by Lexa Hillyer
And as she does, something inside her breaks open.
Isabelle, Aurora taps into her palms, but Isbe is shuddering, her face wet with tears. She’s too overwhelmed to reply. She doesn’t even know why she’s crying—can’t put words to it.
Aurora leads her out of the library in a huddle and takes her back to her old childhood room, the one she slept in for eighteen years before moving into the royal chambers with William.
Isabelle, what’s wrong? Aurora taps again.
Isbe goes to her old window, the one where the garden trellis used to hang. The one through which she ran away a few short months ago.
Too many things are wrong. There is nowhere to start: that she only discovered her mother’s identity after she was already dead. That the war has come to this. That evil will win, despite everything. That she has spent all this time striving in vain to save Deluce—and so much time away from the one person who mattered the most to her in the world.
“You lied,” is all she can finally muster.
Aurora takes her hand again. I had to. You would have come after me otherwise. You would have tried to stop me from what I had to do. I had to try, Isbe. I had to try on my own to do the right thing—without you.
“But what did you do? Where did you go?”
Aurora takes a breath, and then taps. I went to see Malfleur. I tried to kill her.
Isbe gasps, her emotion dipping to make space for shock. “But—but I could have come with you. We could have done it together.” Why does saying this cause her so much hurt, so much embarrassment, that she wants to cry all over again?
You had much to do here, without me, Aurora points out. And you would have wanted to protect me.
Isbe realizes her mouth is gaping open, and clamps it shut. Because what can she say? Aurora is absolutely right. She would have gone after her. She would have stopped her. She would have tried to save her. Over and over and over again. Of course she would have. It was her job. Without that job, what good was Isbe? What good is she?
Anyway, Aurora taps on, it didn’t work. She goes on to explain everything—what really became of Heath, and how the other prisoners remain trapped, still, in LaMorte, in Malfleur’s dungeon. She tells Isbe of her contract with Malfleur, and too of her feelings for Wren—fraught with confusion but realer than anything she has ever experienced before.
Isbe listens in a mix of fascination, awe, and something else—a raw sting in her throat that borders on resentment. Aurora has grown so brave, has come into herself, while Isbe has become a kind of shell.
She begins to pull her hands away. The story is too layered and too much. She needs to be alone.
But Aurora takes her hands more firmly than before, and taps again. You must not despair, Isbe, she insists. We need you now more than ever.
“Now more than ever? Haven’t you heard, Aurora? War’s over. Malfleur won. We leave at dawn.”
“No,” someone else says, coming into the room. “No, we don’t leave. Not if Aurora’s plan works.”
It takes a second for Isbe to recognize the voice. The girl from Sommeil. Wren. “What plan?” she asks cautiously.
Aurora begins to tap an explanation, but she stumbles—there are not enough words in their secret language to say whatever it is she wants to say. You are the heart, she taps. You are the hunter’s daughter.
“I don’t understand.”
Wren steps into the room and closes the door. “Your mother was the Hart Slayer.”
“I know that now,” Isbe says slowly.
“Some of the fae have reason to suspect the Hart Slayer was a descendant of the faerie queen Belcoeur,” Wren explains, her voice crystal and bell-like in Isbe’s stunned silence. “And it is a descendant of Belcoeur who will save us all from Malfleur.”
“But . . .” Isbe flounders. She wants to protest, but there’s a tiny spark of hope in her chest that flares at these words, at a feeling of truth and possibility in them. The shadow is the child, and the child is the shadow. There is only one story, and it is every story, braided together into a single cord.
Still, how is it possible that she is destined to kill Malfleur? “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore,” she says, pulling away from Aurora and sitting down on the edge of her old bed. “I don’t even know myself.” The words drag through her throat, and she is afraid she is going to cry. She doesn’t want to cry again. Tomorrow may be her last day, and she doesn’t want to die like this—weak and frightened.
But I know you, Aurora insists, taking her hand once again and sitting down beside her. You are the brave and wild Isabelle. The one who always risks everything for the good of others, and never for herself. You have always sought your role in other people’s stories, but when will you step into your role at the heart of yours?
“But I did,” Isbe counters. “I am queen of Deluce! I married Prince William. How much more central could I be? And still it’s not enough.”
Aurora taps gently. Maybe that was just you playing my role. Maybe your story is different.
Isbe pulls away. “I need to be alone.”
Aurora hugs her again, and then she and Wren step out of the room.
That night, Isbe lies awake, bereft, like a tiny ship floating out in the wide sea, with no land in sight. Just the vault of stars above and blackness all around. She reaches underneath her pillow, where she has stowed the slipper of winter glass. It’s so tiny, she suddenly realizes it could have belonged to a child. She doesn’t know why the thought has never occurred to her before.
The shadow is the child, and the child is the shadow. Her mother’s voice moves through her mind, bringing strands of the lullaby—no words now, just the melody, both mournful and soothing.
She knows she doesn’t need the slipper anymore. Doesn’t need to know its secrets.
She needs to let go, to say good-bye.
But instead, she holds it close to her chest, feeling its iciness prick through her clothes to her skin. The slipper may not have any real story to tell her—but it is still her last connection to her mother.
Every story, she sees now, is different depending on who’s telling it, anyway. Malfleur is the villain in Aurora’s tale, but the hero in many others. Just like the two versions of the rose lullaby—the one everyone knows, in which Malfleur kills Belcoeur, and the one she learned from her mother, Cassandra, who learned it, perhaps, from her mother, Isbe’s grandmother, who was, maybe—if Aurora and Wren are right—the daughter of Belcoeur herself. In that other version, the sisters were friends, and played together until darkness did win the light from the day.
Isbe knows Aurora’s right—she needs to stop chasing other people’s stories. But what is her own? She recalls once again what it felt like when she first lost her vision—how she desperately needed a hand to pull her out of the darkness, needed someone to make her believe in the world again. She is that little girl now, lost and scared in the unknowable expanse, while Aurora, just a baby, cries silently, unaware of what has happened to Isbe, caught up in the bubble of her own world. From that day on, she has always thought it was up to her to keep Aurora safe.
But the day her sight was tithed—that was Aurora’s christening. It was Aurora’s day, the beginning of her story. Isbe’s own tale had begun before then. She had been abandoned, left behind by her real mother, to run wild, abused and neglected by her father and stepmother, until Gil found her and became her first friend. That is Isbe’s story. That is who she is.
She knows now: she must be the one to give herself a hand up and out.
She must step forward, blindly, into that darkness once more.
She must try.
To kill Malfleur.
Luckily, Aurora has a plan—the thought of it glows before Isbe, lighting up the night, crystal and pure, like ice. But it is not ice at all; it is a guiding star. And in its glow, she begins to see herself again.
30
Malfleur,
the Last Faerie Queen
Blackbir
ds take up the first chorus, swirling overhead in the remaining dark. Malfleur steps through the fields’ tall, sparse weeds, all a predawn gray that pretends at silver.
For a moment, as dew vanishes at her fingertips, the faerie queen wonders if she is dreaming.
But that is impossible, because she does not dream. Her twin stole that power from her before either of them were born, sucked it out of her heart.
Malfleur has always wondered whether Belcoeur also absorbed some of Malfleur’s magical gift; if that’s why magic always flowed so easily through her fingertips, like the gold thread she spun.
For Malfleur, magic has always been so wrought, so hard won. It is not a natural grace but an unholy gathering of everything unnatural, a knotted and dense thing, tangled and burning and immortal. It feeds on death.
Her father once told her of a theory that dying stars draw in the light from surrounding stars and become an ever-expanding hole of darkness that is both self-devouring and self-sustaining. That is exactly what Malfleur’s magic is: desperate to destroy, and thus to thrive.
The morning’s post-rain wet clings to her skirts, weighing them down, but still she feels intoxicated, immortal, as though she might take off soaring as she pushes away from the war camp, where her soldiers rest and plot and strengthen, awaiting the next round of supplies, readying themselves for another attack. This time, the castle will easily be theirs. They’ve put a stranglehold on Deluce’s prize, and there is now no way out but into the mouth of death. Onto the waiting blades of her soldiers’ lances.
The final siege will come. But first Malfleur must meet her pet eye to eye, must reclaim her. She gave Aurora a taste of her own magic, and now, no matter how far the princess runs or where she tries to hide, there’s a thread that binds them together.
She clutches the message she received last night.
Meet me where dawn breaks on the cliffs.
Perhaps they will duel, or perhaps Aurora will simply beg for her forgiveness. Perhaps all of this—Aurora’s escape and now her invitation—is part of an invisible dance. Malfleur can feel the thread between them thrumming with a faint vibration, tugging her onward, closer and closer to the palace of Deluce.
She hasn’t been here, to her childhood home, in sixteen years. Not since Aurora’s christening, when she cursed the baby princess in a way that now strikes Malfleur as almost whimsical. She had not foreseen then that by cursing Aurora with the promise of death, what would actually occur would be a kind of gift—that the princess would become hers.
Aurora was a far more successful experiment than her other human pet, the one called Heath. His mind had been too brutish, too masculine, too narrowly defined, whereas Aurora’s was a wide-open landscape, fertile with possibility.
She will have her back, and soon. She longs to stroke her beautiful hair and teach her new things, to watch her talents blossom and her magic spark into magnificent flame all around them. She cannot be very upset with Aurora for breaking free—she designed her to be untamable, didn’t she?
The palace rises up before her, piercing the still-dark sky. Fog wraps itself around the castle, smoke curling through it like a long-lost twin. For some reason, Malfleur thinks of that old lullaby, the one she created to spread the story of her dominance over her sister. One night reviled, before break of morn . . . the shadow and the child together were born.
The wooden barricades are splashed in scarlet, blackened from fire. Bodies lie everywhere, a massive blanket of masks and bloodstained iron shields. Malfleur must pick her way through them, even as a vulture flies overhead, tilting, ready to drop and scavenge.
This place has changed greatly since she lived in it—and nearly all of its secret passages have been blocked in with plaster. But a little plaster is nothing to her magic. When she reaches one of the secret entrances—known only to those familiar with the castle a hundred years ago, when it was at the height of its glory—she presses her hands against it and shuts her eyes.
The plaster crumbles under her touch. The past dissolves back into the present. She winds her way inside.
Aurora is waiting for her at the exact spot along the cliffs that Malfleur expected—a narrow promontory on the northeastern bluff. She’s standing on the ledge looking out over the Strait of Sorrow, her pale gown and light hair billowing gracefully in the breeze; the first spark of sun outlines her silhouette in gold.
The princess turns at her approach, as if she has in fact sensed her coming, just as Malfleur has followed her senses here to find her. She can feel that the magic has lessened and faded in Aurora, but still it’s there, a quiet pulse, battering and flapping like a fallen dove. She will scoop it up in her hands; she will fix it. She will get the formula right this time.
Queen, Aurora says with her mind, or her eyes, or her body—or perhaps with her magic. Malfleur isn’t sure when she began to “hear” Aurora, who still cannot speak. It happened seamlessly.
“I’m here,” Malfleur says soothingly.
You said you cannot be killed except by the hand of one of your own blood.
“That is true. I am protected. I cannot die.”
I wonder, then, what would happen if I leaped over the edge, her eyes say. The wind gusts, lifting Aurora’s hair, revealing her long, thin neck. It is a strange question.
“I would leap after you,” Malfleur answers calmly.
And?
“And we would fly.”
Something changes in the princess’s face—at first, Malfleur believes it is a flicker of excitement, that the word “fly” has touched something in the princess’s soul, has made her understand what they can be together, what Malfleur can make her. But then the queen sees that it is not excitement or joy. She could swear now that what she reads on Aurora’s face is in fact sadness.
Or pity.
Fear seizes Malfleur’s chest. She feels something radiating out of Aurora—it is magic, an offshoot of her own, but she has no control over it. It belongs to the princess, and it is icy cold, and powerful. It is like an invisible shield, and the queen suddenly realizes that perhaps all this time she has not been understanding Aurora’s words, has not been speaking with her at all, but speaking instead with her own imagination. The real Aurora stands before her, but not the one Malfleur wants her to be. Not the projection of herself.
A princess. A stranger. Her hair gold and dancing upward over the cliffs, like a flame.
And the queen knows, with a terrible suddenness, that this flame must be snuffed. She lunges toward her.
But Aurora ducks and rolls out of the way, revealing something—no, someone—who stood behind her like a shadow.
Malfleur halts, confused, as the shadow comes to life.
She squints between Aurora and the girl, realizing that she is the bastard daughter of the king. She has never laid eyes on Isabelle before, but has heard the rumors of how she has traveled Deluce, trying to rally the peasantry against Malfleur. Understanding dawns on the queen now—this is some kind of trap. Aurora lured her here with purpose.
But what purpose?
She looks at Isabelle’s face, broad and angular and animated, and then she gives a quiet gasp. The eyes, unseeing, are familiar somehow. She could swear they are Belcoeur’s eyes, except that they do not lock with her own in mutual recognition. The girl is blind.
Malfleur wants to laugh. If this is a trap, it is dismally disappointing. Without further thought, her dagger slides from its hilt at her belt and fits at home in her fist. She swirls toward Isabelle in one fluid motion, launching the knife toward the blind girl’s heart. A look of uncertainty crosses Isabelle’s face, and then she counters Malfleur’s blow with something in her hand. Malfleur stumbles and sees that she has parried with a glass object. No. Ice?
It has been carved, if she’s not mistaken, in the shape of a delicate shoe.
The queen nearly laughs as she swivels and lunges a second time with the dagger, but once again, Isabelle, without being able to see her, meets her blade with the gl
ass slipper, which does not shatter. The third time, the queen puts her magic into it, and her thrust is too powerful for Isabelle to block. The shoe flies from the girl’s hands and catches the light of the day that has burst open over the water. Malfleur, fixated with the need to know what it is, fumbles to catch the sparkling slipper, letting her own knife fall to the ground.
As the shoe meets the queen’s open palms, it instantly begins to melt, and Malfleur finds herself frozen in its reflection, her own face disappearing, giving way to something else—a flurry of fractured images. Breathlessly, her whole body goes hot and cold as she is pulled into the ice, into the reflections, into a story of a different time and a different place, and some distant part of her understands with sudden clarity: this is winter glass.
Her father spoke of it once.
No, he is speaking of it now.
He is bending over her, and she is on her knees in snow, weeping. But she is not herself, she is Belcoeur, her sister, and younger, the age she was when she retreated forever into Sommeil.
She is her twin and she is sobbing into the snow, begging her father to help her, to help them. It would be wrong to bring the child with her where she plans to go—it would be a kind of death. And besides, she cannot bear to look at the child, the little girl, her own daughter, who bears such a strong resemblance to Charles.
“Father, help me,” she begs.
And so he does. The old, white-bearded king tells her about winter glass. “Take me to the child,” he says, and she leads him back across the snowy woods to the little cottage. Hunting season has long passed, and the forest is quiet, empty of travelers.
Inside the cottage, a little girl is curled up in her bed in a nursery room, watched over by a maid called Oshannah. A candle flickers by the side of the bed. The girl is not even three years old, and has only just begun to speak.
“Mama,” she says. “It is too cold to sleep. Read me a story.”
She—Malfleur, who is Belcoeur, who is dead and yet not dead—reads her daughter a story. A tale she wrote herself, about a pair of sisters named Daisy and Marigold, who play in the tall fields until the sunlight is swallowed whole by the dark of night. The little girl yawns and flutters her eyes closed, beginning to sleep, to dream.