TWENTY-THREE
AURORA PACED HER ROOM. HER FEET ACHED. HER HEAD ached. Every time she tried to rest on her bed or sit in her chair, she sprang back up like it had burned her, the stillness too much to bear. Occasionally, footsteps hurried along the corridor, or loud, indistinct voices floated up from the courtyard below, but Aurora’s guards stood in front of her door, refusing to let it open, refusing to answer any questions.
The sun was peeking over the horizon when the queen appeared. Her face was pale and pinched, and her elaborate hairstyle had begun to uncurl, hitting her shoulders in ropes. Dark circles surrounded her eyes, and her lips were tight and red, worried by her teeth until blood peeked through. Aurora hurried toward her. “What happened? Is Isabelle all right?”
Iris slapped Aurora with such force that Aurora stumbled backward. A muscle seemed to snap in the queen’s face, a wildness leaping up and possessing her eyes. For a moment, a single moment, hatred filled her. Aurora pressed a hand over her cheek. Her skin stung under her fingers.
The queen sucked in a breath through clenched teeth, and her face settled back into the inscrutable mask she usually wore. “Isabelle is dead,” she said.
“What?”
“Are you deaf, or just stupid? My daughter is dead.” Aurora stared. The words didn’t make sense, not together, not like that. She swayed on her feet. “She is dead, and you, you ungrateful brat . . .” She raised her hand as though preparing to slap Aurora again, but stopped at the last second, her fingers held so tightly that they quivered in the air.
It didn’t make sense. “How?”
“Poison.”
Aurora took an unsteady step backward, then another, until her knees collided with the arm of her chair. Uncertain questions burst onto her lips, but she held them back at the look of barely suppressed agony on the queen’s face.
“It should have been you,” the queen said. She spat out every word, like speaking was almost more effort than she could manage. “They meant it for you. If you had just eaten your fruit . . . if you hadn’t decided to feed it to my daughter . . .”
“I didn’t know,” she said. The words scraped against her throat. “Who—I mean . . .”
“Who do you think? The rebels have been trying to destroy us for years. Do you believe me now? Do you believe what lengths they will go to?”
She remembered the servant she had seen during the dance. A boy with scruffy brown hair, carrying plates to the higher tables. No, she thought. He wouldn’t. But she could not know that.
“I will kill them all,” the queen said, her face as still as ice. “I will tear them out of hiding and burn them until their very ashes scream. And you will watch. And you will smile and be grateful for all we have given you.”
“What happens now?” Aurora said. Her throat felt raw. “I mean, the wedding . . .”
“Is in two days’ time, as it always was. Do you think we will let them win?” The wildness flickered in Iris’s eyes again, but she held it back. “If it were up to me, you would be thrown out to starve on the street with the dogs. If it were up to me, we would cancel this farce of a wedding and properly mourn for my daughter. But as you may have noticed, nothing is really up to me. You will marry Rodric. And you will smile and thank the world for all it has given you. And then you will come to my daughter’s funeral and you will look at the body of the girl you killed. Do you understand?”
Aurora did not reply.
“You are cursed. I knew you would bring nothing but ruin to us all.” She left so quickly that it was almost a run. The door hung open in her wake, and a guard moved to close it, shutting Aurora back up, alone.
Her legs buckled, and she sank to the floor. Her head scraped against the side of the chair, and she crashed it backward, savoring the way the thud rang through her. She did not know how long she sat there, staring at the door. The wind howled outside, sending spring rain splashing against the window. Aurora could not stop picturing the girl who had peered at her around doors and stared up with huge, curious eyes, doubling up over her stomach, spitting blood onto the table, shrieking and screaming in pain, or falling over sideways, dead without a sound. It was meant for me, she thought, over and over, and she shivered, guilt crawling under her skin. Guilt and filthy, sickening relief that she had not taken a bite herself, that she was not as dead as every law of the world demanded she must be.
At some point, she began to doze in fitful bursts. She woke with a jump, cold sweat sticking to her arms.
She leapt to her feet, ignoring the shudder that ran through her, the way her collapsed hair stuck to her neck and her cheek. She had never asked for any of this. People were suffering and dying and it was all her fault and she hadn’t asked for any of it. They expected her to save them, but what could she do? She smiled and curtsied and played along, and now Isabelle was dead, and her mother did not even have the time to grieve. Who was to say that when Aurora became queen, she would have any more power than Iris had now? Alyssinia did not need change decades away. It did not want to wait through hunger and murder and fear, through the cruelty of the king and the spiteful retaliation of the rebels, with innocent people thrown to the wayside. If she sat and did nothing, it would only continue.
There’s always a choice, Rodric had said.
He had had faith in her, through everything. Faith that her presence was a gift, that together they would make things better. And this was his reward. He had loved Isabelle, and now she was dead, and Aurora was alive, and nothing was as it should be.
She wanted to see him. She wanted to apologize to him, or comfort him, or do something. She did not want him to be alone.
She hurried across the room and pushed the door. It rattled against the lock. “Please,” she said. “Open the door.”
The lock clicked, and one of the guards pulled the door open. He glowered at her under heavy eyebrows, but his expression softened as he took in her appearance. “Princess?” he said. “What is it?”
“I wish to see Rodric,” she said.
“You must remain here.”
“Please,” she said. She clutched the doorframe to keep herself upright. “I know the king and queen wish me to stay here, but—I need to see Rodric. Please.”
The guard looked at her for a long moment. Something like pity crossed his face. He nodded. “Of course, Princess,” he said. “I can get you a few minutes with him.”
Her relief, her gratitude, almost brought tears to her eyes. She exhaled slowly, trying to calm her pounding heart. “Thank you,” she said.
The guard led Aurora to a wing of the castle that she did not recognize, far from her own rooms. He knocked once on a thick wooden door.
There was no answer.
“These are Rodric’s rooms?” she asked.
“Yes, Princess.”
She nodded. “Thank you for your help. I will only be a moment.” The door creaked as she pulled it open and slipped inside. It closed behind her with a dull thud.
The room was large and neatly kept, with red fittings and little in the way of decorations or amusements. The only thing out of place was Rodric himself. He sat on the floor in the middle of the room, a book clutched in his hands. He was holding it so tightly that the pages bent.
“Rodric?”
“I was going to give her this,” he said. “Before the wedding. But I can’t now.” His grief was so intense that Aurora could feel it in the air.
I did this, she thought. I allowed this to happen.
“I’m sorry, Rodric,” she said. Tears stung her eyes. “I’m really sorry. Isabelle was—I can’t believe—”
“She was here,” he said. All the joy, the cautious optimism, had been sucked out of his voice, leaving a dull, resigned monotone in their place. “And now she’s just gone. How can that be possible? It doesn’t really make sense, does it?”
“None of this makes sense.” She knelt beside him, their bodies inches apart. The gap felt huge, uncrossable. She rested a hand on his shoulder, but even that contact felt too distant, like he was in a place she could not reach. “Everything’s gone wrong,” she said, and her voice cracked. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Someone tried to poison you,” he said. “It isn’t your fault.” But she knew it was. For ending up here in the first place, for offering Isabelle food off her own plate when she had been warned, over and over and over again, that people were willing to hurt her. They had all been right, and she had been so stupidly, blindly wrong.
“I should have—I don’t know. I’ve done everything wrong.”
Rodric shook his head. “It’s not your fault,” he said again. “I am sorry, Princess. We must carry on, I know. I am simply—I need a second to collect myself.”
He sounded so confused, so guilty, that she had to take a moment to breathe, to steady herself, before she spoke. “You don’t need to collect yourself,” she said. “Why should you have to? Why should you pretend this is anything other than awful?”
He stared at the twisted book in his hands. “Because everything is awful,” he said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? That’s why all this is happening. To make things right. We can’t stop now.”
“We can,” she said. “We can always stop. We can—”
“No,” Rodric said, more forcefully than she’d ever heard him say anything before. “We can’t. Why would we? If we don’t marry now, what was the point of this? What was the point of any of this?”
She looked at the floor. Her hand slipped off his shoulder. What if there isn’t a point? she thought, but she could not say it aloud. She could not bear to make Rodric look any more broken than he already did, to take his last bit of certainty away.
“If I stay,” Aurora said, “if we marry now, what’s to stop these things from happening again?” She grasped at her skirt, twisting the silk in her fist. “I don’t know, Rodric. I don’t know what to think.”
He looked up at her, his eyes pleading. “Are you going to leave?”
Was she? It sounded so impossible. “I don’t know,” she said again. The thought filled her with terror, but every thought terrified her now, and she had sat still and allowed the world to make her decisions for too long. “I don’t know.”