It’s strange to draw near the castle village where she spent her entire life growing up. Isbe thought she would find its familiarity reassuring after their arduous journey. Instead, when William shouts to her that he can see the towers and the drawbridge in the distance, she is overcome with the distinct and uncomfortable sensation of slipping into an old, tight shoe. The smell also reminds her of old shoes, though she has come to realize that it is in fact the odor of death.
Along the road leading here—completely abandoned by travelers—she and William have stumbled upon the rotting carcasses of crows who dropped from the sky having succumbed to the sickness, presumably after feasting on sleeping mice. Even now, William points out another one wobbling awkwardly through the blue dawn, and a moment later she hears it plummet to the ground with a disturbing thud.
Isbe grimaces. “What else do you see?” she asks, grateful that he’s at least speaking to her again. After a few icy hours, his edges seem to have melted a little.
William breathes slowly beside her. “Vines,” he says. “Giant flowers—purple, lush, like big yawning mouths. Collars of thorns all around them. Vines on the castle walls. Vines on the trees and road. An overturned carriage almost entirely covered in them.”
Vines. Of course they’d heard about them before . . . but she’s reminded of something now. “William,” she says, touching his elbow. “Almandine spoke of vines, when she was talking about Queen Malfleur. She said . . . she said something about the queen’s jealousy of Belcoeur. Because Belcoeur could tame the vines. Pestilent vines, she said. Belcoeur could turn them into beautiful flowers.”
“Belcoeur was killed long ago.”
“That’s another thing. Almandine said Belcoeur was someplace called Sommeil. Something terrible happened between the two sisters, and now Belcoeur would never return. Maybe Malfleur didn’t slay her. What if the stories and lullabies are wrong?”
She remembers too the other version of the rose lullaby—the one she sometimes hears in her mother dreams. The one in which the twin faeries play together until nightfall, and no slaying is mentioned at all.
“What if they are?” William asks. “Does it change our mission at all?”
“I’m just thinking. What if Belcoeur is back, and these terrible, beautiful flowers are her doing?”
“Then we have an even greater foe than we thought,” William concedes. “But I still don’t see how this changes our plans for the alliance.” He says “alliance” like the word is made out of a cold, foreign metal.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” Isbe agrees. She scrunches her brow, thinking. “What was Belcoeur’s tithe? The nature of her magic?” She wishes Aurora were beside her. Her sister has all the faerie histories practically memorized.
“I don’t know much about the fae. There’s another one. . . .”
Moments later, Isbe hears yet another crow fall from the sky. She shudders. “What are you doing?” William has stopped walking, and it sounds like he is squatting down.
“There’s something in its mouth,” he says by way of explanation.
“Be careful. It carries the disease. It could spread . . .” The sickness has become all too real. She keeps thinking any moment she’ll feel a yawn coming on, and it’ll be the first sign of the end. Or worse, that William will drop to the ground beside her.
“There’s something in its beak,” William says, investigating. “Like blood, but it’s black. No, it’s . . . purple.”
“Do you think . . .”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Let’s keep going.”
They don’t get much farther before she notices something cutting through the smell of death. Saffron. Cloves. Pepper.
“Spices,” Isbe says. “A merchant cart.” Like the one that drove her and Gilbert to the harbor. It’s both shocking and peculiarly comforting—the idea of people going about their trade even during such terrible times.
“I thought the road was cordoned off. We haven’t seen any other travelers for miles,” William points out.
“True. It’s strange. But there can be little other explanation for such a combination of scents.” It is troubling, though. Why would a spice merchant be traveling this way? And why can she not hear the clop of hooves or clatter of his wagon?
“Isabelle,” William says, grabbing her arm and causing her to halt in her tracks right as they are rounding a bend in the road.
“Is it . . . ,” she starts.
“You were right. A spice merchant. He’s . . .” William lets out a sickened moan, and Isbe has her answer—the merchant is dead. She shouldn’t be surprised—they’ve passed bodies frozen, and even carcasses ravaged by animals from the forest—but somehow this injury, among the list of distresses they’ve had, stings. Could this be the very man who Binks sent to help them, not so long ago? She recalls that Gil described the man’s face as hideously malformed, though he hid it behind some sort of mask worn to manage the overpowering scent of all the spices.
“William. Can you describe what he looks like?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I may have met him before.” She feels her voice breaking. She doesn’t even know the man’s name. It makes no sense, not when thousands are suffering and the one person who has ever loved her may be dying. When Gil is gone, possibly for good. And yet it pains her, this minor loss in the grand scheme of things.
She hears William suck in a disgusted breath and then hold it. A moment later, he returns to her side. “His wares are scattered in the road, a rainbow of colored dusts. The man is on his side, no beard, his face sort of . . . swollen. His jowls look like a few clumps of clay that have been mashed together.”
So it is him. It has to be. “Is he wearing a sort of mask?”
“Hmm. It looks like he was wearing one, but it is down around his neck like a fat noose.”
She tenses. There must have been a struggle, or he had trouble breathing—something to have caused the mask to be ripped off in a hurry.
“How he even got this far from the palace is a wonder,” William comments, echoing her own thoughts. How could he have gotten this far before succumbing, like the others who’ve gone to the Delucian castle and never returned?
“Perhaps he knew something—some way of avoiding the disease. But then it caught up to him.” Isbe ponders. “I am worried, William. I know we must advance, but are we walking straight into our doom?”
She feels the tension in his hand, still on her arm.
Her throat gets tight. It isn’t just the fear of the disease that gives her pause. If she’s honest with herself, it’s the conversation they had while in the steam room, deep in the cellars of Almandine’s estate. Or, better put, the conversation they haven’t had since. She still doesn’t know what he’s thinking—if he regrets his proposal. More importantly, she doesn’t know how she feels. Thoughts of that awkward moment have been torturing her nonstop since they fled the mansion.
“Should we keep going?” William asks, his voice soft. “The decision is yours. I will respect whatever you choose to do.”
Whatever she chooses. But what are her options? They could still back away. They could find their way to Roul’s in the hope that Gilbert has returned there safely. She could hide out among the peasants as they await Malfleur’s invasion. And then what? Watch as he and his children are strung up to die or conscripted into the faerie queen’s army? Sit back while her kingdom is taken?
No. If she’s going to die, she’ll die having done the right thing. She’ll die next to her sister.
“I used to sneak off with a mare called Freckles,” Isbe says carefully. “No one likes to ride her because she’s unruly. Impossible. She never listens. But the way she runs. Gil—my best friend Gilbert—” She pauses. This is the first time she’s even mentioned Gil’s existence to the prince, and saying his name aloud rattles her. “He calls the mare a bad mover,” she goes on, “but it’s not true. She just has her own rhythm, and William, she can go so fast.” The memory rushes through her. “When we were tearing through woods and fields together, not far from this very spot—I felt like I was really alive. I felt like nothing we’d left behind mattered anymore. I didn’t have to know where we were headed. What was important was that we were flying headfirst, like an arrow. Nothing could stop us. I never let go until she threw me.”
“And has she thrown you now?” William asks quietly.
“No,” she answers, hard and resolute. “No, she has not.”
“All right, then,” he says calmly. “Let’s go.”
He heads forward down the road. “Careful of that wheel—it came loose. Here you go.” He helps her past the wreckage of the spice merchant’s cart, and as he does, he lets out a huge sputtering sneeze. It’s a ridiculous sound, coming from so commanding and serious a person.
Despite everything, she laughs.
In a sharp inhale, all the pepper and ginger in the air rises up her nostrils, and she begins coughing and sneezing too.
“No wonder he needed a mask,” the prince says, catching his breath.
“Yes, no wonder.”
“If only a mask could protect us from the sleeping sickness,” William muses.
“Hmm,” Isbe replies. “A mask . . . yes. A mask. A mask!” She stops walking and smacks him in the arm. “William, you’re brilliant!”
“Are you mocking me?”
“No!” The sincerity of his question—the hurt in it—sends a shock through her. He’s still upset over the proposal . . . over her rejection. Because that’s what it was, she realizes. “Despite what you might think of me now, I’m not callous. I think I have a theory on the sickness. What if the spice merchant made it this far from the castle because of his mask? It protected him somehow, but when he removed it, he died.”
“So you think the disease is airborne, then,” William says. “Like the scent of his spices.”
“Right. Perhaps.”
“Maybe carried by the breath of the birds? That could explain the crow’s purple tongue, I suppose.”
“The purple tongue . . . no, I have a better theory. It’s—”
“The vines,” they say simultaneously.
“Smelling them,” he says.
“Or eating them, in the case of the birds,” Isbe adds. And then, after a pause, “It’s faerie magic. Either the work of Malfleur or, more likely, her not-actually-dead sister, Belcoeur. The vines carry a pestilence—like Almandine said. Some sort of poison that puts all creatures who come into contact with their scent to sleep. It explains the presence of the vines, all those flowers you described, and it explains the merchant, and the birds falling asleep midflight. William, it really is brilliant!”
“I didn’t come up with it, Isabelle. You did. You’re the brilliant one.”
“Why does it feel like you’re mocking me now?”
His voice is somber, and a little quiet, when he replies. “I’m not.”
She shivers. No one has ever told her she was brilliant. But there’s something about the way William talks . . . he makes her feel that everything she says and does matters. That he is always listening, always aware of her. That he cares, on some fundamental level, about her thoughts and her feelings and her actions and . . . about her.
Yes, he cares about her. There is no questioning it.
Suddenly she is very, very warm.
“It’s worth a try, isn’t it?” she says, trying to keep the smile off her face. For the first time since she heard Binks’s tale, she feels driven by something other than a wild, stubborn determination. She is startled to name that thing. Hope.
Not more than an hour later, Isbe steps cautiously into the suffocating quiet of the palace courtyard with William right beside her, thick swaths of brocaded fabric from his cloak tied in layers around their mouths and noses.
The formerly bustling courtyard is now as still and cold as a tomb. Without her sense of smell, Isbe is doubly alert to the stillness—a fuzzy silence like the pause between snores. Even though she can’t detect the signature briny odor of the strait, she can sense its proximity by the salty dampness on her skin.
And then, all at once, a powerful feeling of homecoming floods through her. She lets go of William’s arm and begins to run.
Isbe pushes her way through closed doors and down eerily abandoned corridors. She nearly tumbles over the bodies of courtiers, some sleeping and some, she fears, already dead. She can’t think about that just yet. She is home. She is home. She is home.
She bounds up the stairs, twenty to the landing and then four more, to the door of her sister’s bower. She hears William following a few paces behind.
And then she is inside Aurora’s room, and then, in an instant, beside her bed, feeling along the neatly made bedspread until she gasps, her hands coming upon her sister’s, which are cold. Too cold. She leans forward, her heart racing, and touches Aurora’s forehead. Her hair is strewn over the pillows. Someone must have carried her up here. She moves her hands to Aurora’s chest and can only make out the slightest rise and fall. She gasps hard in relief, nearly choking on the heavy fabric around her face. It seems as though the sleeping sickness has somehow preserved Aurora in this state. She’s alive, though deathly thin. She’s alive and—
“We’ve made it!” she bursts out. “William? William, come here. This is her. This is her. Aurora.” Tears sting her eyes. She finds she is shaking, torn between breaking into hysterical laughter and falling to the floor exhausted. It is hard to breathe. Hard to think. She’s back. And Aurora is alive. Everything is going to be all right. They’re together again.
William comes over to her, kneeling down by the bed and wrapping one arm around Isbe. Without thinking, she gives in to his slight pull, leaning against his side, trying to slow her breath, wishing she could rip off her mask and laugh, shout, kiss him.
No.
Quickly she banishes the last idea from her mind.
For several moments, both of them just sit there like that, facing Aurora’s sleeping form, saying nothing.
And then she feels him take a deep breath, and when he lets it out, he says, “My future wife.”
The words echo through the room like marbles scattered from a jar.
Isbe says nothing. She says nothing, and says nothing, and then says more nothing. Minutes tick by until she’s convinced that they too have caught the sickness and that it is gradually numbing their throats and minds.
Finally she steels herself, stepping back into the role she has always played, the invisible armor she has had to wear every day of her life, just before entering the dining hall to meet the critical gaze of her stepmother, or undergoing another lecture by the council, or hunching beneath the blow of an angry kitchen wench’s metal pot. And then, invisible armor in place, she takes that cumbersome, weighty, ever-expanding nothing and turns it into something.
“Kiss her,” she commands, her chest made of iron. “It’s time.”
William doesn’t respond. He doesn’t, to her relief—or dismay, or incomprehensible regret—resist.
She holds her breath. She holds everything back, every single feeling and thought shoved into a dark cove at the very heart of her—other than one: wake up.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
William leans over the bed. He lifts his mask almost silently. He hesitates one more moment and then—
“Isabelle,” he whispers. She realizes she’s been frozen—she’s not sure for how long.
“Yes?” she whispers back.
“It’s not working.”
“What do you mean it’s not working?”
“I kissed her. She hasn’t stirred. Did you . . . did you really think she would?”
Fury flies up Isbe’s spine. “You aren’t doing it right. You must love her. It’s the kiss of true love. It’s . . . she believed in it. It’s—it can’t be any other way.” Her throat burns. Her lungs are on fire. She is going to be sick. “You are her destined husband,” Isbe insists desperately. “And it’s Aurora. She’s so beautiful. She’s so perfect!” Isbe shudders, her voice breaking like shattered glass.
Anger sparks and then gutters into shame, dismay, confusion. How can it not work? It has to work. Not for any logical reason, but by sheer dint of her needing it to. Of wishing it so.
But wishing never got anyone anywhere.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and his now-familiar, rustling-leaves voice blows through her with chilly certainty.
It didn’t work.
Aurora is still asleep.