Winter Glass

by Lexa Hillyer

  “Father,” Belcoeur whispers to King Verglas. “She deserves to be free. She would never be free with me in Sommeil. But what can I do to keep her safe from Malfleur?”

  The king tells her to go out and break the scrim of ice over the well, then to draw a bucket of water.

  When she returns, shivering from the cold, King Verglas takes the bucket and pours it, very slowly, almost tenderly, over the young girl’s sleeping form. He mumbles to himself as he pours, and she can feel the magic of his words, of the story of this moment. The moment becomes the water, freezing it into a full-body armor of winter glass, including skirts and two dainty little slippers. He even fashions the child a satchel of unbreakable arrowheads, all while the girl remains asleep.

  “As long as she is in possession of this armor,” he says, “she will be safe. The ice holds the secret of her identity inside it—the memory of you as her mother. Now no one can know who she is—not even herself—and so she can never be found, except to be found by herself.”

  It is another riddle—King Verglas is fond of them, she knows, and a beat of fear passes through her, becoming regret on the other side. Has she made a mistake? It is too late to ask, and too late to ever know. She must leave, at once. Sommeil awaits her. A world where none of this pain exists. A world where Charles was never killed, where she never loved him to begin with. A world where her sister never broke her heart.

  She kisses the girl on the forehead one last time, and in that kiss, Belcoeur, who is Malfleur, who is witnessing the entire history of the winter-glass armor in a single moment, feels the fluid and fleeting passage of time under her cold lips, and sees the daughter wake and step out of her armor, no longer remembering her own name. The girl has no recollection of Belcoeur, either. Still, the girl keeps the armor with her always, as a relic of a past she can’t recall. The girl grows up to have her own daughter, whom she names Cassandra, and to whom she passes on what remains of the armor and arrows.

  She raises Cassandra in obscurity, and Cassandra uses every single one of the ice arrowheads in her hunts, so that by the time she has met and fallen in love with King Henri, she knows not who she is or where she came from or that she is in fact part fae, and has given up almost every piece of winter glass that might reveal the secret. All she knows of her past is what she has left of her mother, and her mother before her: one tiny glass slipper, no bigger than a child’s.

  Though the knowledge contained in the winter glass has poured over her in an instant—an instant that felt like years—it was just enough time for Isabelle to seize the advantage. Malfleur’s mind clears, her hands and arms drenched in melted ice, just as Isabelle pulls out a real sword hidden beneath her cloak, and plunges it through Malfleur’s chest.

  The blade meets her flesh, and in her last gasp, Malfleur feels the love that Belcoeur felt toward her, the love she felt toward the daughter she was forced to leave behind, the hope that Malfleur would one day forgive her, and above all, the heartbreak of knowing she would not.

  Malfleur seizes, going stiff. Her eyes fly upward, and she sees only fog, only nothingness. There is no final wisdom, no final redemption, no final good-bye. There is no glory—a wellspring of beautiful magic dies with her.

  Her breath goes, brilliantly and suddenly, like a light blown out.

  She falls.

  31

  Isabelle

  Timing is everything. Isbe, if anyone, should know that.

  And still she wasn’t prepared for the suddenness of Malfleur’s death.

  It was as though her dagger had cut a rent through time itself, and everything froze.

  Even when the last remaining faerie queen fell to the ground, lifeless, and Isabelle was able to think clearly again, it still seemed as though time was moving more slowly than normal, like mist over water, twinning itself, every moment doubled and rippling.

  The Vultures camped in the fields beyond the castle grounds were dismantled from whatever spell of magic the queen had forced over them, and awoke in a great confusion, removing their masks and scratching their heads, splashing cold stream water onto their faces and looking into it for some sign of who they were. Many could not recall their own names.

  It was enough of a delay for William to rally one last bout of Delucian soldiers beyond the wall, but the day did not end in mass slaughter, for when the Delucian soldiers arrived at the site and took in the scene, they were struck by its innocence. Many of the unmasked enemy were revealed to be but young boys, lost and trying to find their way home—and those who were men, well, some of them were still full of directionless fury. The conflict was not without further bloodshed, but Deluce regained significant advantage and, in the end, drove off the last of Malfleur’s former puppets. Her army was shown for what it had always been: one giant and dreadful enchantment.

  It was an illusion that will leave many broken—for there are many who believed in Malfleur’s message, who still thought she was going to make them all knights, going to restore a kind of power and privilege they could not access in this life. Many will not appreciate the return to reality, Isbe knows. The world is not a pleasant place for everyone in it. She learned that much, has seen it, even though she cannot see.

  She recalls the stops she and William once made along the Veiled Road—servants willing to rally and support her mission even before she became queen. But she recalls too the many towns where she was unwelcome on her tour as their new queen, where she was accused of being an imposter—or worse, seen as just another aristocrat asking for more and more and more from people who had nothing left to give.

  She had come for their men, and though huge numbers signed up willingly to fight for Deluce, many also lost their lives for a kingdom that has seldom if ever come around to earning that allegiance.

  She doesn’t know if she can fix it all, or even some of it. She doesn’t know if anything she can do will ever be enough.

  But she knows one thing with utter certainty: she can try.

  And that is what she’s going to tell William when she finds him to say good-bye.

  He’s packing a trunk, and she comes up behind his chair, puts her hand on his shoulder. He turns and pulls slightly away.

  “I love you,” she says. The words fly out of her like freed birds. It is perhaps the first and only time she has said it plainly.

  Silence.

  “Then why?” A question raw with hurt—it reopens the pain in her too.

  Why? Does she really have an answer?

  She could go with him, as he has begged her so many times to do. Travel to Aubin and help him combat the rise of his brother Edward, attempt to prevent civil war from breaking out. She could leave Aurora here to run Deluce on her own, or perhaps with Wren’s help.

  “Because that’s not my story,” she says.

  “But it could be.”

  “I love my sister. I love my kingdom. I love you too, but I don’t want to have to choose.”

  “And yet you have chosen,” he says. And then, “I will still love you, Isabelle. From afar. Not being beside you won’t change that. I haven’t given up.”

  “Good,” she says. Then she takes his hand, and places it on her belly, where she feels a tiny stirring, perhaps nascent or perhaps only imagined. “Don’t ever give up on us.”

  She puts her forehead against his, and they stay that way, breathing timidly, as if too violent a movement would separate them finally and forever. He does not kiss her, though she can feel his desire to, the heat of him, his intense gaze and his serious chin and his careful hands and the hurt that has chiseled him into the man she has fallen in love with. And she understands why he doesn’t. It would be too much. Already this moment is too much—it contains its own ending, as every moment does.

  But this is not, she understands now, the ending of her story. It is evening. She stands on the parapets of the palace—where until recently she and Aurora used to seek escape and spy on the council meetings—listening to the roar and rage of the strait below, the r
ustle and slap of sails as the prince’s ship sets off for Aubin.

  That—her ending—is something that must still be discovered and created, cut and polished and sized and honed just like the Delucian sapphires that, she once learned, came out of the ground rough and dark and covered in dirt. Mined by the very people who fought and bled for this kingdom.

  And though Isabelle has vowed to stop positioning herself in anyone else’s story, a question still remains that keeps her awake at night. If she is Belcoeur’s descendant, doesn’t that mean that she’s part fae, and capable of ruling in her own right? The fae all have magic that is specific somehow to who they are, but if Isbe has any special power, she doesn’t know what it is. She wishes she knew for sure. But nothing ever comes of wishing.

  Or does it?

  She recalls how hard she wished to see her sister again when she returned from the Îles de Glace, and how that wish swept through her with a physical agony that resulted in, seemingly, its coming true.

  What if wishing is what caused her own miraculous survival throughout all of the adventures she’s had?

  Gilbert is back and alive. She has not seen him yet, but she knows that he saved the prince in battle.

  Maybe he lived because she wished it so.

  Maybe William loved her for that reason too.

  Maybe the deepest wish of all—to matter, to help—is what killed Malfleur, and not simply the recipe of Belcoeur’s bloodline in Isbe’s veins.

  She thinks of what Dariel told her about winter glass—how our stories find us, and not the other way around. Aurora said something similar, and perhaps she’s right. Isbe has spent so much of her life searching, striving. What if the answer was sitting in her heart, plainly, all this time?

  There is only one way to find out.

  To know for certain, she must make a wish. Just one wish, not enough to turn her mad with greed like so many of the fae. Just enough to prove to herself that she’s right, that the magic in her is real and alive. That her power is wishing.

  Just enough to finally know herself.

  She doesn’t have to think for even a moment—it’s as if the wish has lived inside her forever. Or at least, since Aurora was born, since the day Isbe was given a sister, and a purpose. The wish has been curled and dormant through everything the sisters have experienced together: through the years of coded messages tapped into Isbe’s palms, through the constructing of snow statues and whole worlds unto themselves. Through summer evenings full of eavesdropping and bartered gossip. Through cold nights haunted by fits of coughing and even colder mornings coated in the frost of unfathomable loss—first one parent, then the other.

  Even in her isolation, in her journey away from Aurora, away from all she thought she knew about herself and her sister.

  Yes, the wish has always been there; it is there, still, waiting to be wished, and it is the truest form of love that Isabelle knows.

  So she closes her eyes, and wishes it.

  Epilogue

  Violette,

  a Faerie Duchess of Remarkable Bearing,

  According to Her Selves

  The young maiden of Sommeil—Wren is her name—awoke the very next day, the day after Queen Isabelle’s secret wish, to discover that the stone that had begun to usurp her body had vanished with the night, and in its place, flesh had returned, spotted in places like a new leaf, tender and soft and alive. Belcoeur’s curse on her had been lifted.

  Or so the rumor goes. Trade routes have reopened, and with them the flow of gossip has returned. Not that Violette prefers the rancid breath of messengers to her own curious thoughts, but occasionally she does take interest in the goings-on of the kingdom, especially when they reflect so highly upon her.

  After all, was it not she who amended Wren’s curse in the first place, just like she did Aurora’s? To the blood of Belcoeur you will remain bound, never to fly free, your bond as firm as the stone you’re already starting to become . . . until true love softens the stone back into flesh and bone.

  The maiden and the princess had clearly found true love, and that was why the curse was broken. All exactly according to Violette’s own words.

  She smiles smugly at the reflection in her billiard table, which is, of course, constructed entirely out of mirrors, except for the velvet-lined pockets. Sometimes she likes to linger in the billiards room, playing games with herself. She almost always lets herself win.

  But just as pride surges within her—surely it’s not too presumptuous to assert that she is the real hero of this tale?—she experiences a most discomforting tremor of doubt. The doubt rapidly succumbs to panic, as she recalls a slight snag in her own rationale.

  She had not thought true love existed.

  It had all been a twisted, painted, yet delightful fiction, presented to impress, like a rouge or fancy hairdo.

  And there is a second piece to the gossip, which doesn’t fit with the first.

  Soon after the maiden from Sommeil discovered that her curse had been lifted, she told the princess that she longed to fly free. Wren had, after all, spent her whole life trapped—in a world of dreams—and now she saw that she could only be happy if she knew no confines and no bounds, or so the rumors say. There was a great world beyond the palace of Deluce to explore.

  But if the stories are true, if Wren left Aurora, then this cannot signify true love. Can it? Indeed the story seems, as the old Ice King, Uncle Verglas, might once have said, like a paradox.

  And Violette dislikes paradoxes almost as much as she dislikes insects, visitors, and expectations. Fears them, actually, nearly as much as she fears being alone in the dark.

  She sinks the winning ball—or is it the losing shot?—into a corner pocket. Or is it a socket? Her hand begins to tremble. She begins to contemplate terrible, demonic things. Like what people would think if they found her hanging by her neck from one of her chandeliers, and whether the chandelier would hold her weight, and at what angle her head ought to be cocked so as to appear the most tragic—the left or the right.

  She begins to cry quietly, because dying that way seems awful and yet she knows she deserves it, for all of the innocent people whose sight she has tithed over the years. For her willingness to side with Binks and, in turn, Malfleur.

  Now even the great and powerful Malfleur is dead, and so is Belcoeur, and even Claudine. Their cousin Almandine is but an addled and vacant-eyed living corpse. What is to become of Violette? What is to become of any of them?

  Despite their propensity for long lives, the fae have been rapidly vanishing from this world, and she knows it. Who will save them? Are they meant to be saved at all?

  Perhaps there is some other curse at work, one she does not know about. Perhaps there is time yet to amend it, to undo it. After all, no one knows exactly how a faerie curse works—a curse is almost always more powerful than the faerie who uttered it.

  Yes, surely it is not too sentimental to hold the view that the future of all the fae lies in Violette’s own delicate hands.

  But then, saving her kind would mean risking a lot of things, like exposure to sunlight and other people’s opinions. She shivers and stares down at the billiard table. In addition to the surface, the playing balls are also made of mirrors. In them she sees a series of reflected eyes, all of them rolling this way and that. All of them judging her.

  With the butt of her cue, she shatters the table.

  In the cracks between the shards, she has a momentary revelation. She sees the truth, the real tragedy, so clearly it might have shattered her—except that, thankfully, the sun angles through her window and catches the light of the broken mirror, now become mirrors plural, many-angled, and in them all, she is haloed and safe.

  Violette heaves a sigh of relief, and fixes a stray hair.

  What was it she had been worrying herself over? Something to do with true love. A quaint thing, really. A good story, anyway, if she does say so herself.

  One of the best kinds.

  Epilogue
/>   (the Real One)

  Gilbert

  A giant, steaming manure pile.

  That is the state of Deluce. Who knew winning a war could look so much like losing one?

  Roul was killed when his village was overtaken by enemy forces.

  His children are, even now, on their way here, accompanied by a local milkmaid—a young widow who will be entrusted with their care. This young widow is said to be as pretty as she is kind.

  Gil knows what will be expected of him. It is understood, without anyone ever saying so, that he will marry the beautiful stranger.

  And perhaps he will. He is no faerie, after all; he certainly cannot predict the future, and it’s unlikely he has much power over it whatsoever. The future, he has always thought, is like an untamed colt. It will trample anything that comes underfoot.

  It only wants to be free.

  It breaks Gil’s heart that he has lost a brother, and that Aalis and Piers are orphaned. And yet he knows that his own losses are nothing compared to what others have seen. Everywhere, there is devastation, disorganization, bitterness, and death.

  In fact, next to all that, actual manure looks rather inviting.

  Gil finishes mucking the last stall, his arm muscles singing with the bend and lift of it. The familiar stable smells fill him with a kind of homesick joy. Thrushes dust through the shimmering, sunlit mist outside, and the horses shuffle their hooves, sniffing the arrival of spring, soothed by it, or by Gil’s return, or just by the stillness of the morning.

  And that is where Isabelle finds him, brushing Cobalt’s coat, which gleams so black it’s almost blue. Cobalt gives a low whicker at her arrival, and Gil turns to see her there, framed by the open stable doors, as he has seen her so many times before, though this is the first time since his return.