No. If she’s going to die, she’ll die having done the right thing. She’ll die next to her sister.
“I used to sneak off with a mare called Freckles,” Isbe says carefully. “No one likes to ride her because she’s unruly. Impossible. She never listens. But the way she runs. Gil—my best friend Gilbert—” She pauses. This is the first time she’s even mentioned Gil’s existence to the prince, and saying his name aloud rattles her. “He calls the mare a bad mover,” she goes on, “but it’s not true. She just has her own rhythm, and William, she can go so fast.” The memory rushes through her. “When we were tearing through woods and fields together, not far from this very spot—I felt like I was really alive. I felt like nothing we’d left behind mattered anymore. I didn’t have to know where we were headed. What was important was that we were flying headfirst, like an arrow. Nothing could stop us. I never let go until she threw me.”
“And has she thrown you now?” William asks quietly.
“No,” she answers, hard and resolute. “No, she has not.”
“All right, then,” he says calmly. “Let’s go.”
He heads forward down the road. “Careful of that wheel—it came loose. Here you go.” He helps her past the wreckage of the spice merchant’s cart, and as he does, he lets out a huge sputtering sneeze. It’s a ridiculous sound, coming from so commanding and serious a person.
Despite everything, she laughs.
In a sharp inhale, all the pepper and ginger in the air rises up her nostrils, and she begins coughing and sneezing too.
“No wonder he needed a mask,” the prince says, catching his breath.
“Yes, no wonder.”
“If only a mask could protect us from the sleeping sickness,” William muses.
“Hmm,” Isbe replies. “A mask . . . yes. A mask. A mask!” She stops walking and smacks him in the arm. “William, you’re brilliant!”
“Are you mocking me?”
“No!” The sincerity of his question—the hurt in it—sends a shock through her. He’s still upset over the proposal . . . over her rejection. Because that’s what it was, she realizes. “Despite what you might think of me now, I’m not callous. I think I have a theory on the sickness. What if the spice merchant made it this far from the castle because of his mask? It protected him somehow, but when he removed it, he died.”
“So you think the disease is airborne, then,” William says. “Like the scent of his spices.”
“Right. Perhaps.”
“Maybe carried by the breath of the birds? That could explain the crow’s purple tongue, I suppose.”
“The purple tongue . . . no, I have a better theory. It’s—”
“The vines,” they say simultaneously.
“Smelling them,” he says.
“Or eating them, in the case of the birds,” Isbe adds. And then, after a pause, “It’s faerie magic. Either the work of Malfleur or, more likely, her not-actually-dead sister, Belcoeur. The vines carry a pestilence—like Almandine said. Some sort of poison that puts all creatures who come into contact with their scent to sleep. It explains the presence of the vines, all those flowers you described, and it explains the merchant, and the birds falling asleep midflight. William, it really is brilliant!”
“I didn’t come up with it, Isabelle. You did. You’re the brilliant one.”
“Why does it feel like you’re mocking me now?”
His voice is somber, and a little quiet, when he replies. “I’m not.”
She shivers. No one has ever told her she was brilliant. But there’s something about the way William talks . . . he makes her feel that everything she says and does matters. That he is always listening, always aware of her. That he cares, on some fundamental level, about her thoughts and her feelings and her actions and . . . about her.
Yes, he cares about her. There is no questioning it.
Suddenly she is very, very warm.
“It’s worth a try, isn’t it?” she says, trying to keep the smile off her face. For the first time since she heard Binks’s tale, she feels driven by something other than a wild, stubborn determination. She is startled to name that thing. Hope.
Not more than an hour later, Isbe steps cautiously into the suffocating quiet of the palace courtyard with William right beside her, thick swaths of brocaded fabric from his cloak tied in layers around their mouths and noses.
The formerly bustling courtyard is now as still and cold as a tomb. Without her sense of smell, Isbe is doubly alert to the stillness—a fuzzy silence like the pause between snores. Even though she can’t detect the signature briny odor of the strait, she can sense its proximity by the salty dampness on her skin.
And then, all at once, a powerful feeling of homecoming floods through her. She lets go of William’s arm and begins to run.
Isbe pushes her way through closed doors and down eerily abandoned corridors. She nearly tumbles over the bodies of courtiers, some sleeping and some, she fears, already dead. She can’t think about that just yet. She is home. She is home. She is home.
She bounds up the stairs, twenty to the landing and then four more, to the door of her sister’s bower. She hears William following a few paces behind.
And then she is inside Aurora’s room, and then, in an instant, beside her bed, feeling along the neatly made bedspread until she gasps, her hands coming upon her sister’s, which are cold. Too cold. She leans forward, her heart racing, and touches Aurora’s forehead. Her hair is strewn over the pillows. Someone must have carried her up here. She moves her hands to Aurora’s chest and can only make out the slightest rise and fall. She gasps hard in relief, nearly choking on the heavy fabric around her face. It seems as though the sleeping sickness has somehow preserved Aurora in this state. She’s alive, though deathly thin. She’s alive and—
“We’ve made it!” she bursts out. “William? William, come here. This is her. This is her. Aurora.” Tears sting her eyes. She finds she is shaking, torn between breaking into hysterical laughter and falling to the floor exhausted. It is hard to breathe. Hard to think. She’s back. And Aurora is alive. Everything is going to be all right. They’re together again.
William comes over to her, kneeling down by the bed and wrapping one arm around Isbe. Without thinking, she gives in to his slight pull, leaning against his side, trying to slow her breath, wishing she could rip off her mask and laugh, shout, kiss him.
No.
Quickly she banishes the last idea from her mind.
For several moments, both of them just sit there like that, facing Aurora’s sleeping form, saying nothing.
And then she feels him take a deep breath, and when he lets it out, he says, “My future wife.”
The words echo through the room like marbles scattered from a jar.