by Lexa Hillyer
And now the truth feels so obvious she thinks she might drown in it: her mother was the Balladeer.
And she understands something that her father never could.
Cassandra wasn’t lucky.
She didn’t make the Hart Slayer stop hunting simply by falling in love with the king.
She made the Hart Slayer stop hunting because she was the Hart Slayer. Another anonymous hunter known for helping the poor. Isabelle’s mother was the Hart Slayer, a figure about whom epic poems have been written. And she gave it all up to come to the palace. She gave up her calling for love.
But if she hadn’t done that, Isbe never would have been born.
And now, Cassandra is dead—just as Isbe is discovering the truth. Too late.
Too late to ever know her.
The sudden grief is too much, and the notion of winter-glass armor now feels further away than ever—a fool’s dream. A silly girl’s wish.
How she hates the pain of wishes.
She feels more untethered and alone than ever before, and so very tired—more cold and more tired than when she crawled through half-frozen sewage to make her way into the palace of Aubin. She stumbles across the room and reaches out for something to steady her, somewhere to rest, and finds the ice desk where the king sat earlier, when they first spoke. She rests the torch down on the desk, its flame still burning.
Isbe dreams of the ocean’s unlit depths. One night so mild, before break of morn, amid the roses wild, all tangled in thorns, the shadow and the child together were born. The words of the lullaby—her mother’s version—weave through the darkness of her sleep and begin to take on a new meaning. It is no longer the tale of faerie twins Malfleur and Belcoeur and their infamous rivalry.
What the song is trying to say, her dream self sees now, is that innocence and darkness are inevitably threaded together in one tangled being. A paradox, like the fact that we are all born with the seed of fate inside our chests—that life itself is the gradual opening of death’s red rose.
There are no longer two figures in the song, but one.
The shadow is the child, and the child is the shadow.
23
Verglas,
the Ice King
The king is startled to find his young visitor sleeping in the center of his library the next morning, and regrets that he did not refer to the room properly—that he did not tell her it was in fact a tomb.
And here she is, shaking and nearly frozen to death in half sleep, lying on top of the coffin of his former wife. The North Faerie.
He probably should have pointed out before that it was a coffin and not a desk.
He studies her in the morning light, oddly struck by the beauty of it.
He doesn’t call for help. He wraps her in bearskins himself and places her gently beside a blazing fire. She shifts in her sleep but does not wake, and he thinks, unexpectedly, of his daughter. Not Belcoeur, the one whose smile used to play like a sad, lilting melody over a sun-drenched field, the one everybody found easy ways to love. No, not that daughter, but her twin, Malfleur. Though he cannot be sure, he suspects that he once loved Malfleur best—loved her in a fraught and difficult way. She had been his tiny storm cloud, lined in silver. A tight, dark kernel of a faerie, bursting inward.
He might have done a better job in those days. He didn’t anticipate his regret, however. One cannot. Now he sees it is something we must grow into with age, like an overlarge robe. He might have protected her from her mother, whom she took after in all of the worst ways—the rages. It all stemmed, he thought, not from an inherent anger, but from the constant disappointment of a mind desperately seeking absolutes: most beautiful. Most powerful. Most anything.
He pulls something from his pocket. It is a formal invitation that arrived recently by sleigh post. The penmanship is left-slanting but otherwise perfect. He remembers that handwriting. Malfleur must have penned each and every one of the invitations herself.
It must be quite a party she’s got planned.
And if he knows his daughter—he once thought he did, anyway—she has no doubt convinced every important noble in the known kingdoms to attend. But King Verglas will not be going. He won’t give her the pleasure of his curiosity. He is beyond all that.
He returns to the library, paces the tomb of his second wife, the North Faerie. She had been with child when she was killed. He removes a velvet-lined box from the ice coffin. Inside it are all the figurines he once carved for the child who was never born. A collection of woodland creatures: raccoons and deer and mice. A fox went missing long ago. These, like Isabelle’s slipper, were all made of winter glass, meant to last the ages. Now they are not toys but relics—reminders of a future that never came to be, a future that remained trapped in the past.
Because of Malfleur.
Perhaps it isn’t all his fault, he thinks, the way Malfleur turned out—so murderous and hard. He believes she was in some way warped and jealous from the start, born dreamless, like a living shadow.
Is that really true, however? Perhaps it was only his belief that it was true that made it so. This is another thing he ought to have explained to the young princess. She might have found it interesting: that we sculpt truth out of the world’s formlessness, and thus it is often precisely what we already believe that comes to pass. When it is decided that a person is broken, she may experience a life of sequential breaking. When it is suspected that a faerie may be black of heart, it is that very suspicion that begins to blacken it.
He checks on Isabelle. Her eyelids have begun to flutter.
She will want to leave, and he will soon only remember her visit as a spark across the arctic sameness. He will help. He will show Isabelle and Byrne the shortcut—the tunnel that leads right out of the palace kitchens and beneath the ice labyrinth. It’s the path the North Faerie took many nights when she was his secret lover, before they married and grew tired of each other. Before his own daughter Malfleur jealously attacked her, practicing some new talent she called transference.
But that was all very long ago now, and the stories are kept safe in the walls, where he will never have to feel them.
When his guest has recovered some hours later, he waves and murmurs good-bye to her and her servant, Byrne, wondering if he will miss them, and whether any of us will ever find what we are searching for, or if it is simply the searching for that makes us who we are.
24
Malfleur,
the Last Faerie Queen
Malfleur arranges the sheer black veil over her eyes. She’s standing behind a heavy brocade curtain, at the top of a staircase, preparing herself for her entrance. She can hear the milling guests in the grand ballroom below.
“Hand me the latest tally,” she demands of one of her Vultures.
He passes a scroll to her.
“Hmm. Very well,” she says after a quick scan. She gives it back.
She has checked, and checked again, but her father’s name has not appeared on any of the guest lists. So, he is not coming to her party.
Just as well. She supposes he has not forgiven her for killing his flimsy wife, the North Faerie, all those years ago. Perhaps he knew, or has since discovered, the most disturbing part of that old debacle. The reason for all that blood, permanently dyeing the throne red.
The North Faerie had been with child when Malfleur killed her.
She hadn’t meant to kill her, but that didn’t really matter. In some ways, it was a kind of mercy. Perhaps another child by her father would have posed a threat to Malfleur’s own safety. She might have had to kill that child, once it was born, anyway.
That the child’s tithe was innocence seemed obvious to Malfleur. It was the unborn child that caused the problem with Malfleur’s attempt at transference—and the North Faerie’s death. A kind of unexpected magical interference. But there had been a surprising benefit, which was that Malfleur inherited not the unborn baby’s innocence itself, so much as the ability to tithe it from others, to make ot
hers hard, and to make herself immune to feelings of guilt.
That immunity to guilt has come in handy. She’s done a lot that one could feel guilty about.
At her nod, guards reel up the curtain, and the blazing glow of hundreds of chandeliers bearing thousands of glimmering crystals greets her eyes. As she steps out into the light, she thinks how solitary a life she has led these many years. It’s been a long time since she’s thrown a ball.
And, of course, this isn’t just any ball.
It’s a wedding.
Prince Edward smiles vacantly at her as she meets him at the top of the mezzanine. He is the least handsome of his brothers, has the same dark Aubinian complexion, the same high-ridged cheeks and square jaw that run in his family, though they seem a bit lopsided and harsh on his face, which matches the tenor of his personality. But never mind that—she’s certainly not wedding him for either looks or charm.
They walk down the stairs arm in arm. Around them, nobles from across the land gather closer, their shining silk and velvet dresses and formal suits creating a vast sea of color. She hears a gasp ripple through the crowd as people begin to recognize Edward—the middle brother. It is like a resurrection. He and his brother Philip have been presumed dead since their carriage was ambushed on its way to deliver Prince Philip to the Delucian council, to marry Aurora.
Of course no one knew that the ambush had been staged by one of the brothers. Edward had resented Philip’s intended alliance with Deluce and wanted to ally himself with someone even greater. Malfleur has never been interested in marriage, but she could not pass up the opportunity to thwart the Delucian council—and everyone’s expectations.
She has been waiting to reveal her plans for Edward until she could secure her control over the Aubinian military.
But no one here knows that, and the looks of shock on their faces send a thrill of satisfaction through Malfleur’s veins. She feels awake, alert, alive. Waiters dart through the room carrying silver trays of briar wine, a deep and sparkling burgundy. The room quiets as Malfleur lifts her veil and then raises her glass to make a toast.
“Thank you all for being here to celebrate this auspicious union between the great territories of LaMorte and the kingdom of Aubin.”
Glasses clink and murmurs spread as her guests decide what to make of this news. She beams with pride. Edward has made a docile, if boring, puppet. But he cannot compare to her special pet, her grandest experiment yet. . . .
Briefly, she touches the side of her neck. The wound has already begun to heal nicely, and is mostly obscured by the veil. Still, its warmth fills her not with anger but excitement. When her feat is made public—when they all see how great her power is, that even Deluce’s pride and joy, their golden-haired beauty, their innocent princess, has come under the spell of Malfleur’s greatness—well, then she will have truly won.
This is not a war for land, but for hearts and minds. Revealing Aurora will be the final play, decimating any remaining support for the princess, or her wild half sister, or the pathetic and limping council.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have something I would like to share with you all,” Malfleur announces above the din of the crowd.
She signals to several Vultures standing guard by a back entrance. But they do not move to open the doors.
Frustrated, she marches over to them, and one tilts his head, silently suggesting they speak in private. She pushes him through the doors into a deserted stone atrium. “What’s going on?” she spits.
“My apologies . . . your . . . Your Majesty. We have a problem.”
The word sinks like a stone in her chest.
“The cage is . . . empty.”
“Empty?” Malfleur practically roars, pushing past the Vulture and down the wide torch-lit hallway. Several other guards join them, each attempting to mutter an explanation or to stop her, but Malfleur marches all the way to the wing of the castle where Aurora’s cage is kept. She can see before she gets there that it is indeed empty—and the door is swinging open.
Aurora did not escape, then. Someone freed her.
There’s something on the ground inside the cage. “Retrieve that,” she says, pointing.
One of the Vultures hurries to obey her command and hands her a piece of vellum, hastily written on in blood.
True love, is all it says.
25
Vulture
True love. When he first saw the note, he didn’t know what to make of it. It didn’t immediately unleash a torrent of memories—that would come later. For now it simply tickled awake a minuscule feeling, like a new leaf unfolding. A dim recognition. The flap of vellum wavered in his big, clumsy hands like the flag of some forgotten country.
He doesn’t know how to read, but it wasn’t the words that caused a slow fissure in his consciousness, as though waking him up from a deep sleep. It was the letter itself, the way it was folded and left in the pages of the book. The feeling of receiving the note, knowing he would be unable to decipher it, but sensing that it meant something very important. . . .
He came to her cage. “Did you write this?” he said. It was perhaps the first question he had ever asked the girl. She seemed to see him, to know him, and this knowing was suddenly like a blade tearing through all of his heavy armor, shredding through the fabric of his existence. He shook, rooted to the floor, and in that moment of weakness, she lunged toward the bars, one of her thin, pale arms flying between them like a flash of lightning, and she had his cape in her grip before he knew what had happened.
Vulture was big, and strong. A trained fighter. And so too was that other person, that stableboy he had once been. But the man who didn’t know what he was, the man caught between the two, was just that: caught.
She pulled him close, yanking hard at the chain around his neck and easily ripping the key from the metal with a little sizzle that suggested she’d used both strength and magic.
She was so fast, and he was too confused. He tried to stop her, but she easily moved to the cage door and unlocked it from the inside, freeing herself. As he moved to prevent her escape, she tackled him, sending him sprawling on his back on the floor.
His vision cleared. She was straddling him, her small but wiry, powerful hands around his neck.
He could fight her off. He started to, but froze again, realizing the quandary he was in: he could not kill the queen’s pet, or he himself would be killed. But her magic had reached its heights, and she was desperate—he sensed he would not escape alive if he let her live. Which would it be? Die without a fight, or die a slave?
He didn’t have to choose. He felt her cool hands release their pressure from his neck and slide up, slowly . . . up toward his ears . . . and then, in a startling blur, she had yanked Vulture’s mask off his head.
He lay there on his back, helpless, exposed as though in a glare of blinding light.
He rolled to his side and heaved, a tangle of his red, unkempt hair falling down around his eyes.
She let him recover for a moment, and he swiped the back of his mouth, rubbed his eyes, squinted, turned back to her.
There it was again, that look of profound knowing. Her eyes said, I see you. Her eyes said, Gilbert. Her eyes said, We must hurry.
And so they did. Numbly but with urgency, he led her through the tunnels of Blackthorn, secured them two steeds, and through the starlit night they flew down the side of Mount Briar, and he . . . Vulture . . . Gilbert . . . whoever he was, had the strangest impression that they were the only two people alive at that moment in all the world, the first two people to ever exist, and they were forming the world beneath them as their chargers’ hooves met the earth—coloring it in and giving it shape as the sun, eventually, began to rise.
Now, as they race across gray mornings, the domed cupolas of the Delucian palace rising up through the mist to greet them, more and more memories begin to flood him. The tasseled pillows. The trellis outside the window.
Isabelle, her hair in a tangled knot behind her he
ad, laughing, twisting her mouth up in frustration, reaching out to touch his shoulders, his face. . . .
And that’s how it starts. It’s not Gilbert, the former stableboy, who comes back to him first, but Isbe. It is only through remembering her that he begins to remember himself.
PART
V
NO HEART CAN BE BRAVER
26
Aurora
“Women and children, into the keep!” Maximilien’s shout swirls up into the wind and disappears into the chaos of the inner bailey.
Aurora has not seen the castle this alive since before the sleeping sickness killed off so many. Carts of food and supplies crisscross the green, mothers hold screaming babies to their chests, and boys are separated from their families, conscripted to fight. Aurora watches as one boy who can be no more than eleven or twelve reaches up to accept a set of armor twice his size from a grizzled old soldier who could be his grandfather.
Aurora has known that LaMorte and Deluce have been at war for some time, but she hasn’t really seen it, hasn’t been forced to understand it in literal terms. She has never actually witnessed a battle in all her life, despite having read about the great romantic heroes who’ve fought in them. Now, the anticipation in the air is palpable, even to one who cannot feel.
A tremor of guilt rattles her chest as she moves through the crowd, looking for Prince William. He had told her to stay in her tower room, but he needs to let her fight. She can’t sit idly by—especially not when the imminence of battle is most likely her fault. Since separating herself from Blackthorn, she has tried to shake off the cloak of magic Malfleur gave her, but it is not gone entirely. She senses she may never be entirely free of it.