Aurora is startled from fitful sleep by a loud rustling of feathers . . . and a voice. “Evening, caged bird,” it says.
She opens her eyes and scans the room. The door is closed. A fire mellows in the hearth. Perhaps one of her maids came in to stoke it? That must have been the noise. Or maybe she was dreaming. She leans back against the pillow. Her eyes drift closed again.
“Any pastry? Better yet, mouse’s head?”
This time Aurora sits up with a start. On her window ledge stands a small, smoke-black starling silhouetted by moonlight. Its tiny dark eyes shine, and it cocks its head as though curious, or hungry. She must have left her window open a crack. Since the cold doesn’t bother her, she sometimes forgets to worry about it. The bird in the window is watching her. It’s almost as if the bird was the one to speak. . . .
But that’s old magic, impossible magic.
Then, as she watches, the bird opens its mouth. “Me. What.” Each of the words a separate caw. “What. Is. Me.”
Aurora’s chest tenses. A talking bird. Like something from one of her tales. She throws back the covers and steps cautiously toward the window. Around the bird’s ankle is a fine metal brace, and if she’s not mistaken, it bears a familiar image: a thorny ring surrounding a small crow. The crest of Malfleur.
Aurora stares in awe. People say that unlike most faeries, Queen Malfleur still knows how to wield magic of great power and influence—has made a special study of it all her life, which has been long. She reigns over the scattered territories of disgruntled and largely disorganized citizens in the remote LaMorte Mountains, and Deluce has little to no traffic with LaMorte, so there’s not much evidence to prove whether the rumors of the queen’s gifts of magic are true.
In fact, Deluce has issued many trade sanctions against them, and has repeatedly taxed all passage between the two kingdoms in an effort to discourage the unhappy, unhealthy, and often uncivilized people of LaMorte from crossing over to the lands of their far wealthier neighbors. Aurora has always assumed Malfleur’s skill in magic had been vastly exaggerated throughout the years—more myth than truth to it.
But studying the bird now, Aurora realizes that in fact the rumors about Malfleur’s powers may have been accurate all along. If the faerie queen can make birds speak, what else can she do? And why has the bird come here?
Aurora shivers again, trying to picture the faerie queen, with the dramatic white scar that supposedly crosses her left eyelid.
The bird flutters its wings. “Me freak? Me . . . fiction?”
Aurora shakes her head no.
“What is me?” the bird asks, and she cannot tell if the words are a taunt or a test—or a sincere question. “Vermin. Wonder. Failed experiment. Or success?”
She shakes her head again.
“Magic in guts. Magic inside. Words inside. Like dust. Eating dust. Like fire. Me? Alone. Alone,” the bird says.
Its voice is cold as iron, and she can’t tell whether it knows what it’s saying. Whether it’s asking for help.
“Cat got your tongue?” the bird caws. “Cat got your tongue?”
Aurora shakes her head a third time.
“No words, human?” The starling caws again, and it sounds like a harsh laugh. “Like scarecrow.”
At this, Aurora loses patience and shoos the bird out of the window with a hard wave of the back of her hand. The bird cries once more, fluttering back and taunting her with a final, mocking word. “Useless.” Then it’s winging away into the night.
As soon as it’s gone, Aurora closes her shutters quickly, tears pricking at her eyes, mortification stinging her cheeks. Is she losing her mind, or did a starling really just speak to her—and not just speak, but tease, call her useless, and compare her to a scarecrow?
She gets back into bed, either to sleep and dream, or else to wake up from this eerie nightmare, but neither happens. Instead she lies awake, the starling’s words lingering in her ears. Useless.
She sits up and pushes back the covers. She goes to the hearth and lights a lantern, then wraps herself in her robe and hurries into the secret passageway to Isbe’s room. She has to tell her about the bird—maybe her sister can help her understand what it means. But when she flips open the tapestry, she sees wind rattling the open shutters. The fire is out. The room is empty. Isbe has gone.
Aurora adjusts the heavy cloak around her shoulders and lifts her lantern higher as she steps into the thick, moon-bright snow, reminding herself why she’s doing this. She forces herself to think of the talking bird. She will not be useless. She will not let Isbe go. She has always needed her sister. Now her sister needs her. She’s not going to let her just run away like that. She’ll find her, bring her back, fight for her to stay.
Suspecting Gilbert’s aid, the first thing she does is look for hoofprints, which are easy enough to find in the new-fallen snow. She traces them past the stables and along the dark woods at the edge of the castle village. She passes the unruly thicket where she and Isbe used to imagine that evil monsters dwelled at night, the branches twisted into an ornate latticework glistening with frost. The path of snow prints leads her to the main southerly road, which first winds closer to the shores of the strait and then curves west, veering toward the vast expanse of land beyond the royal grounds. Peasants sleep later in winter, and the area appears deserted. She rapidly loses the meager set of hoofprints amid the mud and slush and chaos of horse tracks in the road, all silvered in a predawn haze.
She turns, half tempted to go back. Though she has only gone a few miles, she is as far as she’s ever been from the castle.
Sneaking away had in fact been easy, which gave Aurora an uneasy feeling. She’s never considered simply leaving the palace before—why would she?
Now she’s hoping that there will be so much to do in the morning in preparation for her birthday feast that it will take everyone a little while to realize that the princess herself has vanished, and the bastard sister too. She knows the council members will be quite busy doing their best to hide their fears about the princes’ murders, while dispatching soldiers and guards to fortify the LaMorte border.
And if all goes well, she’ll catch up to Isbe by the afternoon, and they’ll return safe and sound in time for the celebration.
A horse-drawn cart clops toward her, and she moves to the side of the road as its giant wheels shoot mud up her ankles. She’s partly hoping that its driver will stop and ask if she needs help, but she can’t bring herself to wave him down, fearing she could be recognized and sent home as soon as the driver realizes she doesn’t speak.
She keeps her head down and continues walking.
The road is disturbingly quiet. It occurs to Aurora that she really has very little sense of Deluce as a nation, of what it’s really like to live here. She’s been introduced to a variety of lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses, noblemen and noblefaeries alike, but she’s never once been invited to their homes, nor seen the great population of peasants at work.
There’s a rustle in the trees, and a bird darts out of the underbrush, flapping into the sky. Could it be the same starling? Worry blossoms inside her. There are so many things lurking in this world about which she knows so little: magic that has the power to give birds speech, tensions that drive men to murder. Her heart races as though trying to speak for her, to tell her to stop, to turn back. This is no way to spend a sixteenth birthday—wandering alone.
Another bird shrieks.
A distant scream rings out—maybe an owl.
Or could it be the howl of a killer, covered in the stale blood of two princes, hungry for more?
To be safe, Aurora steps off the road and into the soft thickness of the surrounding woods. Even with her lantern, it’s dark—so dark. It’s too late, or too early, for a girl—a princess—to be out alone.
This was a mistake. She’ll turn home and demand that the council send out a proper search party to discover Isbe’s whereabouts and bring her back. She’ll find a way. Perhaps she can refuse to marry Prince William—the third and youngest son of the late king of Aubin—until this one wish has been granted.
Yes. That’s what she’ll do. She’ll double back, sticking to the woods, which are speckled slightly with the last dregs of moonlight.
But even upon turning around, pushing past underbrush and dodging the low-hanging branches of the trees, many still covered in snow, she begins to find herself disoriented. She’d been only a few feet from the road, hadn’t she? But the road, of course, isn’t lit, and so she can’t quite tell. Better to chance bandits on the road than wolves in the forest. She moves a few feet in what she is sure must be the right direction, but only finds herself surrounded by more woods. Is this the royal forest? She begins to run, urgency pumping through her veins. Her dress tangles in roots and branches, and she hears a tear, but she doesn’t care. She trips and falls onto her knees, dropping the lantern. The flame sputters out. With no way to relight it, she leaves it on the ground and gets up quickly, her fear spiking. She runs toward the road.
The road isn’t there.
She turns around again and sees a glimmer of light. That must be it: the moon against a frozen puddle. Pulse hammering in her temples, she runs harder. She finds herself not beside the road at all, but near a cottage. Its windows are shuttered and completely covered in ivy. It must be one of the many old homes the royal families of the past used to summer in—ideal for hunting excursions. There are several of these throughout the royal forest, Aurora knows, many now long abandoned. Her father enjoyed hunting when he was young and decreed that all the deer in the forest be reserved for his use alone—but he apparently gave up the sport when he married her mother. Since then, the royal forest has become thick with foliage and busy with game that no one is allowed to hunt.
This cottage is large but extremely humble in comparison to the palace, with only two levels and not a single tower. The light she thought she had seen is not the moon but a strange cluster of fireflies huddled at the base of the front roof. As her eyes adjust, she can make out the shape of a small wooden swing tied with two ropes, lightly swaying in the wind.
She has no idea where she is, or which of the several old summer homes this might be, but at this hour an abandoned cottage seems far safer than the woods. When the sun has fully risen she’ll resume her search for the road.
Ivy winds along the doorframe, and Aurora wonders when the door was last opened. After tugging and shoving, dust flying into her face, the heavy door eventually budges inward with a groan.
Aurora glances over her shoulder into the whispering woods around her before entering the dark home. She leaves the door open a crack, hoping the faintest of outdoor light will penetrate the heavy blackness of the air within—and wishing she had just a small portion of Isbe’s bravery, her facility for moving about in the dark.
Think, she urges herself. Servants usually leave a lantern on a shelf just inside the door of every room. Her hands fumble along the inner walls until she trips and hears a clatter. A metal lantern. It must have been on the floor.
She bends down and feels for the handle. Thankfully, there is an old candle inside and a tinderbox attached. Hurriedly, with trembling hands, she shakes a bit of dried kindling into the lid and removes the flint, then rubs the flint against the firestone, watching the faintest of sparks fly off.
It takes several minutes before the kindling catches—a tiny, winking orange ember, which she gathers toward her mouth and blows on until it becomes a small flame. Quickly she uses the flame to light the candle before stomping it back out. It’s the first time she has lit a candle like this in all her life—normally, the servants keep fires burning in every room of the palace, for all but a very few hours of the night, and it’s far easier to light the lanterns using the already leaping hearth flames.
The dust in the air is thick—so thick she fears the air itself will somehow catch on fire. The house has clearly not been inhabited for many years, but feeling she has no better choice, she finds her way to the staircase and heads up, looking for something resembling a bedroom, where she can close the door and sleep the remaining hour or so until sunrise.
At the top of the stairs, she enters the nearest room, and can see dimly that it’s a children’s nursery. An old doll sits in the window, a clock—still ticking!—is perched on the mantel, and two small beds line opposite walls. There’s an open wardrobe, and inside it hang the forms of little girls’ dresses, glimmering as though woven not of fabric but of precious metal.
A whistle chimes, and Aurora nearly loses her breath before realizing the sound has come, oddly, from the clock. A tiny mechanical bird’s face is popping in and out. It whistles once more, and then the bird’s head retreats behind a little door below the six. She’s never seen anything like it before.
She turns and notices something luminous in the corner of the room. A large golden wheel with spokes, bigger than one you might find on a horse-drawn cart. It looks like a glowing sun, and it’s resting atop a low stand, also made of gold. Spilling from a small spool at its side is a long, shimmering thread.
Aurora moves closer to inspect it. To her surprise, even in the candlelight, it appears the thread itself is made from gold. She examines the strange instrument from which the thread flows. It must be some sort of elaborate spindle, she realizes. She’s never seen one, though she’s read about them in books. Her parents always told her that spindles were instruments of evil, bad luck to be warded off at all costs. Since it was only one of many of their superstitions, she hadn’t given it much thought before, but this particular contraption seems magical, mysterious, wonderful.
Enraptured by the spindle’s foreign beauty, she sets down the lantern and spins the great wheel with her hand, watching as it pulls the remainder of the golden thread onto the spool. The sun begins to break over the horizon just then, sending a splash of brilliance into the room, making the thread glow. She reaches out to grab the end of it, and her hand makes contact with the tip of the spindle. For the first time in her life, she feels a sharp pang. It’s a feeling, a sensation, coming from her skin. From touch. Which is impossible. And yet it’s real—she feels it, and it . . . stings, hurts, flares, thrums, sending a shock through her entire body, making her dizzy.
And then, just at the break of dawn on the very day of her sixteenth birthday, she finds she is sinking through the dazzling sunlight, the aura of gold, falling, fainting, descending into memory, into a chaos of colors.
Dreams.
Flame.