by Lexa Hillyer
The first is one she has trouble giving a name to. It is a fine layer of feeling, chiffonlike and subtle, that invades her senses whenever the princess speaks, or moves, or lies close to her in the bleakness of the evening. She does not know the true meaning of this sensitivity, only that it runs against the grain of her bitterness. She doesn’t know what to think of Aurora. She’d resisted Aurora’s half-cooked plan at first, then finally insisted on being a part of it, if only to make sure Aurora was true to her word—if only to be reconnected to others from her world.
If only to save herself.
But the second secret burns clear and bright behind her eyelids whenever she closes them, draws chills through her limbs when she sleeps, ravages her breathing with quick gasps and shudders she pretends come from the bitter wind rather than the truth within. It is the reason she knows they must hurry.
It has been several days since they abandoned the royal carriage. Neither Wren nor Aurora could really figure out how to drive it, a terrible harbinger of the journey to come, and Wren knew it. Besides, the road itself was temperamental at best, nonexistent at worst. And of course, there was the fact that the carriage’s royal insignia was practically a call-out to bandits and thieves. The last thing they wanted was to travel to LaMorte conspicuously.
It was this last thought that had given Aurora an idea: What if they made themselves as conspicuous as possible? She ripped the thin black underlining from the carriage seat cushions and dismantled the harnesses from the carriage rod, then insisted Wren help her topple the carriage into a ditch by the woods and release the horses, sending them galloping riderless back to the palace.
The princess then draped the torn black fabric over her own head like a long veil and tied a rein to her wrist, holding out the other end to Wren.
Now as they passed through woods and villages, following the direction of the sun’s movement, Wren led Aurora like a condemned prisoner. They no longer had to fear widespread apprehension—in fact, Aurora had been banking on it. And Wren had to admit her idea was working. Whenever they confronted a distrustful traveler on the road, Wren would recite the lines Aurora told her: “My ward is a survivor of the sleeping sickness. I’ve been charged with taking her to quarantine in the Vallée de Merle—have you not heard of it? No one else was willing to do the job.” If probed with further questions, she began to plead for assistance, confessing that she could not look the prisoner in the face as the disease had so mangled the woman’s appearance as to make the sight almost unbearable.
So far, at the mere hint of contagion, people have offered the two journeyers a wide berth. No one has lingered long enough to question their story. No one knows enough to contradict it—for of course there is no quarantine in the valley that separates Deluce from LaMorte.
No one has guessed that the woman beneath the veil is the princess of Deluce herself.
At night, the two women have made camp on the outskirts of farms, in goat pens and chicken coops and sometimes, when the weather has allowed, right out in the open, beneath a wintry sky alive with starlight.
And this has all been enough, almost enough, to quell the pull of the inevitable—the monster Wren had thought to outrun, to outlive, but which has caught up to her at last. Wren once told Aurora that she never wanted to leave Sommeil, that a whole new life outside of it would only serve to diminish everything that had come before. But she was lying. Of course she wanted to believe in it—to maybe one day see with her own eyes the waking world of which Heath so often spoke in animated whispers. But even Heath didn’t know it, the beautiful, simple irony, formed like a crystal with perfectly equal sides.
How Aurora’s curse undone would activate an even older curse—the one on her.
It was for this reason, more than any other, that Wren ought to hate Aurora. But she doesn’t. Not exactly. Not when Aurora seems to be the only person willing to take up her cause.
Still, she doesn’t trust her. Wren doesn’t trust anyone easily. After all, she’s never had to. The people she grew up with in Sommeil were ones she saw every single day of her life. There had never been a stranger to meet until Aurora. And no matter the princess’s intentions, she has unwittingly ruined Wren’s life, destroyed a world of people she swore to help, and set in motion an old curse Wren had always hoped was just a myth.
Now, in the thin, wavering light reflected by the creek, Wren pulls her knees into her chest and carefully rolls back her skirt. She removes her shoe to expose her ankle bone, a miniature planet in the expanse of darkness. She rubs the inside of her foot, feeling the divot between bone and tendon, and swallows back her dread. The curse is real.
It’s just as she expected. A stretch of skin there, about the width of three fingers, is cold and firm as marble, as solid and inanimate as stone—is stone.
9
Aurora
Aurora never knew how vast Deluce’s countryside was until now, as she allows herself to be tugged along dirt roads, across muddy pastures, and through woods dense with the crackle of pine needles and half-thawed tarns. With the dark veil over her head, her breathing feels forced, her sight limited to stray chances of light and shadow. Her stomach grows hollowed and hard. Her feet bleed. She does not know it. She hopes, at least, that this is enough to show Wren she’s serious. Nothing has ever felt this serious.
The idea of Malfleur sitting high in her castle in LaMorte, training the refugees of Sommeil to become her newest soldiers—perhaps even poisoning them with her own brand of sinister magic, casting spells over them to hold them under her command—drives Aurora forward, making her more determined than ever that her plan must work.
She must convince Malfleur to let the Sommeilians go. She must free Heath.
Even if it comes at an unthinkable cost.
“What can you possibly offer Malfleur in exchange for helping us?” Wren keeps asking, and each time, Aurora tells her only that she knows what to do, and that Wren should trust her.
But Wren does not. And Aurora knows that if she reveals her plan to Wren, the girl may try and stop her.
Of course, Wren is not the only one. Aurora’s certain that William and Isabelle will try to stop her too. Which is why, when she gets the opportunity, Aurora pens a letter to send back home, in her steadiest and most convincing script. In it, she writes the story she wishes were true, the story that ends in her finding Heath, healthy and alive. The story that ends in true love.
Wren gives the letter to a courier on the outskirts of Bouleau, and then they trudge onward.
At dusk and dawn each day, Wren and Aurora forage vainly for food, both of them growing thinner, subsisting mainly on leaves and berries and even, on one cold night, bits of beetle-filled dirt that make Aurora retch. One evening, she spots a lone doe in the woods. It stares at her with glossy eyes, and her whole being cries out with the agony of her hunger.
After that, Wren begins to open up a tiny bit, to lift the stormy silence she’s been holding for long stretches at a time. Even if she still blames Aurora for the destruction of Sommeil, her anger seems to be softening, and this lets in a tiny hint of hope. Wren tells her stories from her childhood, tells her about how she used to follow Heath into the Borderlands to watch him hunt. The awe with which she saw his mind funnel into focus, his arm muscles going taut as he raised his bow and arrow and aimed. The gasping thrill as an arrow found its mark.
But the stories of Heath bring a new kind of agony to Aurora, ushering a return of her guilt—after all, Wren was in love with Heath before Aurora arrived—as well as a resurgence of all the emotions he awakened in Aurora when she first arrived in Sommeil: the terror when he held the tip of a knife to her neck at the cottage, the intrigue when he relented and helped her. How he guided her across the meadow when she injured her ankle, then tended to her in her room, his hands fumbling but gentle. How he caressed her cheek, brushed her hair out of her face before she pulled away, stunned and overwhelmed and inflamed. She longs to see him again. To finally put a name to all t
hat remains unfinished between them.
And to tell him that it was never meant to be. He was not, and is not, hers to fall in love with. If they had both stayed in Sommeil, perhaps she would never have realized this. But now it seems clearer than ever. Her desire for true love had been like a lit spark that, in his presence, flamed and grew. He was the first person to really touch her. Of course she wanted it to be him—wanted that first touch to be the beginning of their love story.
But as she’s lying beside Wren in the night’s long hours of darkness and breath and rustling wind, she finds herself seeking out any excuse to be touched, to be reminded of its possibility. She begins to wonder whether it was really Heath at all that she’d been drawn to in Sommeil, or just what he represented: a whole new world of sensation. Had she confused the longing to be touched with the yearning to be loved?
Now, even the way the horse rein wraps her wrist during the days, rubbing the skin raw, means something. She feels connected to herself, to her body, and, increasingly, even to Wren.
Which perhaps explains what happened the other night.
It had been rainy, near midnight, and they were asleep in a barn when a farmer, reeking of alcohol, stumbled inside, muttering that he’d seen trespassers and that they’d better show themselves if they didn’t want to be killed. Aurora and Wren were lying side by side for warmth, hidden in the upper floor behind large bales of hay. They froze, and Aurora automatically clutched Wren’s hands, both of them holding their breath until the farmer at last gave up his fumbling, drunken search and left.
When they were sure he’d gone, they finally exhaled, gasping with stifled, relieved laughter. “That was close,” Wren whispered, letting go of her hands and grabbing Aurora’s arms instead. The marvel of it—of being held—rushed through Aurora, signaled a change in her. She felt awake and alive with it. She wanted more of it.
Wren’s face, outlined in faint light, was so near to Aurora’s that she might have inched just a little to the left and kissed her. The thought came to Aurora with a surprising smoothness, as though it had been waiting there in her mind for some time. In the moonlight piercing through the dripping rafters, Wren’s lips looked like a miniature bow, curved and taut.
Wren let go of Aurora just as suddenly and rolled onto her back, blinking up at the ceiling.
“Yes,” Aurora whispered then. “That was close.”
In the morning, as she had done every morning of their journey, Aurora held out her wrists for Wren to bind them.
In this way they manage to cross weeks’ worth of land, moving slowly but steadily westward, passing undetected even through the lush Vallée de Merle, where a falcon eyes them from above, steering at a slant through the sapphire mist.
The border along the river should have been fortified by the Delucian army, but instead they see only razed villages, huts leveled into the mud. Abandoned roads and empty barns that bring back eerie visions of Sommeil itself—a crumbling, desiccated land, left by an unfit ruler to rot.
And always, in the distance: steam clouds, cradling Mount Briar and snaking throughout the territories.
In LaMorte, the terrain becomes increasingly rocky and steep as they make their way up a narrow mountain pass. The pass is deserted, and they’ve given up their plague ruse by now. Wren carries the loose rein in her pack, and Aurora has flung the black fabric from her head, tucking it into her belt so that she can breathe and see, though the higher they climb, the thinner the air becomes, and the heavier Aurora’s heart grows, pumping urgency through her chest. It’s hard to breathe, hard to think. They have not eaten in three days.
So when she smells the faint, distant scent of smoked meat, something in her lurches, desperate. She begins to run, jaggedly, uphill.
“Aurora,” Wren calls out, trying to follow her. “We don’t know where it’s coming from; we can’t just—”
But an eager, wild hunger leaps in Aurora’s veins, pushing her ahead, toward the wisp of smoke in the trees. . . .
As she runs, she sways, dizzy with the desire that has awakened like a beast inside her. She holds out her arm and can see the blue veins rising underneath her skin. She staggers over to a scrawny birch tree and leans against it to catch her breath, and her balance. The sky spins. She blinks rapidly.
Wren finally catches up, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. “We’re not three days’ from Blackthorn now. We can’t risk getting caught. It’s not worth it, Princess.”
“But—”
Her vision goes hazy at the periphery. Wren’s face swims in and out of focus, her concerned dark eyes, her gaunt cheekbones, her hands shaking as they reach for Aurora. . . .
We are going to die out here, Aurora realizes. The thought is sharp as an arrow, cold and hard as ice. It hits her square in the chest.
Breathless, she falls.
When Aurora comes to, the thick scent of smoke and river trout fills her nostrils. She gags, and then convulses from the pain in her empty stomach. Wren hovers nearby, and an old woman with long gray hair is ladling thin broth into a rough clay mug. There’s a blanket draped over Wren’s shoulders, and one covering Aurora too. Thick pine needles surround Wren, and for a moment Aurora is sure the girl has somehow become a bird, alighting in a tree.
Aurora sits up slowly. She blinks at the steaming mug in the elderly woman’s hands. It cannot be true. They haven’t seen a hot meal in weeks. Without thinking, Aurora takes the mug and unself-consciously dives into her broth, gulping it down, hardly noticing the flies that dart in and out, vying for a drop of its warmth.
And then a little boy clambers to her side, crying, “She’s awake!”
“Flea?” Mud streaks the boy’s face, soot in his light hair, and Aurora almost sobs in response to his wide, crooked-toothed smile. It is Flea. “But how?” she whispers.
“Survivors. We found them,” Wren says. There are tears in her eyes, tracks through the dirt on her cheeks. Guilt, as dizzying as her hunger, moves through Aurora. “Or rather, they found us. They escaped Malfleur’s army and have been camping out here, in hiding,” she explains, gesturing around them at what Aurora can now see is a rudimentary camp sprung up literally among tree branches. Haphazardly hewn boards crisscross the tree branches to form platforms connected by planks, like forts built by children playing make-believe.
But that is where the innocence of the scenery ends. There are hundreds of Sommeilians, Aurora can now see, huddled in crowded clumps half covered by makeshift tents, dirty sheets, and clothes hanging off the branches, drenched in the smell of sweat and waste. There are tiny blackened areas both in the trees and on the ground from small, cautious, hastily blotted-out fires. And the flies—they’re everywhere, clustered on the arms of sleeping children, drawn to the filth . . . and worse. The broth turns in her stomach. Aurora is sure she can smell, can feel, death in the air. These people are dying—of hunger, of cold, of sicknesses they were never exposed to in Sommeil. Their whole world has been decimated, gone up in a magical and lethal smoke.
She feels a gush of protectiveness and despair. These are her people—she vowed to help them. And, she realizes as she looks around her, they are all women and children.
“Apparently they’ve been depending on a few kind locals for help and shelter,” Wren goes on to explain. “People like Constance,” she says, gesturing to the old woman, who is, even now, putting an arm behind Aurora’s back to steady her.
“Thank you,” Aurora says. Constance doesn’t seem to hear her, but she smiles, the wrinkles around her eyes deepening. “I will get stronger. I will help. I will—”
“They’ve been watching Malfleur for weeks now,” Wren says.
At the mention of Malfleur, her whole body goes alert. “And?”
Wren shakes her head, gently pushing Aurora back to a resting position. “When you’re rested,” Wren says, “we’ll talk with the others.”
But the warmth of the broth has spread through her belly, and Aurora is beginning to feel more alert. “No,” she sa
ys, touching Wren’s hand and removing it from her shoulder. “We’ll speak to them now.”
They make their way through the maze of branches and planks and platforms—Aurora awed by the ease with which some of the others move about, adapted already to this half-life.
In a crowded tent, Aurora listens to horrifying tales of the faerie queen whose storm of evil makes Belcoeur’s actions seem like a weak breeze in comparison. How Malfleur and her vultures dragged their men away in chains. How she has sapped the youth from nearly all the women in her territory. Aurora has heard the rumors but has never seen evidence of them before. Now she stares in wonder at Constance, who looks as though she may keel over in a matter of months—her gray hair frayed, her face loose, and her skin dappled with age. She is, in fact, Aurora learns, only fourteen years old. One of the many orphans of LaMorte, her youth—her life—stolen from her.
The thought sickens Aurora.
“We must stop Malfleur. I have a plan, but I need to get into the castle. I need to gain access to her.” The truth, the determination of it, is like a javelin driving through her, trim and sharp and deadly. She grips the floorboards beneath her, as though to keep herself from springing out of the tent and racing the rest of the way to Blackthorn.
“Our scouts have been watching the castle all day every day,” one middle-aged woman is saying. Her fingernails are cracked and black with mud. “We’ve not seen the queen depart the gates once.”
“But,” inserts another, as old-looking as Constance—and possibly just as young, “there have been back-to-back attacks in Rocheux and Rigide.” She extracts a drawing that Aurora recognizes as a rudimentary map of the LaMorte territories.
“An’ the queen spotted at both.” The first woman gestures to two places on the map. “Workin’ a kind a’ fire what could eat right through a man’s sword. Fae work, to be sure.”
The others nod solemnly, fear in their eyes.
