by Lexa Hillyer
“I don’t have the answers, child. Only the slipper knows its own secrets. Our stories find us, not the other way around.”
Another riddle. Isbe is starting to feel the effects of all her travel—she’s exhausted, exasperated. “Never mind the slipper, then. Will you stand by Deluce, and make us more winter glass?”
He is quiet.
“Think of the suffering, if we should lose,” she says. “The thought of Malfleur ruling over all the land is ter-rifying.”
The king lets out a rattling breath and shifts his heavy robe. “Life requires suffering, my dear. Why should it be left to me to intervene?”
“Because it matters!” She has stood without realizing it. “Because if that doesn’t matter, then nothing does.”
“It is not up to any one god or faerie, man or woman, to decide what matters for other people, and what does not,” he replies calmly. “But let’s say I was to help you.”
She sits back down.
“What might you give an old king in return for his assistance?”
“What might I give you?” she repeats. She puzzles for a moment, reminded of her very first conversation with Prince William, when she arrived in Aubin and begged him to take her side against Malfleur. At the time, she’d imagined he would agree simply because he believed in her cause, understood the rightness of it. But in the end, she’d been forced to strike a deal, offering Aubin what his country really needed—access to Deluce’s oil. “Well, what is it you want?”
“All that winter glass . . . enough for a whole army?” he says, instead of answering. “It would require quite a bit of information, in order to make it. Information you don’t mind locking away, possibly forever. The history of an entire nation, for example. It would be quite dangerous, don’t you see?”
Another chill moves through her.
He goes on. “And no good faerie does his work without a price. Especially for something so perilous.”
“But . . .”
“All of history,” he says, “shows us how to forget. They say this glacier we stand on has been melting and continues to melt, even as we breathe, and that one day, thousands of years from now, the ice will be gone, and with it, the world’s memory.”
Now she is starting to feel scared. The idea of whole histories becoming locked away does seem risky. Is it worth the risk, though, to save her kingdom?
“Of course,” he adds, “in addition to the information I would need to freeze into the armor, I would have to ask for a little extra something for myself, you see.”
She takes a deep breath, bracing herself. “What else do I have that I could give you to make it a fair deal?”
“It has been a long time that I have lived up here alone,” he says. “And my own past, unfortunately, is riddled with painful truths.”
She begins to recoil from his words, but the old king laughs. “Don’t worry, I am not asking for your company. But . . .” He shifts again, and if she’s not mistaken, there’s a wobble in his voice when he continues on. “I would ask for your memories. You are young. The experiences you’ve had, the joys you’ve felt, and the love you’ve shared with your sister, Aurora . . . these are pure memories, aren’t they? These are the kinds of things a person wants with him when he dies.”
He wants . . . her memories of Aurora?
Isbe stands up again. “No.” The word is out of her before she can think twice. “No. It is too much to ask. Without those memories, who would I even be anymore? I’d be split. Broken.”
The king sighs. “You’d find new meanings, new memories. It’s like I said, Isabelle. The mind is a prism. The light refracts through it and turns fractures into rainbows.”
“You never said that,” she says, stepping away from him. Edging toward the door. “You said the mind is a prison.”
He laughs that dry laugh again, but makes no move to stop her from leaving. “Ah yes. Well, it is both.”
She can’t give King Verglas her memories—there’s got to be another way to get the armor she needs.
The king, despite his strange ways, has offered her and Byrne rooms in the palace, but Isbe is far too upset to sleep. The king said he wouldn’t help her, not without Isabelle relinquishing what’s most precious to her. Her memories of Aurora.
And on top of it all, he has nothing new to tell her about the slipper, no light to shed on her own past, or how her mother came to possess the magical shoe in the first place. He says only the shoe knows—well, what good does that do? If only she could somehow read the shoe—or any of the ice secrets the king keeps—maybe then she could learn how he makes winter glass . . . or information with which to bribe him. Stories he doesn’t want told.
The palace is enormous and mostly empty, making it extremely difficult to navigate as Isbe fumbles her way along its halls. She keeps expecting to run into a maid, and finally lands on a narrow door at the end of a hall that likely leads into servants’ quarters. Perhaps there she’ll at least locate someone who can help. She pushes through the door and is surprised to find herself, not in a corridor, but out in the open.
Icy winds nip at her skin.
She’s outside. She’s not sure how that happened, and takes a few steps forward, listening hard, trying to get her bearings. Is this a courtyard in the middle of the palace, or has she managed to find a secret exit in the outer wall?
Snow blasts down and around her like a blizzard. She isn’t wearing gloves or a coat, and her whole body is already shaking. She needs to find her way inside, but when she swivels back toward the direction she came from, she hits . . . a wall. She turns and moves forward, only to hit another wall. How is this possible?
Her dinner somersaults in her stomach. Has she wandered into the mouth of the labyrinth?
With the sun almost down, that’s the last place she’d want to be.
Panic rises. She darts again toward where the door should be, and finds, again, smooth wall. She tries her tactic of following the wall, fearing more and more by the second that this is not the wall of the palace itself but one of the many that make up the labyrinth.
Her fingertips are going numb, getting frostbitten. She lets go and tunnels frantically in a new direction. Wall after wall. Turn after turn. No. She is starting to cry and knows she mustn’t—the tears are hardening and tightening against her face. She hears buzzing all around her, closing in on her. Is it the sound of the ice shifting? The wind’s echo within the labyrinth?
She hits another wall and lets out a scream, stumbling backward onto the snowy ground.
The buzzing sound abruptly stops. She feels the silence of the snow.
She scrambles shakily to her feet and lurches forward—into something soft and thick and sturdy. Two hands fall on her shoulders.
“Miss. You should not be out here, and without a cloak.” The voice is gravelly and unfamiliar. One of the palace servants, most likely.
She gasps with relief, clutching on to the stranger. Her teeth are chattering.
“You lost?” He clucks admonishingly. “Lucky I was doing last rounds.” He throws a scratchy fur around her shoulders. “Let’s get you out of here.”
“Are—are you a g-guard?” she asks, trying to control the rapid tremor of her jaw. He laughs. “Groundskeeper. Name’s Dariel. I keep the ice sculptures pristine with this,” he explains, holding something up. It’s whatever caused the buzzing earlier, Isbe guesses.
“There must . . . there must be a way,” she bursts out, her voice still shaky.
“Yes, just follow me,” Dariel says.
“No. No, that’s not what I meant.” She pulls against him, knowing that she’s being irrational—that if she’s left out here alone, she’ll freeze. But it’s like the ice is staring at her, waiting; she can feel the burn of anticipation, of its infinite crystal eyes.
“I’m sorry, miss?”
“To read the ice,” she cries. “There must be a way.”
Dariel pauses, as if thinking, and then responds matter-of-factly. “There is.”
/> 21
Aurora
Some kinds can heal, some can nourish, and others can kill. She hopes these are the right ones.
On her knees in the guest room of Blackthorn Castle, Aurora tears off a corner of her sheet and slips it over her hand like a mitten, then fingers the mushrooms she collected, which have been drying beneath her bed. The mushrooms crumble into a fine dust in her covered palm. Aurora brushes this powder into an emptied clay vase. She then carefully ties the piece of torn sheet over the vase to keep its contents from spilling out. She puts the vase under her bed. When the time is right, Malfleur will succumb. Even the fae are made of flesh and blood.
She draws open the sashes, and the scarlet rays of a smoky sunset spin through the window of her room. She had been consigned to a straw pallet during the first days of her training, which was still far nicer, she knew, than the terrible dungeon where the refugees from Sommeil are held. She can hardly think of them, writhing in fear and sadness, slowly starving—in fact she hasn’t thought of them much since the dark magic began to consume her mind.
But recently—ever since her fight with Heath—Aurora has been given access to a bedroom with fine linens, as well as a small library and a sitting room where she meets with the queen. She has been moved up to these guest quarters ostensibly so that Malfleur can chart her recovery, though Aurora can’t help but wonder if it’s really that Malfleur gets a thrill from keeping dangerous things close.
Sometimes she can hear the queen pacing the halls. Last night, she heard Malfleur leaving her rooms for some unknown purpose, and several mornings ago she could have sworn she saw her return from an all-night sojourn before the sun had fully risen, wiping red from her lips. She couldn’t stop thinking about it, wondering where the queen had gone, what that had been staining her mouth.
Aurora has been meeting with her every evening. The sitting room has a pair of thick-padded chairs, and a grandfather clock that stands in the corner, ominously ticking. The queen seems to enjoy playing with her experiment, asking Aurora to do petty tasks with her magic, like causing the candles to go out just by staring at them. She has even gifted Aurora with a pen and ink so that they can communicate. Aurora can’t help but admit to herself that their conversations have been fascinating. Her desire for vengeance is just as strong as ever, but it has become like a bejeweled dagger—something splendid to behold. She is tempted to take her time with it, to savor it.
But she has stalled too long.
Thirty days have passed since Aurora signed Malfleur’s contract, and tomorrow the great hall at Blackthorn Castle will be clamorous with guests. The queen is having a ball, and even though there’s a war on—or perhaps because of the war, and a frantic desire both for distraction and protection—it seems nearly everyone she invited has eagerly agreed to come.
Aurora is disgusted but not surprised. She thinks of the stadium with weapons hidden under a shallow layer of water. Malfleur’s spectacles are rare, which make them even more highly anticipated. Her most recent spectacle, Aurora thinks with irony, was probably Aurora’s own christening: the day Claudine took her voice in exchange for beauty, and Almandine took her sense of touch in exchange for kindness and grace. The day Malfleur tried to take her future.
In the days since her forced combat with Heath, the fight that almost ended in her death—or his—Aurora has stewed in tension, focusing on healing her body and honing her revenge. But in moments of solitude, when she can’t sleep at night, she has thought about him, her muscles throbbing with the memory of their fight. She had already lost Heath once, had finally let go of what she felt toward him, let go of the hope that this feeling would turn into love. She thought she would have been prepared to see him again.
But not like this. She could never have been prepared for what he has become now—a kind of rabid beast, hungry for her blood, hateful and scarily strong. Magically strong. Malfleur’s deadly pet. The idea brings a pain that makes her seethe with anger.
Is that what she has become too?
And what happened to Heath? Was he punished for nearly destroying her? Or sent to rooms similar to these? Is he close by, even now? At any moment, might he burst out of his cell and kill her? Or might she be forced to kill him?
And what of Wren? Aurora can’t stop wondering what’s become of her, if she has successfully escaped, whether she will ever forgive Aurora for nearly killing her. If Aurora succeeds in her plan to murder Malfleur, will Wren celebrate her as a hero or see only that she has become capable of horrors? And in the quietest, most fearful moments of all, she thinks about Wren’s secret—the cool swath of stone stretched across her collarbone.
She slips on her gloves as one of her trainers lights a lantern and brings her down the darkening hall to the sitting room for another meeting with Malfleur. As the flame crackles in the lantern, the sound startles a memory from long ago: of Queen Amélie, before she got sick. Just a fraction of a memory, really. Her mother had been fickle, jealous—mean, even. But she’d also been lively and fun; she could fill a room with her brilliant and cutting observations. And she delighted herself by dressing Aurora up in the finest garments, weaving her hair into towering designs. Aurora didn’t mind being treated like a doll—it was the closest thing to a mother’s love she knew.
She is consumed now by that same sense of anticipation and dread. That same deep tremor of desire to be approved, admired, loved.
She nervously adjusts her gloves.
Malfleur’s smile when Aurora enters the sitting room sends a shiver down her back. The room seems particularly dim—the clock in the corner overly loud, gonging out a warning in rhythm with her heart.
“I’ve seen you soften metal,” the queen says before Aurora has even closed the door. “I’ve seen you freeze liquid.” Aurora turns to face her, and Malfleur settles back in her seat, looking content—smug. “Tonight, I would like to see you shatter glass.”
Aurora is startled. The task seems no more difficult or more special than any other she has been asked to do, but there is a gleam in Malfleur’s eyes that makes Aurora wary. Whatever she has planned for the party, it must involve glass. Perhaps at tomorrow’s ball, she will have Aurora shatter all of the crystal chandeliers, sending glimmering shards raining down on the heads of all her guests and putting out all their light at once.
Or maybe not. Maybe these are just the disturbing thoughts that twist effortlessly through Aurora’s own mind now, drawing up visions that both disgust and delight her imagination.
Malfleur opens her palms. Inside them sits a small glass figurine, delicate and sweet, like a child’s toy. It is cut from black-and-gray glass, or what looks like glass, in the shape of an animal—a fox, Aurora thinks.
For a moment, she turns her concentration to a window in the corner of the room, wondering whether it would be big enough to escape through if she were able to shatter it. But it’s no larger than two hands, and the drop from here to the ground would be deadly.
She turns her attention back to the tiny fox, sending a wave of heat and fury toward not the object itself, which is too darling to look at, but at Malfleur’s hands. Nothing happens. Frustrated, Aurora draws closer to the queen, feeling her own magic spike as she steps toward her, allowing the sickening excitement of it to fill her. She tries again, her eyes blazing hard, her pulse rising; the desire to destroy, to break things apart so that they no longer resemble what they once were, floods her mind in a black wave. She can hardly see. She feels the presence of the glass fox and something else too, a stubbornness—a protection, almost, like a shield around the animal. It feels almost like the wall separating the Borderlands from the Blackthorn of Sommeil. It feels like Queen Belcoeur’s enchantment.
There is a screaming crack, and then the sound of a tiny explosion. Aurora’s vision clears. The fox, strangely, remains intact, and Malfleur looks puzzled, her mouth twisted in a frown. In her peripheral vision, Aurora sees that it was not the figurine that broke, but the face of the grandfather clock, also
made of glass.
The queen stands and paces, obviously upset, concentrating on the glass fox. Aurora wonders if Malfleur is trying to use her own magic to do the same thing, and discovering the impossibility of it.
In the split second that Malfleur is occupied with the figurine, Aurora spins toward the clock. She has been given no access to weapons, but the gong of midnight sounds, low and harsh in her ears, and as it does, she plunges her hand through the broken face and tears the iron hour hand right off the clock. Then, in a seamless movement, she turns, aims, and throws.
The clock hand skewers Malfleur in the throat.
Shock and victory freeze Aurora to the spot as the queen stumbles. Then Aurora snaps out of it and shakily removes her gloves, dusted in the poison of the dried mushrooms. Run. She should run. But instead she watches with horror as the wound begins to bubble with pus that turns white and then green as the poison takes hold. The queen clutches at her neck, a look of shock on her pale face. For a moment, all is stillness, all is silence, as the queen’s eyes begin to roll back.
And then slowly, gradually, Malfleur removes her hand from her neck. The green ooze has gone. There is still a wound, bloodied at its edges, but not one deep enough to do serious harm. The queen looks at the blood on her hands, and then, to Aurora’s surprise, licks her own wet hand like an animal. She catches Aurora’s eyes. “Thank you, pet.” Aurora stares, sickened, unable to move. “It has been too long since I’ve earned a scar from someone who matters to me.”
Time seems to stand still as Aurora begins to understand that she has failed.
The queen considers. “Still, you will have to be restrained.” She nods, and two guards race into the room, as though they’ve been watching all of this take place. Aurora had thought they were alone. The guards drag Aurora out of the room and through the darkened palace, Malfleur leading the way.
It takes a moment before Aurora realizes where they are taking her.
Back to the cage.
The metal door rattles shut with an ominous clang.
