Winter Glass

by Lexa Hillyer

Wren looks at her, a flash of uncertainty in her eyes, before she turns to Malfleur. “She has come to bargain with you.”

  “Go on,” the queen says, and Aurora wonders if it’s just her imagination or if Malfleur has leaned in toward her, ever so slightly. She wants to cry out with the sudden power and pleasure of it.

  She clears her throat. “I would like you to hold back your forces . . .”

  Wren repeats her words to the queen.

  “And free your prisoners, returning them to Deluce . . .”

  Again, Wren translates.

  “And in exchange, I’ll offer you . . .”

  Malfleur waits. Wren watches her cautiously.

  Once again the starling flutters through her mind. If the queen can give voice to animals, what else might she be able to give voice to? Aurora feels the crudeness of her wish, the baseness and selfishness of it, thrusting up inside her in a nauseous wave.

  “Myself.”

  “What? Aurora, no!” Wren’s face has gone pale as a grave.

  “Tell her,” Aurora insists. “Tell her that I give her myself.”

  “Aurora,” Wren protests again, but turns to the queen. “She has offered up . . . herself.”

  Malfleur raises an eyebrow. “And what could I possibly want with you?”

  “An experiment.” Aurora swallows. “You have great power, so you’ve said. Maybe the greatest there is. You could make an example of me. Return my voice to me.”

  Wren repeats, and the queen, to her surprise, barks out a laugh. “I must say I’m impressed. I have heard of you, you see. The princess whose hand is sought the world over. Whose beauty inspires poetry. Whose gentle kindness is enough to melt the hearts of men. A princess whose demure silence makes all those who come to her feel heard and seen.” She says all of these things as if they are insults, points of shame. “So I’m delighted to see the feistier side of you. You’ve come here out of self-interest.”

  “But it isn’t for myself,” Aurora insists. “It’s for us both.” Really, it’s not for either of them. Aurora doesn’t need her voice back—she just needs Malfleur to be tempted. Faeries love making deals, Aurora knows. But can one as intelligent at Malfleur be outwitted?

  Aurora holds Malfleur’s gaze as Wren translates. “I know what it is to have everything, and yet to want more.”

  It’s not entirely a lie. She didn’t do all this—come all this way, risk all these lives—just for her own voice. She’d be happy to never speak again if it meant saving Heath, freeing the others, and putting a peaceful end to the war. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t yearn for things she can never have.

  She thinks of Isbe—of the years of abuse she suffered at the hands of the palace staff in Deluce. At the hand, even, of Aurora’s own mother, and their father. Even still, despite Isbe’s insistence that she was the one forced into the shadows while Aurora had all the light, still, still, Aurora would, sometimes, in her heart of hearts, yearn for what Isbe had. Freedom.

  “Tell me,” Aurora goes on, feeling more confident in her plan as Malfleur takes her in unwaveringly, hardly glancing at Wren for her translation. “What would make a better pet than a mortal princess you’ve magically cured? Who would not bow to the miracle of it? There’s time enough to conquer land, but why not finish what you’ve started, and lure the world to your side instead, bend it to your will?”

  She feels as though she has tucked a lit flint beside a pile of dry twigs—at any moment, it will catch fire. Which is both the most dangerous and the most thrilling thing she has ever done. She has, after all, stoked the engine that scares her even more than Malfleur’s military: her power of persuasion.

  Isbe told her the way whole villages in Deluce have given themselves over to the queen, given up their liberty for a taste of violence and power, willing to turn on their own people if it means seeing the Delucian aristocracy, who have for so long thrived on the thankless labor of the masses, finally fall. She wonders what those same people would think if they learned that Malfleur had taken Aurora in as her own. It might seem a kind of alliance. Would such a pairing undermine the faerie queen’s stance, or turn the tides in her favor?

  Aurora shudders. She is terrified by what she’s about to say—but she knows that Malfleur is only going to keep killing unless Aurora does something to make her change tactics. “Besides,” Aurora adds slowly, “I can convince Deluce and Aubin to come under your rule. Peacefully.”

  “My dear,” Malfleur says now. “Might I remind you that you are already my prisoner. I may do with you whatever I like.”

  “I will only make the offer once,” Aurora says, trying to keep from shaking. “What is your answer?”

  Malfleur looks at Wren and then back at Aurora. Her eyes narrow; her mouth pulls again into that terrifying smile. “My answer . . .”

  Aurora feels her decision like a knee to the gut before she even says it.

  “. . . is no.”

  Aurora has lost count of the days she’s been in her cell.

  The first few days, she occupied herself with studying the locks on the doors, analyzing their mechanisms, trying to divine a clever way to undo them, succeeding only in undoing her own composure and crying out in silent anger. She chased the moving patch of pale spring light through the high window, curling up in it, crying until she was too exhausted to cry, or to feel. She pounded over and over again on the side door connecting her cell to Wren’s, but got only a dull, repeated thud in response—it was enough to signal that Wren was still alive, but the wood was too thick for Wren’s voice to carry.

  And because of that, because of her solitude, Aurora finds herself once again voiceless.

  Scraps of stale bread and sometimes even the stringy tendons of recently slaughtered meat appear at her door at varying hours, never consistently enough to assuage the panic of starvation, though—the dizzying sensation of disappearing. She is smoke. She is bone. She is thirst. When she rises to stand, the walls tilt, the light sways. The darkness comes, and with it, fuzzy pinpricks behind her eyelids that are crude copies of stars, bursts of unconsciousness. When she dreams, it’s of ink bottles full of blood.

  She longs to be with Wren, to confess what she feels. To beg forgiveness. She has failed Wren, failed all of the refugees of Sommeil and LaMorte, failed Isbe and William and all of Deluce too. She begins to believe what Malfleur said of her, that she only came here out of self-interest. Not to try and reclaim her voice, which had never been at the very forefront of her wishes—but to prove something to Wren, to everyone. She had wanted desperately to be the kind of person Wren would admire, to be a hero.

  But maybe heroes are only for stories.

  By the time Malfleur returns to her, silhouetted by a tepid beam of moonlight, Aurora has come to the very brink of loss—has felt everything she knew about herself draped out over the ledge, hooked on by a single finger.

  She is, she believes, ready to let go.

  The queen moves like a piece of darkness. Aurora has the wild fear that if she shifts, even breathes too hard, Malfleur will prove but a phantom, a delirious creation of her mind. And she needs her to be real. She clings to it.

  “Shhh,” the queen says as she kneels down on the floor in front of Aurora.

  It’s all Aurora can do not to gasp in surprise—at her closeness, at the shock of seeing the queen bending to her level, like a nursemaid about to comfort a child from a nightmare.

  “I have been busy, as you can imagine.” Her voice is removed and devoid of pity, her eyes thoughtful as they take in Aurora’s decrepit state without reaction.

  Aurora’s hands shake. She doesn’t know what to think, what to feel, what to do. She can only wait, hoping to be put out of her misery one way or another, at last—and yet still, stubbornly, clinging to hope.

  “I have not changed my mind . . . ,” the queen says slowly. “Entirely. But I have been thinking.” She works her jaw, and Aurora is struck by the way she can see the bones shifting beneath her pale skin, even through the
musty thickness of the moonlit cell. “I will give you something.”

  Aurora hates the way her whole body trembles, the way a sob launches up into the back of her throat, waiting there. How hunger like a sleeping demon uncurls and begins to gnaw . . .

  “Not your voice, but . . .”

  Water. Ink. Something to eat. Something to bring on sleep, or even death. Anything.

  Malfleur’s teeth glint in the dark. “Something better.”

  12

  Malfleur,

  the Last Faerie Queen

  The night forest whistles with the flight of frightened creatures as she charges on horseback into its mist, alive with the need for blood. She must have it. The desire for it is not new, but in recent years it has intensified, provoking her to go to greater lengths to get it—and driving her to greater heights.

  To leave the castle undetected, as always, Malfleur moved through the cavernous dungeon, through the crying of its new captives—the countless women who survived her guards only to be locked up, made to share cells with their own rotting dead.

  Now, in the fresh night air, Malfleur pulls the vulture mask from her face and dismounts, finding her way to the mountain stream where she has set her trap, wondering what she will have caught tonight, though it doesn’t really matter, so long as it is still alive. So long as her killing blade is its first.

  Unlike some of the fae, Malfleur does not believe in luck. But tonight she feels lucky. After all, she has ensnared the most fascinating creature yet—the pale, trembling beauty, the prize of Deluce.

  Beauty like Princess Aurora’s is more curse than gift. Malfleur has seen how that kind of beauty acts like an intoxicating drug, how it demands only more of itself. How it begs.

  How it withers.

  Malfleur and her sister, Belcoeur, should know. Beauty is what killed their mother.

  She may have despised the woman—her original tormentor—but Malfleur still relives her mother’s suicide every day. Like a meteor shower it ravaged the sky and then was over, leaving a blackness, a blankness. Malfleur knew why her mother did it: she couldn’t stand that she’d begun to grow warped and wrinkled with age, that her daughters’ looks had surpassed her own.

  It happened just before Malfleur had left to study magic all over the world, sending back gifts and discoveries to Belcoeur all the while, even though she didn’t want to be near her twin anymore, with those bright eyes, that big hope, that great and tender love. Soft. Suffocating.

  Their father, King Verglas, had turned in on himself already by then, had begun to hoard his tithe, which was knowledge. She couldn’t bear to witness that, either. She felt cut off from him more than ever.

  So when she discovered that her father had conquered the Îles de Glace in her absence and had remarried the blithering North Faerie, at first the news could hardly touch her. After Belcoeur’s betrayal, and after the only response she could find within herself was to kill Charles Blackthorn, Malfleur withdrew to the mountains, unable to face society, the past a terrible riddle that would taunt her, she feared, until she died or went mad like so many other faeries.

  Back then, she had felt guilt—and hurt—of a kind that only the deep and stagnant mountain bogs could equal. It had consumed her, had nearly sunk her in its dark, slurping mire. She vowed, at that time, never to kill again.

  But as she discovered and began to practice transference, it was like something awoke again—a black-winged bird flew up and out of the swamp her life had been, cawing and crying and carving out a new way forward.

  It was Blackthorn himself—young Charles—who had first inspired the idea of transference, though of course it would be many years after his death at her hands that she thought of it again. The elder Blackthorn and Verglas, her father, had arranged another hunting visit, and this time the Blackthorns were guests at the Delucian palace. Things were so different back then, Malfleur recalls: the way the human and fae monarchs socialized as though even the rise of humans to such power could never pose a threat to the fae.

  Charles had gone out riding with his father and hers, and returned later with a fox, which she found him skinning in a room off the kitchens. He said he loved to handle all the preparation of the animal himself. Tying up and hanging it by the feet. Brushing the fur clean of burs before making studied, precise cuts around the ankles in order to begin the careful removal of its skin. Once it was separated from the flesh and guts, the meat and the fat had to be scraped away. And then there was the slow stretching, tacking, and drying of the hide.

  Charles confessed to her—never taking his eyes away from his meticulous dissection—that he’d always been fascinated with the fae. He had an endless series of questions about magic: what it felt like, how it worked, why the system of faerie tithing had even come about. Questions she didn’t always know the answer to, but which stirred her own curiosity. It was only the third time she’d seen him since their first meeting and the memorable game of whist. She was now sixteen, he eighteen. She cleaned his knives for him while he worked.

  After he was finished with the fox, he washed his hands in a bucket drawn from a well, then retrieved something from a pouch tucked inside his doublet. She didn’t say aloud—or even admit silently, to her private self—what she felt when he produced the glistening white pearl she’d given him from her mother’s necklace a few years earlier. She didn’t want to name it, for that would make the feeling smaller and mundane. She couldn’t call it a romance, what was taking seed and spreading its roots through the dark soil of her heart. She couldn’t, because that would make it a silly thing, predictable, a story that must demand one of two conclusions, neither of which appealed to her. For as much as everyone lives in fear that he or she might be destined for tragic ends, Malfleur was equally revolted by the idea of a happily ever after. Perhaps because both actually suggested the same thing to her: an ending.

  No. Hers would not be a love story—not then, and not ever.

  It was during their discussions of faerie magic that day so many years ago now, when he made the suggestion that eventually led to transference, though at the time it struck her as ridiculous. They had left the kitchens and begun to stroll the palace grounds, the brackish sea air blustering off the cliffs and billowing up into the cloudy sky, making the famous Delucian fog writhe and whirl. As they walked, his hair shuffled in the wind, bright and out of place.

  In his forthright way, he accused faerie tithing of being outdated and unfair, especially to the human race that now populated the majority of their lands. Malfleur argued that this had always been the relationship of human to fae, though, much like the fox to both. There was, quite simply, a hierarchy in the natural order of things, one that had to be respected in order for each to thrive as they were born to thrive.

  He looked at her then, and she felt as studied as the slain fox had been. His eyes took her apart, but so carefully, so gently, and so gradually, that she experienced the confusion and surprise of liking it.

  “If I had the power of the fae, I’d use it to tithe away faerie magic from all the others. Bring about a new order, one in which faerie and man are equal,” he said.

  She scoffed, of course, offended. “You’d have us be just like you, then? What arrogance.”

  “Is it arrogant to want justice?” His eyes blued, sun passing over water.

  Thirst sprang up in her. “It is arrogant,” she countered, “to believe you can even know what justice looks like for anyone but yourself.”

  “You would have us govern without presuming we understand justice as a general principle?”

  “Oh, please, Charles,” she said with a smile. “I don’t pretend that anyone actually rules in the name of justice.” She wanted to laugh. “Monarchy does not exist for the sake of fairness.”

  She didn’t know her words would hit him so hard, but he winced as though struck by something small yet infinitely sharp. The truth was like that, she thought. A trim and effective dagger—it fit, well hidden, inside even the daintiest
palm.

  He turned to face her, forcing her to stop walking. They had passed the gardens and were nearing the top of a squat hill she and her twin had hurtled themselves down countless times as children.

  “You have a stark view of the world,” he said after a moment spent staring at her. His breath danced in the cool fog, folding into it, becoming lost.

  She wanted to shrug but didn’t. She hadn’t expected him to make it personal. Instead, she turned to the side, scanning for signs of life over the strait. A stray gull curved through the gray. Closer, a pair of laundresses chased a woman’s underclothing that had gotten caught up in the wind’s invisible fist.

  “It is rarely pleasant to look at things without any of their comfortable disguises,” she finally answered.

  He touched her scar.

  She sucked in a breath but did not push his hand away. It was the first time he seemed to have acknowledged the seared mark on her cheek and brow.

  “That’s what I like so much about you, Malfleur,” he said, so low and so quiet it gave her a shiver. “With you, there can be no disguises. Everything is real. Light becomes anguish.”

  She turned to face him, then. He was so near. His thumb traced her lower lip.

  “And,” he whispered, “anguish becomes light.”

  Now, Malfleur traces her fingers along her scar as she nears the trap in the woods. She is still thinking about transference and about the princess’s offer. I give you myself, she’d said. Malfleur toys with the possibilities. She has already used transference to transcend the old way of tithing senses, instead discovering how to transfer them from one being to another. She has used it on her soldiers, to make them harder and stronger—filling them with the rage and hunger of real vultures.

  And now she ponders the possibility of the opposite. If she can tithe magic from the fae, can she also transfer magic to another? What might happen to a princess who has been gifted beauty and grace . . . and a piece of Malfleur’s own magic? Aurora could be the grandest experiment, the most intriguing pet, the best protégé yet. . . .