Isbe tries to ignore the mild sting in her words. “You won’t be lonely—you’re marrying a prince. I’m the one being kicked out of our home. I’m sorry if I can’t say I pity you.”
Please don’t be jealous of me, Isbe. You know how much I need you. We need each other.
“Jealous?” She snorts. Jealous of the princess who can’t speak or feel, who’s forced into a marriage with a prince she’s never met? “As if I’d want my life to be anything like yours!” she blurts out.
She can feel from the tension in Aurora’s body that she has hurt her sister.
Slowly Aurora taps. In that case, maybe it is for the best that you’re leaving.
She doesn’t mean it, Isbe knows—she’s just offended. She’s just worried and upset about everything that’s happened in the past few hours. But still Isbe yanks her hand away—a sharp cruelty. Without their hand-to-hand connection, her sister can’t communicate at all. She’s trapped in her own silence.
Well, she’d better get used to it.
“Please, just leave. I need to be alone.” The words burn her throat, and as soon as her sister swishes through the tapestry and her distressed footsteps fade from the secret corridor, Isbe slumps down onto her plush bed, a flood of dread and sadness pushing up against her on all sides, threatening to drown her.
She rolls over, pushing her face into a pillow. Its fresh linen-y smell only makes the pain welling up inside her worse. How many times has Aurora insisted on Isbe’s comfort, even at the expense of her own? How often has Isbe tended to Aurora’s scrapes and cuts and beestings—not because they hurt her but precisely because they didn’t? Sometimes Isbe could swear she felt the pain that her sister could not, held it for her, in case that was how pain worked and someone had to bear it.
How many mornings did they wake side by side, having stayed up too late telling each other stories? How many games and jokes and codes did they create—not to mention an entire secret language of hand taps—building a world that was all their own, an impenetrable fortress belonging just to them?
Isbe longs even now to crawl up the secret passageway to Aurora’s room and apologize, to get into her bed and refuse to let go of her, refuse to be parted.
But it’s an impossible wish. Her life until now has been a lie, an indulgence. And the horrible suspicion that Aurora pities her—that, on some level, maybe she wants Isbe out of her way—is what gives her the resolve she needs at last.
Isbe would always rather face the truth. Even if it crushes her.
When she hears the pebble against her window several hours later, she doesn’t hesitate. If she turned back now and ran to apologize to Aurora, she might lose her nerve. So she walks toward the wind blowing her open shutters back and forth.
Night has a very different smell from day. It is purer, sweeter somehow. In the night, there are no boundaries between herself and the world around her. She is equal to it.
Isbe heaves her trunk onto the windowsill and, when Gil calls softly up to her, drops it into his waiting arms, fleeing her room—and her sister and her home and her life up until now.
As the cold air embraces her and she grips the lilac trellis for the last time, she could swear her own palm tingles, as though from a simple long-and-short pinkie tap. Good-bye.
5
Aurora
Aurora is startled from fitful sleep by a loud rustling of feathers . . . and a voice. “Evening, caged bird,” it says.
She opens her eyes and scans the room. The door is closed. A fire mellows in the hearth. Perhaps one of her maids came in to stoke it? That must have been the noise. Or maybe she was dreaming. She leans back against the pillow. Her eyes drift closed again.
“Any pastry? Better yet, mouse’s head?”
This time Aurora sits up with a start. On her window ledge stands a small, smoke-black starling silhouetted by moonlight. Its tiny dark eyes shine, and it cocks its head as though curious, or hungry. She must have left her window open a crack. Since the cold doesn’t bother her, she sometimes forgets to worry about it. The bird in the window is watching her. It’s almost as if the bird was the one to speak. . . .
But that’s old magic, impossible magic.
Then, as she watches, the bird opens its mouth. “Me. What.” Each of the words a separate caw. “What. Is. Me.”
Aurora’s chest tenses. A talking bird. Like something from one of her tales. She throws back the covers and steps cautiously toward the window. Around the bird’s ankle is a fine metal brace, and if she’s not mistaken, it bears a familiar image: a thorny ring surrounding a small crow. The crest of Malfleur.
Aurora stares in awe. People say that unlike most faeries, Queen Malfleur still knows how to wield magic of great power and influence—has made a special study of it all her life, which has been long. She reigns over the scattered territories of disgruntled and largely disorganized citizens in the remote LaMorte Mountains, and Deluce has little to no traffic with LaMorte, so there’s not much evidence to prove whether the rumors of the queen’s gifts of magic are true.
In fact, Deluce has issued many trade sanctions against them, and has repeatedly taxed all passage between the two kingdoms in an effort to discourage the unhappy, unhealthy, and often uncivilized people of LaMorte from crossing over to the lands of their far wealthier neighbors. Aurora has always assumed Malfleur’s skill in magic had been vastly exaggerated throughout the years—more myth than truth to it.
But studying the bird now, Aurora realizes that in fact the rumors about Malfleur’s powers may have been accurate all along. If the faerie queen can make birds speak, what else can she do? And why has the bird come here?
Aurora shivers again, trying to picture the faerie queen, with the dramatic white scar that supposedly crosses her left eyelid.
The bird flutters its wings. “Me freak? Me . . . fiction?”
Aurora shakes her head no.
“What is me?” the bird asks, and she cannot tell if the words are a taunt or a test—or a sincere question. “Vermin. Wonder. Failed experiment. Or success?”
She shakes her head again.
“Magic in guts. Magic inside. Words inside. Like dust. Eating dust. Like fire. Me? Alone. Alone,” the bird says.
Its voice is cold as iron, and she can’t tell whether it knows what it’s saying. Whether it’s asking for help.
“Cat got your tongue?” the bird caws. “Cat got your tongue?”
Aurora shakes her head a third time.
“No words, human?” The starling caws again, and it sounds like a harsh laugh. “Like scarecrow.”
At this, Aurora loses patience and shoos the bird out of the window with a hard wave of the back of her hand. The bird cries once more, fluttering back and taunting her with a final, mocking word. “Useless.” Then it’s winging away into the night.