Sleepily, she lists the facts to herself: Deluce needs her. She must return, marry a prince, and protect her kingdom, though these things have begun to seem like mere strands of a book she once read. The one that stands out the most is this: she has to get back to Isbe. Which means somehow finding a way out of this place.
Aurora’s stomach stirs. She flips back the covers and dresses quickly, with ever-increasing confidence. Even hunger has a different—and greater—impact here. In Deluce, she’d often go hours forgetting to eat, especially when caught up in a good book. But here she feels the pang and immediately begins to imagine the juice of a fresh peach, the smooth spread of butter on warm pastries, even though she knows they don’t have such luxuries. In Deluce, servants brought breakfast to her room, and Isbe always joined her before they started their day. But everything is different in Sommeil. She eats with the others—her rank doesn’t matter. And her sister isn’t here.
Isbe ran away, a voice reminds Aurora as she slips on her boots. She was content to live without you. She loved you, but she pitied you. She has once again kicked the wasps’ nest of thoughts that always lies just to the side of her path. Her heart races as she tries to ignore her doubts.
She glances out the window. From the tower, Aurora can see all the way across the desiccated fields surrounding Blackthorn, butting up against a thick, dry forest. There’s no sign of the stone wall from here, the one that protects the estate from the Borderlands; the one she and Heath, unbelievably, passed through together.
Below her, there are already peasants up early, moving about near a run-down barn. And in the distance, a figure approaches the woods alone.
Heath. Going off to hunt once again. In the Borderlands. Over the past few days, she has watched him return home dragging the bodies of whole harts and wild boar with arrows aslant in their chests, sacks filled with bloody pheasant and duck parts, and once, a net of fish, some still writhing. And she has watched too, as Wren greets him each time with something more than gratitude in her posture, in her smile.
You’ll only break his heart, Wren had said to her on that first day.
Many nights he goes straight to his chambers without eating dinner, hunched over a lantern, making notes to himself. At first she was impressed that he could read and write, though only rudimentarily. And then she became curious. He explained that he was keeping a hunting log because game has grown increasingly scarce.
With everything she learns about Sommeil, Aurora has only become more concerned for its fate, has come to realize that escape may be necessary not just for her, or for Heath, but for all of them.
But in the meantime, she has been trying to help however she can. Here there’s no complex hierarchy of household staff to run the palace and maintain its grounds and outbuildings. Instead, chores are assigned based on family, with many peasants who don’t appear to have any role at all. Greta and her family man the kitchens along with several others, and though Aurora has no experience, she’s made herself useful there—hanging herbs to dry, grinding grain into powder to make flour, scrubbing vegetables from the gardens until her hands, usually prized for their daintiness, have grown ragged and chapped. This may be a world wrought from dreaming, but for Aurora it has provided her first taste of real work and real life—life the way the masses live it, both here and, she can only assume, at home.
She doesn’t bother to pin up her hair. She grabs a piece of vellum that she’d asked Wren to procure yesterday and flings open her bedroom door, runs down the stairs and out onto the grounds, making her way after Heath. She inhales the morning dew as she calls out to him repeatedly, but he doesn’t turn around.
Aurora’s beginning to fear her voice has somehow been imagined this whole time, both by her and by others, when finally he hears her and turns.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks, sweeping hair out of his eyes. She’s noticed how often he does that around her, and she wonders, fleetingly, if she makes him nervous.
She tries to catch her breath. “I thought I could come with you today. Help take notes for you. I’m a very skilled writer and I have excellent penmanship. I—”
“Aurora, it isn’t safe. You need to go back.”
“But I want to be of use. Every day I’ve been biding my time, wandering alone, and I haven’t gotten any closer to an answer.” Her limited contributions leave plenty of time to roam the castle, looking for evidence, for a sign, for a way out—as though she might simply stumble upon a lost key to a hidden door. Maybe, she has thought irrationally, she’d find another spinning wheel.
But she has not. And her own sense of urgency has already begun to wane. Isbe comes to her as a sharp pang of need but then fades from her mind again. Sommeil itself has this effect on her. There’s a poignancy to every breath here, and it distracts her, reminds her of early mornings when she was eleven or twelve, just discovering the tomes of epic romance in the library. How she’d take her latest treasure down to the kitchens, where she’d sit in a window to read while the warm scent of baking biscuits drifted and curled around her, steaming the pane.
Sommeil gives her that exact feeling: those brief hours when you are holding an unread story in your hands and don’t yet know how it will end. You would be content if the biscuits never rose and were never consumed, the irises in the garden never bloomed and faded, the rain hovered but never fell. The not-yet-ness tastes sweeter than the thing you’re waiting for.
“I thought I could help you. At least I could get out of the estate and—”
“And get yourself killed in the Borderlands?” Heath sighs, his arm muscles flexing as if by instinct. “I can see you are beginning to feel what this place does to people. That restlessness. Half sweet, half deadly. You don’t need to get lost, or be lured by an Impression, to go mad here. Sometimes it happens all on its own.”
“But you’ve been ignoring me—avoiding me, even,” she adds, realizing that it’s true. “We agreed to help each other find a way out of Sommeil. I thought—”
“I made you no promises.”
“But you did,” she insists, feeling baffled and dismayed by the way he won’t even look in her eyes.
“I said I would protect you, and that’s what I’m trying to do right now. As for a way out . . . I had hoped you might have answers, but you don’t. In the meantime, Blackthorn needs me.” His hands clench and unclench.
“But the game dwindles,” she counters. “You can’t just turn back to your life, knowing one day the food may run out completely!” The heat of their argument is warming her cheeks.
“What do you know about hunger? You grew up a sheltered, spoiled princess!”
The accusation stings, even though it shouldn’t. Her royal upbringing shouldn’t be an insult. “I didn’t choose my own parents.”
“No, but they chose everything for you,” he snaps.
“What does that mean?”