Winter Glass

by Lexa Hillyer

  Aurora studies the markings on the map. The villages of Rocheux and Rigide lie on opposite sides of the third-largest peak, which means it would be seemingly impossible for the queen to appear in both locations within a day of one another . . . and certainly not without ever leaving the castle.

  Aurora doesn’t doubt that Malfleur’s power is great. But the accounts of the Sommeilian scouts stretch the limits of possibility. Disappearing and reappearing, phantomlike and at whim . . . these are abilities Aurora has never read about in any of the faerie histories. And she has read them all.

  And fire that can melt a sword in battle? Great magic, dark magic, always comes at a price, even—or especially—for the fae.

  What price did Malfleur pay for such power?

  A chill moves through her. If their stories are true, then Aurora, along with all of Deluce, is up against someone far more capable—and more sinister—than anyone realized.

  She looks around at the other women in the tent, their bodies weak, their eyes fatigued but fierce. “We must prepare,” she says.

  A light rain falls for several days as Aurora and Wren recuperate, hiding out with the scouts on a perch overlooking Blackthorn from morning ’til night, watching soldiers come and go, with no sign of Malfleur. Aurora’s arms and legs have taken on new contours from navigating the treetop campsite and climbing steep terrain. Her body has grown tenser, tauter, stronger, even as her determination has done the same.

  All the while, the dampness seeps into her worn clothes and deepens the ache and cold in her bones.

  This evening, there’s agitation among the group. There was another raid yesterday, at the foot of the mountains, not far from their camp, and the queen was spotted riding her silver-haired stallion through the wreckage, her cloak billowing in the thick smoke as fires raged and people screamed.

  The Sommeilians argue late into the night about whether the risk of relocating outweighs the risk of staying. Most don’t want to leave: they’ve learned the landscape here, the hospitable areas where the soil is fertile. They’ve identified which leaves can be ground into powder for broth, which acorns can be broken open to produce sweet nut meat, and which wild things ought to be avoided at all cost, like the fork-tongued salamanders said to be venomous and the flying squirrels that carry disease in their fangs.

  To avoid the mounting tensions, Aurora splinters off with Wren at sunset to forage. She has come to like these moments, when the world appears charred and quiet. She has been getting used to the thin mountain air too, pine filled and smoky, to the constant chill, the fear that radiates out along the branches of their camp like a contagion.

  Still, tonight she’s agitated. If only she had her palace library at her fingertips. She’d be able to flip through all the histories of the fae in search of a clue that might help explain how Malfleur’s powers have grown so mighty, how she’s able to leap from place to place around the territories without ever seeming to leave her own front door. Even in the time of the great winged faeries, nearly a thousand years ago or more, there were no stories of disappearing and reappearing, of traveling like a phantom throughout the land. Could it be a combination of flight and invisibility? Could Malfleur have produced doubles—replicas of herself scattered in key areas of tension all over LaMorte? Could she be creating elaborate spells of illusion, sort of like the enchantments Belcoeur inflicted on the castle in Sommeil?

  The rain won’t let up, even as Wren and Aurora wind their way deeper into the forest, filling their baskets with mushrooms to bring back to Constance, who will sort them into two groups according to type—one for eating, and one for poisoning the darts. The later it gets, and the farther they go into the dense woods, the richer the undergrowth they find, littered with jewellike fungi that seem to glow in the final embers of daylight.

  “I’m so hungry I think I might risk death for this one,” Aurora says, holding up a toadstool the size of her palm, its speckled top the lush red of an apple.

  “Then I suppose I better keep a more careful eye on you,” Wren replies. As though Aurora was just a little girl who needed to be watched at all times.

  Her words tickle an awareness at the edge of Aurora’s mind. “You still don’t trust me,” she says, turning to look at Wren plainly.

  Wren shifts her basket. “And why should I?”

  “Why wouldn’t you? After everything we’ve gone through to get this far . . .” Now that she’s gotten physically stronger, all the feelings she’s been pushing down for weeks rise back up, even stronger. “What must I do to prove to you that I’m sorry, that I want to make things right, that I will make things right?”

  “It isn’t your intention that I doubt,” Wren says, unmoving. Her heart-shaped face looks innocent, somehow, in the darkness. Her damp hair clings to her cheeks.

  “Then what?” Aurora moves closer to her, sensing there is something, some secret Wren has been keeping from her. “Why can’t we be friends, Wren? You were so kind to me once. I want you to trust me. I want . . .” She doesn’t know what else she wants, only that Wren’s resistance lights a fire in her, and at the same time, she feels a powerful need to break through that resistance, to shatter it like glass.

  But Wren simply shakes her head and begins to turn away. “I don’t want your friendship, Princess,” she mutters quietly.

  Aurora goes after her, grabs her arm. Wren gasps in surprise and turns back toward her again. “This is because of Heath, isn’t it?” Heat floods through her, but she can’t stop. They must speak of it. “That day in the gallery . . . when you found us . . . when you saw us—”

  “Kissing.”

  Aurora blushes furiously. “You were upset,” she insists. “I remember it vividly. You wouldn’t speak to me. I thought—”

  “That I was envious. I know,” Wren says. Her eyes are impossible to read in the gathering darkness. Rain is still coming down and hovering, misting around them like a cold breath, making Aurora’s skin prickle and Wren’s glisten. “You said as much to the mad queen, but you were as wrong about me as you were about her.”

  “What do you mean?” How is it possible, Aurora wonders, that the longer she knows Wren, the greater a mystery the girl becomes? “You loved him, didn’t you?”

  Wren sighs and nods. “As a brother, Aurora.”

  “A . . . brother,” Aurora repeats.

  Wren squares her shoulders. “He is my brother, in every manner but birth. He took care of me for my whole life, practically raised me. I loved him, love him still, the way you love Isabelle.”

  “But you tried to prevent us . . . you told me not to break his heart.”

  Wren just looks at her. Finally she lifts the basket of mushrooms higher in her arms. “Love is like these, Aurora. There are all types. They may look the same to someone who doesn’t know the difference, but some kinds can heal, some can nourish, and others can kill.”

  “But . . . I still don’t understand. Please, Wren, just give me a chance. We could die tomorrow. Malfleur’s soldiers have detected our camp. There may not be much time left and we are on the same side, don’t you see that? Don’t you feel that? That’s why I’m even here.”

  Wren steps toward her—so close Aurora could swear she’s going to reach out for her hands. Wren’s lips part, and she pauses, as though holding back what she really wants to say. Her mouth waits like that, open just slightly, and Aurora feels overcome with the need to touch her.

  “We are on the same side,” Wren says finally, softly; Aurora has to lean toward her to hear it. “But we are far apart, you and I. You’re a princess, I’m a servant.”

  “But surely—”

  Wren raises a hand, and the protestations die in Aurora’s throat. “I’ve already said, you don’t understand, and you can’t possibly. The best you can do is keep your distance until we reach Malfleur. If we reach her.”

  And then she vanishes into the dense woods, leaving Aurora alone.

  The silence when she’s gone seems to vibrate the mist, mak
ing the tiny hairs on Aurora’s arms stand on end. Aurora finds she is shaking, and not just from the cold.

  She had thought Wren was beginning to warm to her. She had thought, if not a true friendship, then some sort of bond had started to develop between them. But now she feels slapped in the face—her cheeks sting with the humiliation of it, the frustration. She feels more certain than ever that Wren is hiding something, has been hiding something for a while now. Perhaps since before their journey even began. Here they are, both risking their lives, not just for Heath but for all the Sommeilians, and for Delucians too. Why should Wren keep secrets? And how dare she withhold her trust, when it’s the one and only thing Aurora has asked of her?

  Isbe’s admonishing, joking voice comes to her now. Go after her, then.

  She does.

  But evening has given way to night. The woods are thick with tangled branches, and though the pine needles above seem to soften the rain, the air is damp and heavy. Her heartbeat stutters. She can’t find her way.

  “Wren?” Her voice thins in the fog, and she wonders if anyone can hear it. Every time Wren leaves her side, she remembers just how precious her voice is.

  Perhaps it isn’t fair that she associates Wren now with the incredible feeling of having her voice and sense of touch back—the freedom and elation of it—but it’s the truth. And because of that, there are things she longs to tell Wren, things she has never told anyone. How sometimes the chance brush of Wren’s fingers along her arm sends a thrill through her that shocks her—different, and perhaps better, than how she felt when Heath touched her. How sometimes she senses a sadness in Wren’s eyes that makes her own heart ache and thump. How she wants to be let in, wants more than just her trust. She wants to be heard. To be touched.

  To be understood.

  Maybe, even, to be loved.

  Somewhere along the way, she has stopped wanting Heath’s love with the same fierceness she’d once felt. Could it be she’s started wanting Wren’s instead? The idea of it is uncanny, unexpected, effortless. And unlike anything she’s ever read in one of her storybooks.

  “Wren?” she calls out again, breaking into a run.

  Aurora searches deeper into the woods than she meant to go. She is lost; she can see that now. It is too late, too dark, too cold, and she is too alone. Leaves hiss in the wind. The earth, sodden and spongy, seems to want to swallow her. Seems to throb, as though it’s alive. In fact, she could swear the ground beneath her has a heartbeat of its own, a quiet, rhythmic boom. She can’t really feel it, of course, and yet she can sense it, perhaps even hear it.

  She stops running and takes a breath, trying to gather her focus. A line of white mist snakes before her like a path, and the ground beneath it hums and pulses. Either she’s hallucinating, or there is something beneath the mist, something forming it, she realizes. Is the earth warmer there? She bends down on her hands and knees, trying to feel the strange heartbeat of the moss and dirt. She doesn’t understand it.

  But she follows it.

  Soon she has made her way to an impassible stretch of vertical rock. At its base is a pile of mossy stones and boulders, and between these, a thick steam emanates from the cracks. Fixated, curious, Aurora throws her weight into one of the stones, trying to push it aside. Though she’s not strong enough to roll it out of the way, she manages to nudge it slightly, and she gasps. A faint gleam of light comes through the crack, and a tiny burst of heat hisses out. There is a hole—a path to someplace else. Something underground.

  She puts her face to the stones, peering between them, then jolts back again. Movement. Shadows and light. She presses her face to the crack again, and now she can definitely see movement, and in fact can hear a banging, puffing sound. The heartbeat she’d heard before, but it had been muffled by the undergrowth.

  Now she’s surer than ever that something is going on beneath the ground. And these stones are blocking an entrance.

  Terrified, she turns around, attempting to find her way back to the camp.

  And that’s when she remembers.

  It’s something she’d read long ago in her faerie histories, but hadn’t thought much about at the time, as it was mostly rumor—a theory about how Malfleur was able to miraculously transform the once practically barren territories into a fertile place for crops. Underground furnaces. She wonders now if that theory is true. These might need to be lit and traversed for maintenance.

  And then another thing occurs to her: if there are heat tunnels throughout the kingdom, creating pathways of steam to warm the soil, perhaps some of them are connected. And perhaps they are not only connected to one another, but connected to the castle—because surely the castle and its grounds would be heated.

  Aurora suddenly knows exactly how Malfleur has been getting around the territories without ever appearing to leave Blackthorn.

  The underground tunnels.

  And if there’s an alternate way out of the castle . . . then there’s also a way in.

  10

  Isabelle

  “Together”—Isabelle tilts her chin up, letting her voice rise on the wind—“we are . . .”

  The waiting crowd collectively inhales as she lifts the war hammer over her head, then slams it down before her. There’s a dull, thudding echo.

  She lifts the velvet sack from the platform in front of her and pulls out the glass slipper—perfectly intact.

  “Unbreakable.”

  She holds up the shoe.

  The spring wind rushes around her, fluttering her cloak.

  Gasps. Murmurs. A wild cheer rippling outward.

  A smile pulls across Isbe’s face; triumph fills her chest. She is standing on a stage, but even without it she feels taller than ever, visible in a way she hasn’t felt before—like a beacon. She never knew what that word meant . . . “beacon.” And now she has become one.

  Based on the volume of the crowd’s cheers today, she guesses they’ll have a hearty list of names to add to their growing ranks, and she’s relieved. Already, in just two short weeks, Isbe has registered nearly a full battalion’s worth of soldiers for the Delucian army, with just her speeches. But it hasn’t been easy.

  Some towns have refused to let her speak; some crowds have thrown rotten potatoes and eggs at her carriage and called her the Bastard Queen. News of Aurora’s abdication has by now spread to much of the land, and not every Delucian citizen is happy about it. Rumors abound: that Aurora never woke at all, that William and Isabelle conspired to kill her in her sleep, that this is all a plot on the part of Queen Malfleur to undermine Deluce’s legitimacy.

  The slipper has helped combat these rumors somewhat—it has, in fact, taken on a life of its own. At rallies, in town squares across the land, Isbe has exhibited the dainty object—too small for her own foot—and proclaimed that she knows what it is like to be small, to be stepped on. She has worn their shoes. Her mother was a peasant, like them. She should have grown up in poverty; it was only a feint of hand by the fates that landed her in the palace instead. But she has known what it is like to be unlucky too.

  Every time she gets to this part in her speech, she can feel the way the breath catches in her lungs. Gil. He bargained away his luck for her safety.

  She has heard the memory of his voice in the many gathered crowds, has felt his absence everywhere. She imagines he’d be proud of her now.

  Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d see through the words, to the terrified, exhausted girl behind them, the one who’s been playing queen one moment and people’s voice the next. And he’d be right to cast his doubts. He’d be right to hate her, even. She has betrayed every sentiment she once vowed to uphold—her disdain for all things royal. She has married a prince.

  And she loves William, loves everything about him: his mind, his passion for ideas, the way his voice moves against her skin in the dark. Even thinking of him sends a shiver of excitement through her body, and she longs to see him again.

  Just married, and two weeks apart—it’s exc
ruciating.

  And yet. The decision to marry William, to bind her life and soul to his, has changed her irrevocably—the knowledge of it coats every inch of her and inhabits her senses, a heady perfume she once admired but now cannot wash off, even as it intoxicates her still.

  And there is a thorn in the side of her love. Though she has never stopped sending out inquiries, has even ordered a royal investigation into the fate of the whaling ship where she lost Gil, the mystery of their parting still haunts her, a dark reverberation of the mystery within the mystery: the meaning of his kiss, of the intensity in Gil’s words and hands during that moment in the storm. What might have happened next had it not been their last?

  She steps down from the stage, ushered by several guards in full livery. They take her to the royal carriage and stow her safely inside. Then she’s jolted against the back of her seat as the horses are whipped into motion.

  These long, confining carriage rides drive her mad with anxiety and impatience. They leave far too much room for her thoughts to consume her. And she’s painfully aware of the guards—no fewer than six—who accompany her journey, which only adds to the on-edge feeling. She aches for an unbridled courser and an open field.

  She removes her gloves to finger the cool surface of the slipper, both transfixed and frustrated. The slipper has given her a kind of influence she never expected . . . and yet its meaning eludes her.

  So her mother grew up a peasant.

  So she possessed an article of clothing, constructed out of the least likely material: glass.

  And the fact that the slipper is unbreakable has now become the touchstone of her campaign. It won’t shatter, no matter how hard Isbe has tried—a feature she was shocked to discover when an angry rioter tried to steal it.

  But why?

  There is a story in this shoe and its strange magic. Isbe longs to understand it. However, there is one person in her life who knows stories like no other, and that is Aurora, and she is gone, to find her own happily-ever-after. Isabelle received a single letter from her sister, sent via messenger from some point south of the royal road where the river forks in the Vallée de Merle. It said only that Aurora was alive, and all right, and not to come after her. That she has found Heath and they are making a life together in obscurity, safe from the violence of the war.