Winter Glass

by Lexa Hillyer

  “Just a hunch,” she replies calmly. A man who devotes his life to gambling—trading in goods, gold, luck, and secrets—is one who likely keeps tidy records of who owes him what.

  “What might you need this information for?”

  “What I need, sir, are their men. As many as I can get. You may have heard there’s a war on.”

  A pause. And then: “What happened to your hair?”

  It’s an obvious attempt to unnerve her. She reaches up to touch her hair, which has been gathered neatly at the base of her neck. He can’t possibly tell how short it is, save for one stray lock, which she quickly brushes behind her ear. He has, she’s sure, simply heard the rumors: the foreign prince’s wild, short-haired bride. The king’s bastard daughter taking to the campaign trail to rally the peasantry.

  “What happened to your staff?” she counters.

  He grumbles. “Say I have what interests you. . . . What will you give me in return? I’ve heard you possess something of interest to me.”

  Isabelle tenses. “Do I?” He can’t be asking for her luck, can he?

  “The stories have preceded you. Of a certain unbreakable slipper. I might find quite a value in this special token of yours. I might even throw in a tailor or two—you know a man who’s good with a needle could certainly help improve the look of those military uniforms.”

  Isabelle scoffs. “You would trade your own men for a symbolic shoe?”

  She hears the soft sigh of his chair as he shifts and seems to reconsider. “Perhaps not,” he says slowly. “I would need to see it first.”

  Her hand moves to the pouch tied to her belt protectively. “Lord Barnabé . . . Binks. I don’t have time to bargain with you. You may have noticed that I am now officially your queen. Decisions about the fate of this kingdom’s nobility are mine to make. What I can offer you is that I won’t have you executed at my earliest convenience.”

  He guffaws, but she raises her hand. “Or,” she adds, “worse, have you publicly stripped of your title and prominence, what remains of your wealth and”—she gestures—“frippery.”

  This seems to shut him up . . . for a moment.

  Then he shoves his chair back. “I won’t stand for these empty threats and insults.”

  “I assure you,” she says calmly, “they aren’t empty, but your coffers will be. I’ll give you some time to collect the information I have requested, and will expect the names delivered to the palace by special messenger.” At this she can practically hear him cringe, thinking of the expense of a courier in times of war. “In one week’s time.”

  “But—”

  “One week, Binks.”

  She waits until she has made it all the way out of his mansion and into her waiting carriage before she allows herself to smile.

  11

  Aurora

  The underground tunnels of LaMorte are lined with iron torches holding a kind of moss that burns all day without fading, even in the close, oppressive heat. Steam swirls, beckons, melts. Through it, a greenish glow glances against the rocks and dirt walls, making them seem to undulate. Like lungs, Aurora thinks.

  Once, a plague physician visited the palace in Deluce, and tried to explain to Aurora how the disease had come to infect her mother’s lungs, described them as soft passages that inflate and deflate with breath, vulnerable to invasion. Though she’d been banned from Queen Amelié’s chambers, Aurora sneaked into her mother’s rooms and crept to her bed, hoping for a word, a sign of life. Maybe the queen would bestow a last wish, she’d imagined, or at least a harried maternal warning. Perhaps there’d be a cool, dry kiss pressed against her forehead, a bony hand clasped around her own. A gaze that showed what her mother had never actually, in so many words, said. Not just that Aurora was pretty or that Aurora was good. But that Amelié loved her.

  All she’d seen, though, was the queen’s porcelain skin, her cheekbones cutting like blades into the dusty air of the heavily boarded bedchamber, her closed eyes, her stillness. A whisper of pained breath. A droplet of blood at the corner of her lips.

  Aurora keeps thinking of that cold and dreadful morning—her mother’s last—as she moves through the tunnels underneath the mountains.

  She leads the refugees of Sommeil and LaMorte, a brigade of women armed with anything they could find—clubs, anvils, pickaxes, and sticks—through the mountains’ lungs, realizing they are like a sickness, spreading, taking hold, approaching the heart.

  Her discovery has made her stronger, braver. She’d been right—she’d found the heating channels connecting the furnaces. The next morning, she led the women away from the camp, back to the stones, and pried them apart.

  And then they were inside.

  Even as she wipes perspiration from the back of her neck, Aurora feels another kind of certainty flowering within her: she’s convinced now that true love is something subtler and more complicated than she used to believe.

  Wren has been keeping her distance. She never explained why she stalked off in the woods the other night after their argument. She hasn’t said why she doesn’t want to be friends, and Aurora has respected her distance. She knows how to be patient. She has spent her whole childhood that way: waiting, silent, while others lived. This was why she’d had to go. To leave not only the palace, but everything it contained. Even Isbe.

  It’s hard, and confusing, this growing awareness . . . that she can love her sister more than anything, yet that she must be apart from her in order to know, and perhaps one day, love herself.

  The map of the territories, tucked inside her dress, rustles against her chest, and she tries her best to gauge their direction, stopping to make a mark on the map whenever the tunnels fork, so she can chart which way they’ve gone. She can only hope she’s leading them the right way, and not to their deaths . . . though she knows that she could very easily be doing both at the same time.

  The trapped air smells of bodies, of sweat and earth and roots and heat. And too, the vinegary scent of fear. Murmured commands and hissed warnings travel through the pack as the women move in a tight, tangled mass of limbs and skirts, hair and torch and weapon. Aurora can hardly tell where she ends and the rest of her makeshift army begins. They are one.

  Finally, after the better part of a day, the tunnel narrows like a constricted throat, and then they are hit with a burst of cool, musty air as it opens wide into a vast underground dungeon.

  Blackthorn.

  They did it. A sudden euphoria washes through her. They are in the nadir of the castle.

  Quickly her excitement mellows into caution. This is Malfleur’s dungeon. From the stale stench of human waste and standing water, and the faint groan of rusty voices, Aurora can guess at the state of the prisoners even before she sees them. She pulls her arm across her mouth to keep from gagging as she scans the cavernous room, squinting through the thick air.

  There are several aisles of cells, all in a row like horse stalls; hay covers the ground, black with mold and rot. People who hardly resemble humans are locked behind iron bars, and in the dim sphere of her torch’s light, the white-gray bones of skeletons cast sharp shadows along the floor. A collection of the dead and nearly dead. The embodiment of disease, abuse, cruelty.

  The living are mostly too weak, too faded, even to beg for help. Some hardly seem to notice the sudden entrance of all these women. One prisoner cries out quietly, urgently, “The beast! The beast is back to feed!”

  Another moans, “Take me next!”—his voice hardly more than a breath.

  Aurora shudders, ashamed at her own revulsion. Is Heath among them? Panic races through her chest. She hopes they’re not too late. It’s only after she has hurried from cage to cage that she runs into Wren again, and they grasp each other’s arms, and she knows that they have both come to the same discovery: Heath is not here. He is not one of the prisoners. She heaves a sigh of relief; can see it too in Wren, who does not pull away. No news of him is better than bad news.

  “They aren’t from Sommeil,
but we must save them,” Wren says, looking around her at the wretched prisoners.

  The other women have crowded into the cavern, pushing through the filth, searching for the entrance into the castle proper—obviously impatient, nervous, desperate. They are so close now, they can’t afford a wrong move.

  “We will,” Aurora vows with a bravery, and a certainty, that are not quite her own. “We will find the keys and set them all free.”

  “Look,” Wren says. She gestures to where a large group of women have gathered at the mouth of a small, dark stairwell, and are pushing one another to get through.

  “Wait,” Aurora warns, her heart pounding hard in her chest. Nearly all of them, at least, can hear her voice. This is something she can’t take for granted. At least not now. Not yet.

  But if her idea works . . .

  She goes over the plan and the formations. The fastest and lithest women—the ones carrying pouches of poisoned darts and finely whittled flutes—must lead the pack, disabling as many soldiers as they can. Next come the largest and strongest women, those with heavy, blunt weapons, who will push back the remaining opposition and create space for combat. The fiercest among them will follow at the tail end—those who are not afraid to shed blood, to kill by any means.

  Aurora and Wren will lead the first wave. The satchel of poisoned darts trembles in Aurora’s fist. She slides one out and slips it inside her wooden flute, smooth and solid against her palm. She has practiced the way to purse her lips, covering the playing holes and blowing air through the flute in a hard tuft to shoot the dart at her opponent. She’s tempted to trace her finger along the dart’s tip, knowing that even a faint nick could be enough to undo her. As she pushes her way up the winding stone stairs, she is almost amused to think of what happened last time she pricked a finger.

  Their skirmish, if you could even call it that, does not go as planned.

  A surge of soldiers greets them at the other side of the bolted door, and Aurora is hardly able to take in her surroundings—a wide storage cellar, lit with dripping wrought-iron chandeliers, and hordes of men in terrifying, curve-beaked masks—before she is shoved violently to the side, dropping her flute and cracking her head against a wall. A spray of blood—someone else’s—strikes the stone beside her, painting her fingers in it, making them slippery.

  Even as she clambers back up to fight, the chaos has multiplied itself. It seems the women were anticipated. Armored men are bludgeoning the invaders, pulling them back by the hair, stepping on their skirts, holding them down with their knees. The sounds of women screaming echo in the chamber, and Aurora barely manages to shove a soldier, grinning savagely beneath his mask, away from Wren, driving one of her darts into his neck by hand.

  She gasps and staggers backward as she sees his grin become a grimace and his eyes roll back. He falls to his knees and collapses. She cannot feel the shock of his death, of what she’s just done—her first kill—because no sooner has he crumpled to the floor than three more appear where he had been. Vultures, everywhere.

  And their eyes—the way they blaze behind those black masks. It suddenly becomes obvious to Aurora that they are more than mere soldiers. They are under the spell of some unfathomable magic.

  She is surrounded too quickly; the tide of the battle has crashed epically and too soon. She has led all of these women, whom she pledged to help, into certain death. Panic, thick and ugly as tar, stops her throat—she is panting and heaving as she lunges at one of her attackers, unable to best him. She is forced to her knees and looks up just as a metal-coated knee is thrust up into her chin. Her jaw rattles as blood fills her mouth, sparks swarming her vision, followed by a swift and heady blackness.

  When Aurora comes to, she is chained to a chair, her head slumped onto her shoulder. She glances up blearily, her vision swimming. The room spins. The person across from her flickers like a candlelit dream.

  Pale face, ravaged by a wide, rippled scar.

  Aurora blinks.

  Beautiful lips.

  Dark, piercing, depthless eyes.

  A crown of unmistakable iron thorns.

  The opening notes of the rose lullaby trickle into Aurora’s mind: One night reviled . . .

  She swallows and blinks again, her vision finally coming into focus.

  Before her sits the faerie queen, Malfleur.

  There’s something wrong with Aurora’s face. It must be puffy; one eye is so swollen she can barely see out of it. She licks her lips and tastes blood. She tries to concentrate, but her thoughts dance into the shadows.

  A cynical part of her, a part she hardly knew ’til now, wants to laugh at what a fool she is. How she imagined storming the throne room and bargaining with Queen Malfleur like an equal. How stupidly, naively unafraid she’d been.

  She squints and looks at the queen.

  Malfleur’s smile stretches across her face as though pulled that way by invisible strings.

  Where are they, where is Wren— She cuts off. Her voice is gone again, she realizes. The effort to speak singes her throat, coming out as a rattling gasp. She struggles against the shackles binding her wrists.

  “I find it almost enchanting,” Queen Malfleur says calmly, then takes a sip from a goblet of something dark. Aurora wonders if it’s blood. “Your arrival. An unexpected gift.”

  Malfleur’s grin is a sickle, carving into Aurora’s heart. She clenches her muscles and tugs against the chains again, to no avail.

  “I nearly didn’t recognize you,” the faerie queen goes on, her eyes scanning Aurora from her tangled blond hair to her ragged garments.

  She must not, she realizes, look anything like she once did. Aurora grits her teeth.

  “But your friend—Wren, is it?—was crying out your name over and over.”

  What did you do to her? . . . Once again, the words die in Aurora’s mouth, and her chest clenches from the pain of it. She’s voiceless.

  “What I found most intriguing,” Malfleur adds, “was that you murmured a reply, which the girl seemed to hear, though I could not.” She pauses, eyeing Aurora as though awaiting a response. “It got me thinking, of course. You must know my sister was very powerful once.”

  Was.

  Malfleur purses her lips. Aurora stares at her. She had believed Wren when she’d told her that Malfleur entered Sommeil and murdered Belcoeur, but the coldness of Malfleur’s demeanor still comes as a shock.

  “It seems my sister’s world,” the queen says, rising from her chair, “and by extension, those who were raised there, have a sort of immunity to the work of the other fae.” She begins to pace, her long dark gown spilling across stone like black oil. “Like an invisible shield. Thus the tithes taken from you appear to be nonexistent among her people.”

  Aurora takes in her surroundings as the queen paces. It’s a small room, more of a cell, really, and six walled. Judging by the light, high up. Probably in a tower. There are no furnishings other than the two chairs. There are, however, two doors. Malfleur comes to one of the doors, pauses, and turns to catch Aurora’s gaze.

  “Belcoeur could outpower the rest of them, perhaps. Unfortunately for her, though, she could not outdo me.”

  The queen’s words send a chill through Aurora as she wrenches open the door. Through it lies an even smaller adjoining cell, dark and windowless—and in the center sits Wren, hunched on the floor, tied up and whimpering faintly. A rag is stuffed in her mouth.

  Malfleur picks up Wren by the elbow and drags her into Aurora’s chamber. She yanks the rag from Wren’s mouth, and Aurora winces as the girl lets out a choking sob. The rag is covered in blood and dirt.

  Aurora’s arms strain against the chains. “Let her go!” she commands, thrilled at the rush of her voice’s return, which brings with it a surge of anger. Now that Wren is here, Aurora can speak—though only Wren can hear it.

  “Now, Aurora.” Malfleur smiles and retakes her seat, shoving Wren to her knees at the foot of her chair like a dog. “Tell me. What brings you to Bla
ckthorn?”

  Aurora struggles and pulls but cannot free her hands. “Let her go and I’ll tell you.”

  Malfleur stares at her blankly. Obviously she can’t understand, can’t hear. Then she gazes down at Wren and grabs her by the chin, tilting her face up. “Please ask the princess why she has come to my palace.”

  “Stop! I—I came for you,” Aurora says.

  Wren, shaking, meets the queen’s eyes. She clears her throat. “She came for you,” she whispers.

  “What a lovely surprise. And we hadn’t even prepared for guests,” Malfleur replies with a smirk. “Perhaps I should rephrase. What is it exactly that the princess wants from me?”

  Wren practically snarls. “To demand the freedom of my people.”

  Malfleur backhands her across the face with such force that Wren cries out, falling to her elbows on the stone floor. Aurora gasps.

  “I didn’t ask you for your own answer, my dear.” The queen looks to Aurora, studying her face for a moment in silence. Aurora tries to keep from trembling. “I imagine, to have come all this way,” Malfleur goes on, “the princess must have been seeking something very important—something important to her.”

  A gust of wind blows through the unboarded window, cut high into the walls above their heads. Leaves blast through its bars and swirl in the room. The heat of anger in Aurora’s gut twists into icy fear. Malfleur’s eyes seem to bore through her, pinning her even more strongly than the shackles.

  “What did you really want in coming here?”

  Aurora shivers. “I—I wanted—I want—” To free Wren’s people. To convince you to stop this war. To save Heath. To . . .

  All of these responses are at the tip of her tongue, but something stops her from answering. She thinks, as she often has these past weeks, of the starling that spoke from her bedroom window, taunting her, on the eve of her birthday.

  She pushes on, forcing herself to be brave, to stick to her plan. “I’ve come to bargain with you.”