeil. How the notes had not been a childish prank, but the act of a man who sensed his love was unrequited, yet still had to speak it, in some secret way.
The swirling magic, and the fury, that have been clouding Aurora’s mind and tensing her body melt a little at this memory. She digs down, seizing on the tiny candlelight within her, wavering but not yet blown out: the real Aurora, beneath the stifling weight of the magic. She’s still there.
Aurora imagines holding her palms cupped around that flame, protecting it from going out. There’s a story in here, somewhere. Somewhere in here, there is hope.
Gilbert. Isabelle. True love. Secrets.
The love notes.
If only he were more Gilbert. If only he remembered.
What if that love for her sister still burns within him—a tiny flame, just like hers?
Quickly, an idea flashes into her, as though entering not through her mind but directly through her heart.
Hands shaking, she tears a page from the book, then bites her finger open until it bleeds.
With the blood and the tip of a fingernail, she scratches out a hasty note. She folds it, just like the love notes were folded into Isbe’s wall, and pokes it out of the horse book. Then she props it through the bars, and waits. For the impossible to happen. For the right Vulture to return.
Several other guards come and go, seeming to ignore the pile of books altogether.
And then—and then—sometime late in the night, a vulture appears. He cannot have come to bring her food; it is too late for that. She waits, poised; she doesn’t try to lunge for his neck. Sh
e tries, instead, to catch and hold his gaze. For a moment, it seems to work. She could swear the hardness in his eyes wavers, ripples like a stone thrown into a pond. And she’s certain that her hunch is correct. It’s him. It’s really him.
But then he collects her books and walks away, not seeming to notice the note tucked within.
22
Isabelle
The basalt flame produces a faint smell, almost herbal, and a strange, gently undulating, blue-black heat. Isbe is back in the library of the ice palace, and it must be near dawn. She has not slept. Though the flame did not work on her slipper, she moves determinedly through the cavernous room, so different seeming in the dark—so much vaster and echoing.
For moments here and there, she has the most unusual sensation of being able to see—not literally, but abstractly, somehow. The absence of light, and shape, and form seems to be its own kind of substance. How can nothing be something? The air, even, dances around her, full of unfelt bodies. She shakes her head, trying to clear it, to make sense of what she’s feeling. She wonders if the smoke from the torch is affecting her thinking.
She learned once from a palace chef that frogs will leap out of boiling water to save their own lives, but if the water’s temperature is only gradually raised, the frog will not notice; it will remain in the water until it is cooked to death. She feels lulled by the flame’s wavering heat, suspects she will succumb to something terrible in it. She fears the torch in her hand, and the icy whispers of the walls around her.
“My ancestors discovered the secret from the island’s hot springs,” Dariel had explained after she pressed him for answers about the ice. “The springs are thought to be healing, and our people frequently bathe in them to restore our spirits and release tension,” he told her. “It is not uncommon to experience visions in the springs. Ecstasies. The steam comes from deep beneath the earth and seems to release the secrets held in the ice. Many believe there are real histories wafting through the steam and then dissipating in the air.”
“So I have to go to a hot spring,” Isbe replied.
“No,” Dariel explained. “You do not. All you need is a basalt flame.”
“A what?”
“It is a kind of torch made with bits of black rock from deep below the ice—the kind that heats the springs. But I must warn you—many men say these are the rocks of the underworld, the place of polar darkness, and that the visions they bring are not real but our fantasies come to haunt us.”
A chill went through her. “I’m not afraid,” she said, though what she meant was, I’ve come this far. “But how will I find the story I’m looking for?”
Dariel thought for a moment. “You won’t. You must trust the ice. The story will find you.”
It’s exactly what the king told her, and oddly, this reassures her. She would have to trust the ice.
She has no other choice.
Now she runs her bare fingers, chapped and blistered from the ice, against more ice. Searching, searching.
The flame makes the walls melt, but only a little, like beads of perspiration. Everything’s slippery, and she has no idea where she is in the room. She has a sense of touching infinity. She shivers, hot and cold and hot again. The softening ice sends whispered words, phrases, even emotions that seem to reach out to her and wind their way inside her mind.
Where is the heart, the heart . . .
The phrase repeats and repeats, detangling itself into sense. Where is all the hart?
Isbe feels herself disappearing into the words and their story, becoming not herself and not a person at all but a kind of witness—she’s all the figures in the tale and none of them at once.
There are woods. There is a mad clattering of hooves. A king’s fury radiates between the tall trees striping the world all around him. This is his forest. The royal forest. The king is Isbe’s father, King Henri. She is him and she is not him, but she can feel his righteous anger. All the hart are being driven from the woods, his wood and thus his game. No one is allowed to hunt the hart but him.
And yet someone has gone against the king’s wishes. The Hart Slayer, that’s what Henri has come to call this criminal—a mysterious hunter who is not only shooting his game but delivering his prizes to the doorsteps of random peasants throughout the area, making a mockery of the king and his laws.
The king is enraged. This hunter must be captured and hanged. An example must be made. Hunting is his chief joy, and now that joy has been ripped away, replaced with humiliation.
His royal guard has decorated the outskirts of the forest in posters declaring the king’s offering of a massive reward for the head of the Hart Slayer. Sketches drawn from the brief glimpses of him by loyal villagers show a scrawny man of average height and unkempt hair. The hunter’s only true identifying features are the special arrows he uses on the hunt. Some people have made a hobby of trying to find these arrows—all of them made of some sort of material that resembles clear glass, except that it does not break.
Winter glass, Isbe thinks, suddenly coming back to herself.
Her hands are shaking. She realizes they are drenched and numb, the icy water melting down along her outstretched arm and trickling down her dress. But she must know more. She moves along the ice, seeking the voices again, that swishing of heavy cloaks against horses’ backs and hooves on dense forest floor, that sense of galloping speed and that wondrously palpable feeling of anger.
On this day, the king is determined—more determined than ever—to catch a hart. He must have a win. He must feel the still-beating heart in the creature’s warm chest before he drives in the final, killing wound. He will not stop until he has completed the hunt.
And then it happens, at last—a shift in the underbrush. The presence of an animal, lithe, skirting in the shadows, and tall. Fast but not fast enough. There is a clearing ahead; he knows these parts well, knows them better than he knows himself. Excitement and victory fly through his veins, nearly lighting him up from within, as he reaches for his bow and arrow, and aims, aims . . . aims.
He is a hair’s breadth away from firing the shot, when something stops him, and the figure emerges, a scared look in its eyes.
No. Not its. Hers.
It is no deer, but a maiden.
There is no specific moment when the king, Isbe’s father, falls in love with this maiden. It happens quickly, but in increments. He finds himself thinking of her all day and soon can dream of nothing but her at night—the maiden so poor she grew up not in a house or cottage but a hut built into the side of a tree, not in a village but on the outskirts of untamed land. Isbe’s hands slide along the ice, and the torch burns hotter and hotter as the story of their chance meetings in the woods unfolds—once, twice, and three times, before Henri admits who he is: the king of Deluce. By then it is too late; the maiden has fallen in love with him, and he with her.
After some convincing, he persuades her at last to be his. She thinks she will be plucked from obscurity and brought into the royal family. It is what every young girl dreams will happen. To her credit, this maiden—Cassandra is her name—hopes that her love for the king will do some good for this world.
It will not, however.
It will do good only for the king himself. Cassandra will become his favorite mistress, because after he whisks her away to the palace and covers her in lavish dresses and tripled strands of sapphires, the Hart Slayer stops hunting in the royal forest. Cassandra, the king believes, has brought him good luck, and gradually he forgets his ire, forgets the affront to his ego the illegal hunter had caused. Even the people who were helped by the Hart Slayer—many as poor as Cassandra herself—go on about their lives and begin to forget their mysterious benefactor ever existed.
But Cassandra will never be queen and she will never be wife, and in two years’ time, when she has only just given birth to the king’s bastard daughter, she will be forced out and sent away, leaving her only worldly attachments behind: the child, whom she names Isabelle, and a small
item given to her by her own mother—a tiny slipper made of unbreakable glass.
And as she flees the castle, a confidante—the minister of religion, a young woman named Hildegarde—shakes her head at the girl. “There is so much more you might have been, Cassandra.”
Cassandra sets sail in a stolen fisherman’s vessel, and finds, to her surprise, that a life at sea suits her. At first the life is not easy, and she struggles to survive by casting fishing nets woven of the silk veils she once wore at the palace, and tied with clove-hitch knots of her own hair. But the solitude soothes the pain of her past; the constant movement keeps her from ever having to be too still with her thoughts.
The singing voice she had once preserved for her younger days spent roaming the forest she now lets loose, and with it, she finds she is able to tame the wild beasts of the sea. Narwhals encircle her craft, drawn by her lilting songs. Fish frequently fly into her nets as if willingly—more than she could ever consume on her own. More than enough to gift. She finds a kind of calling again—a purpose. Over time, her past—everything she was and wanted to be—slips away into the dark and anonymous waves.
Years pass that way, bringing Isbe to what must have occurred only recently—no more than a year ago, maybe two: the day Cassandra herself slips away, her song swallowed by an angry storm, her ship sunk.
Isabelle experiences every writhing, startling pain as her mother lets go of the fight and allows herself to drown, and it is only in the final moment of letting go that Isbe comes to, gasping.
Isabelle staggers through the vast library, wanting only to lie down, but there’s nowhere to lie that isn’t cold and full of haunting whispers. She’s awash in an unexpected sense of loss.
Shards of the story flash through her mind: the glass arrows and the glass slipper. Her mother’s voice, the same one she has heard so many times in her mother dreams, singing her own version of the rose lullaby. The voice that made the seas friendly, drew fish straight into her nets.
Isbe recalls her own first journey at sea, when she and Gil stole across the Strait of Sorrow toward the shores of Aubin onboard a whaling vessel. She remembers that the sailors spoke of a mythic figure—the Balladeer—who sang to calm the waves, and who was known for leaving desperate villages with bounties of fresh-caught fish.