A moment later, Wren lets go and moves back to the silver tray, where she lifts a lid off the soup dish. “I’ll let you eat and rest now.”
Aurora tries to taste her food, but all she can think of is the look on Wren’s face. If she ever gets home again, she is going to appreciate her world. She’s going to tell Isbe every day how much she cares. She’s never going to be ensnared by her own fears again.
But for now she’s not home, she’s here. Sommeil. She rolls the word around in her mind as she takes off her travel clothes to change into the nightgown Wren left out for her. It’s the first time she’s ever had to dress or undress herself, but she can’t stand the idea of someone else doing it for her, not now. Not when a mere breath against her skin sends her into shivers so intense she’s not sure if they’re pleasurable or sickening. Even now, as she steps into the lightweight gown, every thread whispers around and against her.
She climbs into the bed, settling into its deep embrace. She’s exhausted, but her heart burns with curiosity. Deluce needs her. Isbe needs her. The last faerie queen in her world could be marching at any moment, could even now be committing more unthinkable murders. And yet . . . what will happen if—no, when—Aurora returns? Will her voice and sense of touch immediately snuff out like a candle? She doesn’t know why these senses have returned to her—can only imagine that the faerie tithes at her christening somehow don’t hold weight here in Sommeil, that Belcoeur’s magic, evil as it may be, nullifies any other. This is a world of Belcoeur’s making, after all.
And what did Wren mean when she said Sommeil was full of beauty?
The worn softness of a pillow caresses her cheek; she is penetratingly aware of every single stitch in its fabric, a grammar of its own, a way of being she never knew before coming here. She thinks of all the everyday objects that she’s never fully known. She would like to meet them all with her hands, to feel the secret code of their physical forms, the silk, the paper, the wood, the string. Marble and grass and fallen leaves and a baby’s hair and the ears of a goat. They are all as utterly foreign to her as the unusual birdlike clock she saw in the nursery room in the cottage. And the enormous golden spinning wheel that pricked her finger and gave her the curse, or gift, of pain.
The ghost of Heath’s fingers sighs along her jaw. Will it haunt her forever when she leaves this place? She has only just learned this form of closeness, and already she fears how much she craves it, craves more—how devastated she would be never to have it again.
She extends her hand to the bedframe, touching its old, polished oak. She presses her fingers against it as though it were Isbe’s palm. I’m afraid, she taps, wishing her sister could hear her. She thinks of the words Heath said to her earlier that startled her so.
I need you, she taps.
12
Isabelle
Evening wind whips at her neck. Isbe inhales, clenching her eyes against the freezing ocean spray. There are rumors among the sailors that the waves have been angrier than usual this winter, ever since the purported death of someone they refer to reverentially as the Balladeer, a figure much spoken of but rarely seen.
The Balladeer is said to have roamed the North Sea for many years, singing to the water in the water’s own language, using music to draw fish straight into his wide nets. Some believe he was one of the fae, but others say that cannot be, for the fae are driven only by greed. Very poor seaside villages in the north had, over the past ten years or more, reported enormous bundles of fresh-caught herring and eel, cod and pike, and sometimes even oysters appearing on their shores, as though left there by some benevolent god, and they swore they could still hear the final notes of the Balladeer’s song in the air as they collected these unexpected gifts. But—whether god or faerie or human—the Balladeer is gone now, and the waters, turbulent and brutally cold, seem to know it.
Clinging to the rail of the rocking ship with one hand, Isbe dips the other into her pocket, feeling for the lock of hair there, coarse and curly. Gil was horrified when she demanded he hack away the long tangles that had been blowing in her face for nearly eighteen years. At first he’d refused to help, but when she determined to do it for herself, he conceded, not wanting to stand by and watch her wield a rusted old fish knife so close to her own skin.
She brushes her fingers against the reminder of what they’ve done. It was necessary, along with binding her chest and donning the garb of a young sailor. Before boarding the ship, she and Gil were both questioned. No one wants to carry the sleeping sickness abroad with them. But using the last of the coins Isbe had taken from the palace before she left, they managed to convince the captain to change his mind about allowing Gil and his blind “brother” aboard the ship.
The echo of lifeboats rattling along the ship’s sides greeted them as they boarded. She was surprised by how many deckhands there were, and unsettled by the fishy, oil-lantern stench mixed with manly sweat.
Now, as she turns to make her way below decks, the odor increases. She has spent most of the day trying to stay out of the way of the experienced hands, listening to the thunk of oil barrels in the cargo hold and the thickly accented calls of the sailors in a language she barely recognizes as her own—avast and abaft, dead rise and draft—wishing she could participate, but knowing how dangerous it would be to get in the way of a swinging beam or changing sail. And the last thing she needs is to draw unwanted attention. She must not jeopardize her goal of reaching William of Aubin safely.
At her request, Gil described the various spears and daggers strapped to the wall. The voulges she’d heard of—they resemble a meat cleaver but with a longer handle—and the ranseur too, tridentlike with short sides. At the helm sits one foreign weapon that neither Gil nor Isbe recognize: a giant spear that springs forward like an arrow, but with a long rope attached to the end.
She can tell from the quiet now that the decks are mostly cleared, save a few sailors who will man the ship through the darkest hours. Though she dreads another night in the crowded, low-ceilinged cabin below, the air thick with grunts and snores and the scurrying of rats, she knows that, come sunrise, they’ll be within rowing distance of Aubin’s shores.