She adjusts her dress, feeling how it clings to her, wishing she could just rip it off her body like she might have done when she was a child playing in the stream with Gilbert.
Gilbert. There’s another source of painful confusion. How can she feel what she’s feeling now in the presence of William and still know in her heart that she has never cared for any boy the way she cares for Gil? It’s possible she may never know for sure whether he survived, may live in half mourning until the day she dies.
The playfulness evaporates from her heart, replaced with a tightness: guilt for joking about a harpsichord, let alone with Prince William, the man she is bringing home for her sister to marry. She fidgets, the heat starting to go to her head. It’s definitely hot in here . . . but she and William have become accustomed to hiding out in unusual places over the last week, ever since their rescue by Sisters Genevieve and Katherine. The two nuns had left them at a crossroads that night, just before dawn, with explicit directions to the first stop on the Veiled Road, though Sister Genevieve warned that if they didn’t arrive before sunup, they’d be as good as dead. Malfleur’s mercenaries in Isolé would by then have redoubled their efforts to locate Isbe and William, who wouldn’t stand a chance on their own in broad daylight.
And so for nearly a week they’ve been traveling like this, under the cover of night, from house to house along the Veiled Road, ushered in by servants who, increasingly, seem to have heard about them and their plans. Despite the fact that they previously understood the alliance to be deeply unpleasant to most of the serfdom, it turns out that the story of the bastard princess of Deluce and the third prince of Aubin has reached—and inspired—many throughout the land.
Many people no longer see Malfleur as a trumped-up threat invented by the council, but a real looming danger, thanks to her gruesome mercenaries raiding so many villages along the western and southern borders, threatening serfs, and killing nobles. And while the sleeping council is still out of favor among the masses, it seems many of the serving class are willing to look on an alliance with renewed optimism. It’s incredible, really, how terror can change the tides of a kingdom.
Which is how Isbe and William have come to find themselves in yet another secret chamber within the estate of a very rich noblewoman—and a faerie, at that. They were surprised at first to learn that Almandine’s home was a stop on the Veiled Road. They had, perhaps naively, assumed that much of the faerie population supported Malfleur, if for no other reason than the fact that they feared her retaliation if they didn’t. Then again, Almandine herself might simply have no knowledge that her servants are part of the anti-LaMorte resistance.
Beads of sweat drip down Isbe’s back.
“In all seriousness, Isabelle,” William says quietly; he seems to have noticed her mood darkening. “I may have many privileges, as a royal, and as a male. But I am not free to do whatever I would wish. I am not free, for example, to choose whom I marry—or to marry for love.”
The silence after his words is heavy. “I’m not sure what you mean,” Isbe finally responds. “You agreed to come with me. You agreed to marry Aurora. For the alliance. That was absolutely your choice. And . . .” She takes a breath, finding herself sick to her stomach to have to repeat this once again. “You will fall in love with her when you see her.”
And then the two of them will have the true love that is destined to undo the curse. This is the wild hope, like a hand in the dark, to which Isbe has been clinging ever since she and Gilbert left Binks’s study, which seems like it occurred in a former lifetime but was actually less than a fortnight ago.
William hesitates before responding. Isbe realizes that every time he pauses, every time he takes a breath, she unconsciously holds hers in, waiting. And when his words come, they rush to her, convincing and taut as a harpoon’s line, their point snagging her in the heart and pulling, pulling. . . . “Tell me something else about her,” William says.
Isbe leans against the wall, its cool, damp marble providing small relief to the overwhelming heat.
She can’t help it. She doesn’t want to talk about Aurora—not in this moment, not when she can feel the intensity of the prince’s gaze on her skin; not when the steam is wrapping itself around her senses, making her emotions slick and difficult to hold in, like if she lets her guard down for even a second, some secret truth may slip out that she’ll forever regret.
And yet the details pour out of her—because some parts of us never change. Some facts are inalterable. You cannot crack open Isbe’s heart without releasing the purest form of love she knows: her love for her sister.
She tells him about her favorite childhood memories, their secret language, the hidden passageway connecting their bedrooms, the snow sculptures and the games of make-believe, the stories they told each other, the tricks they played on the stuffiest of council members.
She even tells him some of the darker memories: how Queen Amélie used to scorn Isbe, sometimes refused to let her sit at the dinner table with the rest of the royal family, slapped her hands and face when she disobeyed her nurses, and found elaborate—almost hilarious—ways to place blame on her for absolutely everything, from the grand hall getting too drafty in winter to the beets being stewed too long, to King Henri withholding his affection from her (because, the queen argued, Isabelle reminded him of his former love—an absurd claim, when everyone knew he had countless flings, all meaningless and disposable, prior to marrying the queen).
And how, amid all this, Aurora would sneak Isbe treats from the kitchen when she was sent to bed without supper, or bring thick feather-stuffed blankets from her room when the frigid air coming off the strait snuck under the doorframe and chilled her bones. Though she couldn’t stand up for Isbe by speaking, Aurora found countless ways big and small to remind Isbe that she did matter. Whatever happened, however hard things got, Isbe always knew that Aurora was there for her.
Isbe doesn’t notice the wetness at the corner of her eyes until she feels the heat of the sauna increase as William leans closer, his fingers grazing her cheek, wiping a tear away.
“Isabelle,” he says softly.
And just as quickly, she is shot forward from the past into the now. The memories burn off, and she can only think of how close the prince is, how steady and calm his voice is, how his fingers dance across her skin—not at all in the awkward, mechanical way he claims to play the harpsichord, but freely, as though he’s reading her expression the way she has read Gilbert’s and Aurora’s for years. He has moved to sit beside her on the same bench, and she’s uncomfortably aware of the fact that he is bare-chested. This man who teases her but also takes her so seriously . . .