Coughing and sputtering, Isbe finally reaches an opening in the village walls that rises just inches over the freezing, wretched water, letting air whistle through and beneath it. She doesn’t know how long she’s been traveling, mostly on all fours, along the sewage route. The castle village is farther inland than she thought. It’s been more than a full day, and there’s a dull burn in her stomach and throat.
Holding her breath, she goes under.
She emerges on the other side of the wall and gags. Then she crawls along the inside of the wall, away from the stream, until she finds a frozen puddle. She pulls back her hand and then, with a trembling fist, slams hard into the puddle, cracking its surface. Beneath it is clean rainwater, which she hungrily splashes over her face, gulping handfuls of it down, until she can no longer take the added injury of cold on cold.
Her legs are so chilled she’s not sure if she can stand again, but she manages to wobble to her feet. Now that she’s moved several yards from the stream, she is able to take in other smells beyond its putrid odor. She detects the smoke of a blacksmith and fumbles toward it, leaving the safety of the wall. All she can think of right now is fire. Warmth. Day has fully broken, and she can hear the bustle of peasants pushing carts and herding animals. Someone is bound to spot her soon and realize she is out of place.
Several times she trips and falls—on a wooden crate, a low stone wall, other items she’s too distressed to recognize. She’s too numb to feel the pain of blooming bruises along her shins and arms. A rooster crows at her.
She bangs her fists along the outer walls of the blacksmith’s shop until she finds the door, a sour burning smell puffing out from its corners.
The door swings open, and she falls forward into the smoke and heat.
“’Ee’s not dead!” a young boy exclaims sometime later. For a moment, Isbe is sure it’s Piers, Gil’s nephew. But as she comes to, she realizes the voice bears a distinctly Aubinian accent. That’s right. She found the blacksmith’s hut. This must be the smith’s son. “But ’ee canna see me!” the boy adds.
Another boy comes over. “’Ee’s got a demon a’ some kine. Let’s get Da.”
“Wait, no,” Isbe says, sitting up dizzily on the dirt floor. It’s not the first time someone has seen the way her eyes wander, sightless, and believed her to be possessed by an evil spirit. “Don’t go to your father. I’m . . . I . . .” Think, Isbe. She recalls the stories Gil and Roul used to love to scare her with when they were kids. “I’m a messenger from across the sea. I have news of . . .” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “The murder of the princes. I have . . . I got business with the palace. But a, er, a pirate, ’ee took my ship. Now I need you boys’ help.”
“You seen pirates!” one of them hollers.
“How ca’ we help?” asks the other.
“Was dem princes killed by the pirates too?” asks the first.
“Shhh,” Isbe says, doing her best to seem conspiratorial. “The . . . dem pirates could come back for us.”
“For us?” One of the boys—he can hardly be older than five or six—begins to whimper.
She turns to face the older-sounding one. “I jus’ need two things. First is a cloak. ’Ave you got a clean cloak for me?”
He darts away and returns, placing a heavy woolen blanket into her palms.
“This will do,” Isbe says, wrapping it around her shoulders.
“What’s t’ other thing?” the younger boy asks.
“Hand me a stick or a fork—anything like that—and I’ll show you,” Isbe says.
One of the boys places a rustic tool into her hands. She’s not sure what it is. She bends over and tries to draw in the hard dirt of the floor, carving the image from memory. The castle’s main gates are at the eastern wall. The tallest tower is the northeast one, which overlooks the sea in the distance. And the servants’ quarters are clustered along the northernmost wing, which gets the harshest winds and is thus less coveted by the royal family and its guests.
She points to a notch she has just drawn in that wall. “I need you to take me here. In secret.”
She lets the boys study the messy drawing in the dirt for a full minute or two before rubbing it away with her sleeve.
“Will you tell us more about da pirate?”
“Yessir,” Isbe promises. “I’ll tell ya all about ’im . . . on the way.”
Shimmying through the peasants’ pantry window is not the hard part. Though the main gates to the palace are well protected, the peasants’ pantry is easily accessible from the outside. It would not be fitting for farmers to have to deliver grain from the granary to the kitchens via the front entrance, which is reserved for militia, merchants, and visiting nobility.
And of course, there’s no way she’d pass for any of the above. She has to hide behind a sack of wheat for the better part of the day, knowing the palace is heavily guarded and that sneaking about in full light is a bad idea. She remains curled in the blacksmith’s wool blanket, trying to warm up. Weary as her body feels, she’s far too nervous to sleep.
But navigating the northern wing and finding passage to the palace wall walks along the roof that evening is not the hard part either. By testing, listening, and pausing, she is able to make her way to the turret she recalls from her snow-sculpting sessions with her sister. This is far safer than wandering the halls themselves, where she’s bound to knock over something fragile, creating a distraction, or walk straight into a servant who might report her to the guards.
No, the hard part is guessing which of the chambers belongs to the youngest prince. At the news of his elder two brothers’ deaths, would William have moved up into their likely more plush and comfortable rooms, or remained in his own? She knows that royals are always considering such advantages and what they signify. Then again, Aubin is not as enamored of luxuries as Deluce is. The Aubinians are known for being a more austere people.
How she wishes she were with Gil, and that they were entering the castle the way they’d initially planned—as merchants offering goods to the master of trade.
How she wishes, for that matter, that Aurora had never fallen sick with sleep.
How she wishes, above all, that the faeries were not such a vengeful and self-serving breed, because it is Binks’s fault that Gil and Isbe have been separated, she’s certain. It’s Violette’s fault she lost her sight at the age of two. And it’s Malfleur’s fault that a curse was put on Aurora in the first place.
But wishing, she reminds herself, does not produce results.
Her arms shaking from exhaustion, she scampers down over the edge of the parapet and finds footing. Quickly, before she can think how foolishly dangerous this is, she inches along the wall until her foot hits an oriel. The window doesn’t open easily. It takes several kicks before she is able to enter with a loud, shattering crack. She almost loses her grip, and gasps. The wool blanket falls from her shoulders, into the open wind. Then she swings herself the rest of the way through the broken glass and into the room.
She catches her breath. Thankfully, no one else seems to be in the room at the moment, or surely there would be hollering and she’d have been apprehended by now, and dragged to the dungeons. She has thrown caution away as easily as she lost her borrowed “cloak,” and by this point she’s hardly even thinking straight.
Isbe realizes her hand is bleeding, but there’s no time to worry. She gropes for something to hold on to—the room must be sparsely appointed, as it is difficult to find anything. She ends up yanking a drape off a large chair in the process, probably leaving a bloody handprint. This must be Edward’s or Philip’s room—why else would the furniture be covered?
She crashes into a table next, banging her hip hard. This is a disaster. In her hurry to find the door, she smashes an object that sounds valuable as it breaks. A servant is bound to have heard. She can only have a few seconds left before someone discovers her.
Ah. The door. She exits and runs her hands along walls oddly bare of tapestries, down a hallway, her mind racing, not even caring that she might be tracing blood. How is she to find William? Will he believe her story? Will he even remember who she is? She notices a faint fragrance coming from every direction, citrusy and fresh, as though the windows have been purposefully kept open—so different from the sweet floral musks preferred by the Delucian palace.
“You there!” a female voice calls in a thick Aubinian accent. Probably a servant. She’s been spotted. The voice is about fifty paces away—likely at the very end of the long hall.
Isbe doesn’t turn around.
“Stop!” the woman behind her cries.
She pushes open another door and stumbles into a room, slamming the door closed behind her.
Then she is roughly shoved down, and the air is knocked out of her.
Someone is pinning her arms to the floor. He smells of fresh sweat masked by lime soap.
“State your purpose if you want to live,” the young man says. His voice is quiet, a tree in the wind, but his grip on Isbe’s arms is tense. She feels the vibration in his entire body and recognizes it: fear.
“It would . . . be easier . . . to . . . state my—” she huffs out, finally giving up.
The man rolls off her, taking his exotic lime-soap smell with him. Isbe heaves a deep breath.
There’s a rapid knock on the door, and a woman’s breathless voice comes through, the same servant who tried to stop Isbe moments ago. “An intruder, my lord!”
“I have it well in hand, Elise,” he calls through the closed door. “You may return to your duties. Now tell me,” he demands, turning his voice back toward Isbe, “the name of the person so bold as to enter the chambers of the prince without invitation. And in your condition,” he adds.
“I have been blind for sixteen years. I am quite capable of getting around in my condition,” Isbe declares, sitting up with effort.
“Actually, I didn’t mean that,” he says, less roughly. “I meant your . . . well, the disarray of your attire, the hideous stench emanating from you . . .” He lifts her hand and then drops it again. “The fingers nearly blue from cold. And there’s the haphazardly shorn hair . . .” He sucks in a breath. “Gods help me—are you a woman?”
Insulted, Isbe pushes a stray clump of soggy hair out of her face, feeling something wet streak her forehead. Blood, most likely. Then she remembers what she must look and smell like, her hair having been hacked short with a knife, and having sailed the open sea, nearly died, and then tunneled into the castle village via its sewage system before bloodying her hand from a broken window. She crosses her arms over her chest. “How’d you figure it out?”
“Your frame is much too small to be a man’s, your voice too high, your lips too delicate.” He is still sitting beside her on the cold marble floor, and she can feel the weight of his gaze on her, more intense than the weight of his body had been.
“I fooled the entire ship of sailors who brought me to your shores.” She feels a zing of pride when she says this aloud.
“And let me guess—you paid your way aboard this ship.”
“Yes, but—” She stops. Could he be right? Were they just playing along, pretending to believe she was a boy and that Gil was her brother? Would the captain have simply given passage to anyone carrying the right amount of gold coins? Humiliation sweeps through her, heating her cheeks. “Well.” She swallows. “Since you asked my name, it’s Isabelle. Daughter to the late King Henri of Deluce.”
The man emits a sound that resembles a choke and a snort.
“What?”
He makes the sound again. It is, she’s horrified to realize, a laugh.
“I’ve been through far too much to be made fun of now,” she says, trying to steady the slight tremor in her voice. She begins to stand, hoping her weakened legs won’t wobble.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his cloak giving a low, velvety swish across the floor as he stands too. “I’m not making fun of you. I just . . .”
There it is again, the laugh. She glowers.
He clears his throat. “So, Isabelle of Deluce, if that really is who you are. What did cause you to go through so much just to seek admittance to the prince? Did the Delucian council send you? Because it certainly wouldn’t appear so. And how did you possibly get across our borders? They’ve been closed to travelers from Deluce for the past week, ever since news spread here of the—”
“Sleeping sickness, I know. I have my ways,” she answers, not willing just now to explain that she nearly drowned and was saved, only to be unceremoniously dumped on an abandoned and reeking dock miles from the palace. “And I will only explain why I am here to the prince himself. Please prove to me that you are in fact William of Aubin.”
“I must prove my identity to you?” he asks with faint amusement. “I could have you sent to the dungeons for the rest of your life for trespassing.”
“Give me your hand,” Isbe demands.
She hears him hesitate, clearly taken aback by the forwardness of her request. But then, gently, he picks up her right hand and places it on his palm. She moves her fingers over his, feeling the strength and sturdiness of his hand before running her fingertips over his rings until she finds what she’s searching for—the royal Aubinian signet.
Satisfied, she turns her face toward his. “It is you.”
“How did you get in here?” he asks, sounding sincerely curious. “The palace is quite well defended. If my castle guard is sleeping on the job, they’ll be hearing about it soon enough. You’ve embarrassed a family—and a nation—known for our caution.”
“I’ve lived in a palace all my life. I know my way around.”
“Well, you’ve made quite an impression.”
She’s not sure what to think of the comment, but once again she feels the weight of his gaze, and it makes her uncomfortable. She clears her throat. “We need to talk. I’m here to seek your . . . well.” She hesitates, realizing she should have planned her speech better. “My kingdom needs your help. I—I need your help. You have to come with me back to Deluce. At once. Now, in fact. We should leave today.”
“Travel to Deluce? With you? That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous! I . . . we—this is an emergency. Deluce is desperate. You’re our only hope at the moment.”
William sighs. “I’m very sorry, Isabelle. Really, I am. The sleeping sickness sounds terrifying. I hate that Aubin has had to close its borders, but we can’t afford a crippling plague when times are hard enough as it is. I really am very sorry indeed, but I don’t see what I could possibly do to help.”
“Sorry indeed? Don’t be an idiot, William. Don’t act like you don’t know that both our kingdoms are in danger. And I’m very sorry for the loss of your older brothers—” She feels a little bit bad about spitting out that last part. “But the responsibility to do the right thing for Aubin lies in your hands now. I hope you don’t intend to let your kingdom fall to Malfleur.”
“Ah, so this is a political visit.”
“What else would it be? I’m not here for a hot cup of tea!”
“No,” the prince says, that gentle swaying-tree sound back in his voice. “You certainly are not.”
“I’m here to talk about how our countries can help each other in a time of great peril. The threat of Malfleur is real, no matter how much you’d like to deny it.”
“I don’t deny it,” he says, pacing. “Aubin has long suspected Queen Malfleur’s dissatisfaction with the LaMorte Territories. We’ve been anticipating a move on her part for years. But that doesn’t mean I’ll help Deluce.”
This surprises Isbe. Her impression, both from the palace as well as her brief time in the country at Roul’s home, has left her believing that the majority of people doubt Malfleur will ever organize. And certainly most of them don’t know what Isbe knows.
“If you agree with me that the faerie queen is a true threat, then how can you conscionably refuse to help? Who do you think will be next if Deluce falls? Once she has all our gold and our caverns of wine, what do you think she’ll come for? The sunny shores of Aubin, that’s what.”
“Perhaps,” William says. “But unlike Deluce, we have weapons. We’re prepared for war. Deluce, on the other hand, is fattened with wealth and pride, lazy, ignorant, and massively divided by infighting. Your people are unhappy, your military wildly disorganized, and now a devastating disease is sweeping through the aristocracy, beginning at the very top. An alliance would be imprudent at best, and more likely doomed.”
Isbe feels as though she has been punched in the jaw. She is floored by this account of her kingdom. The sting of his assessment is made worse by the faint taste of truth in it.
She blinks rapidly, trying to regain her composure. She needs to try a new tactic. “Malfleur’s people killed your brothers. Isn’t that enough to incite vengeance?”
“That portrait of the situation is only one view.”
“What do you mean?” Isbe feels her face getting hot with frustration.
“We have every reason to suspect that Deluce, and not LaMorte, is responsible for the murder of my brothers,” William says, his words hard as stone on stone.
“But—I—why?”
“Because your kingdom doesn’t want this alliance any more than ours does. If you really think your royal council is acting in the general interests of the populace, then you are wrong. It seems I know what the Delucian peasantry wants more than you do, Isabelle. They are sick of seeing the lavish waste of the upper classes while they work and suffer.”
She swallows hard. “And Aubin’s peasants are living in luxury, I suppose?” she asks, sweeping her arms around to indicate the decadence of the room, though even as she does, she realizes that from what she’s observed so far, this palace is in fact far less furnished, decorated, and perfumed than the Delucian palace.
“No,” William admits. “But we lead by example. We have strict regulations that all nobility must adhere to. We make public accounting of all our taxations. Our kingdom is lean and efficient. Our expenses go toward weapons and military, not superfluous indulgences.”
“But . . . but . . . Deluce is constantly exporting goods to Aubin.”
“Oils, metals, essentials. Not spices or silks.”
She can’t argue with him—she doesn’t know enough about Delucian trade to assess whether what he says is accurate. “Even if you’re right, you’re still not going to be able to save yourselves from Malfleur, if the information I have is true.”
“And what information is that?”
“The sleeping sickness is the work of the fae. Dark faerie magic, William. Meant to cripple us just as Malfleur launches her plot to overtake us. And that means closing the borders won’t help. The sickness is not a typical disease of nature, but the result of a curse. It will come for you too, all of you. Unless we work together to stop it.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” He seems to be really listening now.
“I know how to undo the curse,” she says.
“Hmm,” he says—it’s his thinking noise, she realizes. “A faerie curse. You must realize how this sounds. The fae have been dormant for decades. Most could not abide by the laws laid down by my father’s father and have long since left Aubin . . . those that haven’t died out, that is. I’ve never heard of one having the power to curse a nation and cause a disease.”
“You have to belie—”
“That said,” the prince goes on, cutting her off. “If what you say is true . . .”
“It is. I know it is. Malfleur cursed Aurora, my sister, to die on her sixteenth birthday. Then the faerie duchess Violette amended the curse, saying she wouldn’t die but would fall into a deep sleep, only to be awakened by true love. As far as I can gather, my father and his wife made every attempt to cover it up, and the Delucian council is complicit in hiding it. They saw it as an irredeemable scandal, one they clearly wanted to keep hidden from the people and, even more importantly, from Aubin. And now almost everyone in attendance at her christening is dead or asleep. But Violette said true love would awaken Aurora. And that’s where you come in.”
“You think I’m Aurora’s true love?”
“I think you can be. I don’t know much about the fae except that their curses are not always as literal as they seem. And I have to try. I have to try. If you come help me, and if you succeed in awakening my sister, it will send a signal to Malfleur that we can stand against her magic.”
The prince is quiet for a moment. “But what if we can’t?”
“So you do believe me, then?” Isbe asks, relief flooding her, bringing in a new wave of energy.
“Hmm,” he says.
“Let me ask you something,” Isbe says softly. “If you had a chance to bring back your brothers, would you try?”
His laugh this time is curt and hard, a door slamming. “The answer to that is complicated. My brothers . . . they weren’t very kind.”
Isbe doesn’t know how to respond to that. It’s not at all what she was expecting him to say. All the hope she felt moments ago shrivels like a dried leaf. He doesn’t believe in faerie magic. He doesn’t believe the sleeping sickness is a curse, or that he could possibly play a role in undoing it. He isn’t going to help. She’s come all this way—she’s lost Gil and risked her own life, and for what?
Her mouth feels dry. She licks her lips. They are chapped, and sting. Her whole face is chapped, in fact, her skin stretched dry from the salt and the freezing wind. Her body aches—she’s still cold, and wet, and horribly reeking—and her hand stings from her cut. Her head hurts. Despair pushes down on her, making it difficult to stay upright. She needs a chair. Why is there no chair? She sways slightly, trying to think, trying to figure out how to save this. But she can’t think. Not anymore. Gilbert is gone. Aurora is asleep—maybe forever. And Deluce, just as the prince said, is doomed.
“Isabelle, I do believe that Malfleur intends to go to war, and that our kingdoms are mutually endangered. Though her soldiers, if they mean to take the Delucian palace, will first have to survive the sickness, which may in fact buy us some time. Still, I will hear no further political entreaties until you have done one thing for me.”
Isbe swallows. “And what is that?” She’s been through so much, she’s afraid this last request will be the one that kills her.
“For the love of all things decent, I insist you have a bath.”
It is late now. She is alone. The night guard is quiet enough that she can hear the scampering of mice in the corners of the halls, the fluttering of bats in the courtyard, the lone coo of an owl searching the dark, its hunger as yet unsatisfied. She can hear, almost, the settling of sheets around sleeping bodies, the scuttling of the palace baker preparing for the next day’s meals, the hum of snores. And even more faintly, more impossibly, comes the sweet voice from her mother dreams, twisting the lyrics of the rose lullaby like vines around her heart.
The prince informed only Elise, one of his most trusted servants, to draw and heat the water and to provide fresh clothes before leaving Isbe to disrobe. No one else knows of her presence. Hundreds of fresh cuts and scrapes cry out silently as Isbe lowers her sore, tender limbs into the bath through a cloud of citrus-scented steam, but gradually the chill begins to recede from her bones. Her nakedness makes her feel even more alone, and she sinks lower, until the water comes up to her chin and ears, to the tips of her shorn hair.
This bath is going to make her smell like William.
She clutches her wounded palm and thinks of the prince’s premonition about Malfleur. Thinks of how readily he said it: war.
The word moves through Isbe with a tremor. She spent much of her youth spying on military drills and has always fantasized about fighting for a cause.
Maybe even dying for one.
Gilbert always said she was crazy to want that.
The heat seeps into her, thawing and unlocking feelings she doesn’t want unlocked. She can’t think about Gil. Not now.
She holds her breath and goes under. Beneath the surface, her ears ring, and she is back on the ship, crossing the sea, listening to the high whine of the harpoon’s taut rope just before it snapped, remembering the hope that flew into her even as she was tossed into the frothing waves. She thinks of the clamor of the men as they grabbed for spears, as they flung their weapons wildly at the majestic, crying beast, wanting the giant body for its blubbery, pungent oil and the high value they could charge for its tusk. It pierces her chest, sharp as the tusk itself: the unfairness that one life must sometimes be sacrificed to save another.
She comes up gasping, her hair dripping warm, soapy water down her shoulders.
If this is what it means to be a true princess—making difficult decisions that could risk uncountable lives—she’s gladder than ever that she isn’t one.