“Somewhere,” he says, reaching back to her and placing her hand against the cold stone. “We may not be able to see it, because of the illusion.”
Aurora has so many questions she doesn’t even know where to begin, but she wants to get out of here as badly as he seems to. Her sister—and a prince, and an entire kingdom—are waiting for her. So she reaches up and out, beginning to inch along the wall as Heath does.
Aurora takes in the wall’s story through the pads of her fingers—she’s unused to all the information that can storm her body this way. Her fingertips tingle and ache. It’s like the cold texture of the stone carries an emotion. Touching it makes her feel raw and exposed.
“Ow!” she cries, pulling her fingers back. “Something . . .” Like the prick of the spinning wheel. “Sharp.”
She squints through the fog and then sucks in a breath.
“What is it?” Heath asks urgently, coming to her side. “Did you find the rift?”
She shakes her head. “There’s . . . there’s something in the stones. Can you see it? There’s . . .” Terror and disgust rise to her head like a toxic fume. Through the mist, she makes out a suit of warped armor.
But it’s not just armor. It’s the anguished form of a dead soldier, his body crushed by the stones.
And yet . . . somehow, he’s become part of the stones. She can see the mangled profile of the man’s face, his arm wrenched backward, his helmet jutting out jaggedly—that’s what she’d scratched her hand on.
She shudders, her ears ringing, her chest frozen with shock.
“The queen’s guards,” Heath says, his voice barely more than a whisper.
She continues to gape at the scene of desperation and violence, preserved in stone like a gruesome sculpture. “But why would her own guards be trying to get through to her? Wouldn’t she keep them close?”
“They weren’t trying to get in,” Heath says. “They were trying to get out.”
She backs away. Her arms are trembling wildly. Around them, the forest has risen up again, and she’s afraid that if she turns her back on the wall, it won’t be there anymore. That even Heath won’t be there anymore. She grabs at his sleeve. “I don’t like this.”
Heath’s voice is hard as he moves on, continuing to investigate the wall. “Neither did they. Four of her best men. Story goes they hacked through with an ax, and that’s what left the rift. Long before I was even born.”
Aurora’s beginning to feel completely overwhelmed from running her hands over the stones, every variation a forlorn mystery, when finally something changes.
She hears Heath’s quick intake of breath. “This is it,” he whispers.
The wall appears intact, but Aurora discovers she can pass her hand straight through the stones. She pulls it back hastily. What if the wall clamps down on her, as it must have done with the four guards?
Heath lunges forward.
In seconds, he is enveloped by the illusion, and dread replaces all other sensations. For all she knows, he has disappeared, leaving her alone. She cringes, tense, waiting to hear the horrible sound of stones moving, of crunching bones.
But then Heath’s hand and face reemerge, and he grins. “You coming?”
She holds her breath, reminding herself that she has no other choice. Not unless she wants to remain alone in the Borderlands.
She closes her eyes . . . then steps into the mist and stone.
Penetrating the illusion is like walking through ice. She feels the wall’s resistance, a deep sorrow tinged with bitterness. The word “stop” clenches all around her. She starts to hyperventilate.
This is wrong. This is all wrong. She needs to get out. She needs to turn back. She needs to—
Heath’s hand wraps around hers, and tugs.
8
Isabelle
Normally, noisy crowds frustrate Isbe; she ends up disconnected in all the commotion. But the cacophony at Roul’s dinner table tonight is strangely comforting—it may not replace the loneliness she feels when she thinks of her sister, but at least it serves to lessen the raging questions in her mind: What is Aurora doing at this very moment? What would she think of this table, of this meal they must eat almost entirely with their hands? The many interweaving voices talking over one another, the laughter and the sounds of dishes rattling on the warped wooden table make the entire room seem warmer, cozier, and more alive than she has felt in a while.
A neighboring family has joined them for their evening meal—a kind couple and their five children, making it seven kids in total, in addition to the five adults. The neighbors contributed their own pheasant eggs and helped to prepare a rabbit stew. Isbe senses for them this is quite a feast, and after a week of hard work, she too is savoring the strong scent of the stew and the satisfying toughness of the meat in her teeth.
Isbe has been learning everything she can about the farm: how to follow the fence to the goat pen, where to draw water, what grain sack to feed the pigs from. Before they came, Roul clearly hadn’t lifted a finger to straighten up his small home since the death of Celeste, and it reeked of mourning and of dirty children, of sweat and sour goats’ milk. Isbe spent the first day scrubbing the floors, rubbing dry lavender and sage into the cracks to freshen the place up.
She can’t imagine what it must be like to have lost an unborn baby and a wife in one strike. Roul’s son, Piers, is too young to help out, so he runs loose all day, reminding Isbe of herself at that age. When there’s nothing else to be done, Isbe plays with Aalis, whom Roul had otherwise been strapping to his back every day while he worked.
There has been almost no break. In just a few days, Isbe’s back, arms, and legs have gathered a deep, unfamiliar ache. The nights are short and cold; the days begin before dawn.
Sometimes Aalis wakes screaming from bad dreams, and Isbe holds her warm little body against her own, singing her the rose lullaby until the girl relaxes and drifts back to sleep. Though she might not admit it aloud, the familiar lullaby comforts Isbe too. “One night reviled, before break of morn, amid the roses wild, all tangled in thorns, the shadow and the child together were born . . .” Somehow the words make her feel connected to the life she led up until now—the life she left behind.
When Isbe and Gilbert first got here, Isbe brought her fingers to touch Roul’s leathery cheeks, to explore the sharp ridges of his face. Gil—despite the roughness of his hands and garments—is so familiar, so constant, she thinks of him as smooth, like an oft-handled river stone. Roul, on the other hand, is all broken bits and hard edges. It’s strange how haggard he has become in just a few years; he isn’t much older than Gil, after all. But life beyond the royal village has not been kind to him, and Gil now exceeds him in both height and the broadness of his shoulders.