by Lexa Hillyer
“Can you stand?” Gil screams, unable to take his eyes off the Vulture to check on the prince. He ducks as the soldier swings feistily at him, and then Gil shoves his shield at the soldier, suddenly moved by the moment—moved by the need to protect the prince at all costs. His focus and drive have returned.
The Vulture is huge. He lumbers back with a growl that briefly unnerves Gil. Remembering the stunned reaction of the previous Vulture, Gil once again goes for the mask, knowing his advantage will be in revealing the man’s face and making him vulnerable. Rain falls hard in his eyes, and Gil knows that one false move will leave him dead. It takes several tries, and he sustains a dizzying blow to the head and the gut, making him stumble and heave, before he slashes through the dense mask, tearing it off the man’s face.
And then he realizes why the hulking figure is so terrifying.
He’s the same man who was sent in to fight Aurora, gladiator style, in LaMorte—and almost killed her. The one the queen called off before he could finish the job. He is no Vulture at all, but another one of the queen’s vicious pets. And Gilbert has witnessed his strength.
But the man, the monster, isn’t after Gil—doesn’t seem to recognize him, or if he does, to care. No, he is after William. The prince. The prize.
They all are. Gil takes in with horror the flood of soldiers—four more Vultures gathering around them now, surrounding him and the prince. They are outnumbered, and William has only just now limped to standing, but he looks like he’s on the brink of collapse. Blood pours from his knees down into his boots, which look bloated with blood and rain. If those wounds fester, the prince will die. Gil feels like he’s going to be sick, but there’s no time to react.
Malfleur’s monster tosses his wild, sand-colored hair and roars like an unleashed beast. Removing his mask doesn’t seem to have softened him at all.
Gil thrusts his sword, terror becoming action, even as he sees from the corner of his eye that the prince has engaged one of the other approaching Vultures.
The man is powerful, and wild. Too wild. Gil thinks of Freckles, the mare no one could tame but Isbe. He realizes his opponent’s wildness could be Gil’s way in. He is disordered, has no real training. Like any wild animal, he might be skittish, hungry, and reactive. Gil feels that, even as the soldier lifts up his war hammer and swings.
Gil barely dodges, then leaps at him, ramming his shoulder into the man’s side to unbalance him, then trying to drive a halberd up through the armpit opening in his armor—but he’s not strong or fast enough, and the man throws him off into the mud. Gil scrambles, frantically scanning the mayhem for a distraction.
He sees the prince is down again, a Vulture on top of him, and Gil rolls to his side, dropping his sword and lunging on top of both men, grabbing the Vulture by his cape and flinging him off Prince William. But just as soon as he has that Vulture restrained, Malfleur’s special soldier comes at him, grinning scarily. Gil is weaponless, but lifts up the struggling Vulture he grabbed, like a shield. The monster launches his weapon at the Vulture Gil is holding—straight at the Vulture’s face—instantly killing one of his own. The man has no allegiance.
The Vulture slumps, his weight now yanking Gil off-balance. He shoves the dead man to the side as the prince leaps up and tackles the monstrous soldier from behind. The soldier roars again, swinging around as the prince’s arms wrap around his throat.
And then time seems to slow as a word carries toward the men on the wind.
“Heath?” A woman’s voice, somehow both soft and piercing.
A startled look comes over the monstrous man as he makes eye contact with whoever cried out his name.
And that pause is all it takes. Gil finds his sword in the mud and slashes it across Heath’s middle.
Heath falls.
Gil throws himself on top of Heath, flipping Heath onto his back and holding him down while the prince pulls a dagger from his boot and plunges it through Heath’s neck, sending a fountain of blood up onto the prince’s mouth and chin, dripping down his chest, as though he has just coughed it up himself. Gil too is covered in Heath’s blood, but there is no time to process, because the other three Vultures are flying at them at once.
And then something strange happens. Their grimaces all seem to freeze on their faces as a flickering sound whizzes over Gil’s head.
All at once, the three of them drop to the ground, and Gil sees a series of tiny darts—poisoned, presumably—sticking out of the necks of the Vultures.
There is a clearing. He turns to see a woman with long black hair and skin the color of new leather, bedecked in men’s armor. It’s the girl Aurora refused to kill for Malfleur. She runs to Heath’s side, bending over his blood-drenched body, weeping. The prince is still kneeling nearby, looking dizzy. He is losing his own blood rapidly.
Through the thicket of bodies and blood spray, he sees Aurora, not far behind the girl.
“Aurora!” Gil cries out, and she runs to him. “Here, take his side.” Then, “We need to get you out of here,” Gil says to the prince.
Aurora and Gil grab the prince underneath his arms.
William shakes his head. “I am needed.”
Gil looks into Aurora’s silent eyes, then back at the prince. “You are not meant to die here. Come.”
He and Aurora heave him up to standing. There is so much pain in the prince’s eyes, Gil can hardly face him. The man looks broken.
“Wait,” William says, staring at the spread of violence—the tangle of bodies, the shouts of men attacking, and the screams of men falling.
It seems hopeless, and Gil knows if they don’t hurry, they are going to die—and so will everyone in the castle village.
More Vultures pour over the wall on the south side.
Despair threatens to strangle Gil—images of his mother and father, his brother and his brother’s children, flash before his eyes. All the faces he will never see again. Deluce is going to fall. It’s over. It’s all over.
And then the prince is gasping in his arms, and he turns his attention back to William and Aurora.
But the prince isn’t gasping, he is shouting. The din has become so loud around them that Gil can hardly hear, and he leans closer.
“I have an idea,” the prince says.
28
William,
Once Merely the Third Prince of Aubin,
Now Both Crown Prince of Aubin and King Consort of Deluce
He can’t feel his legs. Men—Delucian men—fall from the walls, shot down by Malfleur’s forces on the other side. All around him, men are dying. Technically, they are his men.
Someone is dragging him, a young man close to his age. And Princess Aurora, on his other side. Where has she come from? It is as though she has emerged from some storybook, but playing the role of a different character. Maybe he is dreaming.
Darkness clouds his vision, making him light-headed. The world goes mute and black.
He is a boy again, and his brother Edward has just smashed his latest model against a wall, putting a crack in the marble. Philip, the oldest, is off somewhere studying: removed, cold. There is no one to defend William. He runs to his father, the king, showing him the broken model. Not the cannon design—that would come later, and meet a similar fate—but an earlier model he’d molded to resemble a ship.
The fleet. Where is the fleet? Has no one come to help him?
“Will you tell Eddie he must fix it?” the young prince asks.
His father looks at the object and then at his son. “William. You will face many setbacks in your life. It is your job to see the victory in failure.”
William forces his eyes open, forces his mind to focus and his breath to speak. “I have an idea,” he says to the young man carrying him.
The cannons. The faulty cannons, of his own design. The ones that brought him so much shame just weeks ago because they backfired, exploding on his own men, decimating a huge fraction of his forces and causing them to have to retreat midbattle, even as Malfleur unleash
ed a wicked fire that melted their weapons at first touch.
He has several more of these cannons stored in the armory—the relics of his most epic failure yet.
See the victory in failure.
They need to staunch the flow of the offense—a wound leaking inward like an infection. What they need, in fact, is an explosion from within.
There is no time to lose.
He sounds the command.
29
Isabelle
By some miracle—and a series of explosions that left both sides devastated—the Delucian castle has fended off a siege, but scouts say more troops from LaMorte are on their way, camped less than a day’s ride from the castle. If the castle falls to Malfleur, the war is as good as lost. The news reaches Isbe and Byrne even as they hasten back across the choppy waves of the North Sea. Everything adds to her remorse, from the angry thrashing of the waves to the barking of geese veering overhead as their ship makes port in one of the small, secret harbors amid the Delucian caves, known only to the military—and, of course, those who build their childhoods on eavesdropping, such as Isbe.
She berates herself every step of the way, as she and Byrne disembark and find the treacherous switchback path up the side of the cliffs. She shouldn’t have left William to defend the kingdom—her kingdom. She shouldn’t have refused the Ice King’s offer.
She did learn one thing: that her mother was the Hart Slayer. But that changes nothing. How she wishes that it mattered. How she wishes she could see Aurora one last time, before all of this is over. These wishes are so strong, she cannot resist them as she usually does, can’t tamp down the feeling that rises within her, a burning all along her bones, painful almost to the brink of shattering.
She misses her sister. She is afraid.
They have hardly surmounted the bluffs when they are accosted by soldiers and dragged through the castle village. She has no will to protest, and they are not interested in listening anyway.
Isbe can hear and sense the devastation—the lingering smoke and the bitter taste of burnt oil in the air, and beneath that, the rotten stench of death. It’s like the sleeping sickness all over again, but so much worse. There is an eerie quiet—not stillness, but movements that are deliberate and laden with sadness: the slow turn of cart wheels passing awkwardly around rubble. Unstable structures still in the final throes of collapse, dust lifting from crumbled stone.
And carried on the wind, the faint weeping of women and children, some in the keep, some tending to husbands and fathers, some scattered, disorganized, moaning, and lost.
Battles are brief, she knows, but the aftermath . . .
She and Byrne are brought before the prince.
“Do you not recognize your own princess? Let her go,” William says when Isbe and Byrne enter his study.
Dimly, she registers Byrne’s gasp as she rushes toward William, not caring what she may stumble over or bump into on the way. But to her surprise, Byrne stops her, gently taking her arms.
“Miss. Highness. He isn’t well.”
Isbe pauses. “What?” And then dread floods her. “What happened? William?”
“I’m fine,” says the prince. His velvet voice is just a few feet away, and she reaches out to him, confused. “It’s just . . .” He sighs, and she feels another tremor of uncertainty.
“What happened?” she repeats.
“My legs.”
Isbe sucks in a breath and falls to her knees before him, resting her head on his lap. “No.”
“It was them or me,” he says, in that rustling way that suggests an almost laugh. He brushes hair out of her face and thumbs a tear she hadn’t realized was there from the corner of her eye.
“What are we to do?” She is not asking about his recovery, but about Deluce.
“We drove them back, but the solution was only temporary. They will return to finish what they started. And . . . I received a letter.” He clears his throat, his voice dropping low. “From my brother Edward.”
Isbe startles. “But—”
William lets out a sigh. “He is alive. But as I’ve said before, my relationship with my brothers was always . . . complicated. I have only just learned that my middle brother, Edward, plotted the death of our elder brother, Philip. He staged his own death to make it look like a double murder, in part to stoke tensions between Deluce and Aubin. You see, he did it all . . .” He pauses, obviously having difficulty admitting the truth. “He did it all for the favor of Queen Malfleur.”
Isbe shakes her head. It can’t be true. She can’t imagine anyone betraying his own brother, but especially not a brother like William.
“There is no fleet coming,” William goes on. “Edward has commandeered the military and cut off the flow of supplies. Aubin is now cooperating with LaMorte.”
Now anger replaces disbelief. “But we must write back to him, urge him to understand the grave mistake he has made—”
“Isabelle.” Wiliam’s voice sounds like it is going to break, and something in her snaps.
“No. No, William, this is not over.” Now it’s her voice that’s breaking.
“At dawn, we evacuate everyone we can. There will be several ships waiting to bring safe passage to Aubin. You will be on one of them, and so will I.”
“So we’re just giving up?”
“We’re saving as many lives as possible.”
A storm churns in her chest. “No.”
“Isabelle,” he says more gently. “We’re at the end.”
We’re at the end. He said it to her once before, in the wine caves. The night he proposed to her for a second time. The night he touched her and awoke something in her that she thought wasn’t possible. She hadn’t ever allowed herself to love, or to want love—because she thought it would make the not having only more painful. She always hated that terrible wish—any wish at all. Wishes give her a physical pang, like a shock, a dizzying reminder of their futility, like the one she felt earlier, when she wished to see Aurora again.
And then . . . William cracked her open anyway; made a fine, nearly invisible fissure in her shell that would change everything. She let him. She let love in. She agreed to step up, to take on the mantle. To rule by his side.
And now, this is what it all comes to.
We are at the end. The last time he said it, they had really only just been at the very beginning. But this time it’s different.
“I’m not leaving Deluce,” she says, rising. “You may flee with the others if you wish. You may bring them to safety. But I will stay.”
“I can’t leave you behind,” he protests.
“You can,” she says, and when she says it, the fissure in her heart grows deeper, and something even harder to get to begins to shake and crumble. Maybe something like her spirit, or her soul. She bends down to him in his chair, and takes his face in her hands. So strong, so determined, so stubborn. She loves every single thing about him. She kisses him, her lips taking in the salt of tears that have trickled down his face. “You can,” she says again, pulling away. “And you will.”
He is silent for a moment, and then says only, “Your sister needs to speak to you. She and Wren say it is urgent.”
“My sister?” She feels a wave of shock and rocks backward, away from his touch. “Aurora is here?” She steps back, dizzy with the thought of it. “But she said—” Her voice drops off in William’s silence. Realization splashes over her like hot water. Aurora never went off to make a life with Heath. “She lied.”
In that moment, something else occurs, a kind of tingly pleasure pulsing through her. It’s almost—almost—as though her desperate wish when she disembarked her ship has come true. Of course that’s impossible. Nothing ever comes of wishing.
Does it?
William takes her hand and puts it to his face again, then kisses her open palm. “Go and see her,” he says.
Aurora is in the library, which is now full of injured soldiers on makeshift cots. The contrast between the heroic tales shel
ved here and the reality of war at their fingertips is not lost on Isabelle, and she pauses for a moment, reconciling to it. She thinks too of the frozen library in King Verglas’s palace, a room full of histories and ideas and contradictions, a room radiant with light and yet frigid with ice. Here, now, there are no ideas at all. Philosophies and pasts don’t matter—it is all blood and bodies, needs and tasks and action.
Isbe stands out of the way and waits for Aurora to notice her. The old Isbe would have bashed through the busy room and made her presence undeniable, would have sought out Aurora the way she sought out everything in the world—arms first, then chest, then mind. But this Isbe is different. She hugs the wall with her back, feels herself becoming shadow. The shadow is the child, and the child is the shadow.
She clutches the ice slipper still in the inner pocket of her cloak. She doesn’t feel reassured by it. She feels nothing. The world is upside down. Aurora, who she thought had run off to find love, to live her own life and her own story, is not who she thought she was. Aurora, who has always been the one solid thing she can hold on to in this world, has become yet another mystery. She was always Isbe’s light—and what is a shadow without its light?
As she waits, Isbe feels more and more invisible, as though she is disappearing, or folding inward. All of her life, she has had to be strong, and somehow that made it easy to be so. Until now.
And then, gentle hands find her shoulders, sweep down her arms, and wrap her in an embrace.
The crisp softness of Aurora that used to signify, in Isbe’s mind, her beauty, is gone. She has grown firm and taut, muscular. She is still shorter than Isbe, but her long hair no longer smells of peaches and sun-drenched fields. Instead it carries the faint medicinal scent of the room, of bitter herbs used to cure and staunch wounds, of sweat and blood and metal.
Beneath those, there’s a smell that is all her own, something that reminds Isbe of a warm summer evening.
Relief is a new current of breath in Isbe’s chest. She is still Aurora—changed and yet not.
Isbe hugs her back.