“Wait.” William clears his throat. “Listen. I want to keep you safe. To keep us safe. But what we need to do right now is mobilize our troops in order to protect the kingdoms; we need weapons and a military strategy, and we can’t do any of that from a wine cave.”
“We can’t do any of that anyway unless we wake up Aurora and the council,” Isabelle counters, starting to feel exasperated. “We need to lift the curse first.”
“There’s no time for that! I agreed to come out here to the cliffs with you so we could strategize—not stick our heads in the sand. And yes, Isabelle, before you interrupt me, we can do it without lifting the curse.” William’s hands are on her shoulders. This time she doesn’t pull away.
“How?” she asks.
“Simple. You authorize the Delucian troops to gather in my kingdom and receive my weapons. You coordinate the safe transfer of oil to Aubin while I send word to the chief of military back home to prepare for battle. We issue masks to anyone who needs to come within an unsafe proximity to the palace. Don’t you see? We don’t need your sister for any of it. Right now all we need is information we can easily dig up around the castle . . . supply stores and trade routes and—”
“So you’re saying we should just leave Aurora as she is. Asleep. Forever.”
“I’m saying that right now you may have to choose.” He steps closer to her, still touching her. “You can try saving your sister, or you can try saving your kingdom. Neither are guarantees, but it has to be one or the other. We’re at the end, Isabelle. And I need to know where you stand.”
The smell of wine in the room is so strong. It must be, for it is making her feel hot, intoxicated, fuzzy. Choose? But she can’t choose. That’s not fair. That’s not in her power.
“And,” he goes on, stepping even closer until she can feel the heat of his body just a few fingers’ breadth from her own. “If we must make the alliance official . . .”
His hands slide down her arms. He kneels before her. “Then accept me as your prince and rule by my side.” His words are the crest of a tidal wave, and she stands there in disbelief as it torrents on. “You’ve shown you can do it. Through your bravery, your cleverness, your determination—some might call it stubbornness.” She almost laughs. But she doesn’t. She can’t make a sound, can’t stop the wave that is still barreling toward her. “You are the type of ruler who might actually inspire the people to listen. I want to do this together. With you. Marry me.” The wave crashes.
Silence.
“Marry me, Isabelle,” he repeats. The dazzling, shocking aftermath, lighter than air. The foam.
“But . . . I can’t—”
“You can,” he says. “The question is, will you.”
She’s too dizzy to stand. She can’t quite believe this is happening—he’s proposing . . . again. She gets down onto her knees as well, and he lets go of her hands so she can touch his face: the firm ridge of his cheeks, the softness of his mouth, the emotion—the hunger—buzzing through his skin. “William . . .” What to say? How to tell him? How to—
“Isabelle,” he whispers, he insists. Now his hands are on her face, on her lips, on her jaw, tilting her back slightly so that her neck is arched.
Time seems to stop, and Isabelle remembers being a child, no more than two, watching a white feather float from a down coverlet a maid was shaking out. It fell so slowly, idling back and forth on the air, she felt sure it would never land.
And then all at once she is no longer a child, and no longer waiting.
It is late. William is asleep beside her, what remains of his torn cloak forming a thick, soft blanket beneath them. It’s the normal kind of sleep, not the sickness; she made sure to test it by waking him repeatedly until finally he growled half teasingly and kissed her until he succeeded in convincing her to stop. Now she lies awake in the darkness, touching the corner of her mouth where his first kiss landed, his lips merely brushing hers—remembering. How quickly things unspooled from there, and then his lips were parting hers and his hand was at the small of her back, pulling her up against him, and she was kissing him back. . . .
And it was different than her first kiss with Gilbert, which was wild and unexpected, clumsy and exciting and messy and sweet, like a day in the fields with Freckles, flying across the open grass, the wind tangling her hair. Escape.
With William, everything was the opposite: slow, deliberate, full of meaning. She had never felt more present in her own skin, every touch like a raindrop in a pond, rippling outward from a single spot.
But now.
She can’t sleep. She’s afraid that if she does, this will all go away and she’ll lose what it felt like to be beautiful, to be chosen. That if she sleeps, she will dream, and in that dream she will hear her mother singing, and the song will lure her to stay asleep forever, where it’s safe—or else, worse, that waking from it will shatter her.
Wind whistles along the craggy cliffs, the mouth of the strait sloshes below, and she knows she has to make a decision. William has asked her to marry him, and, although she said yes with every part of her, she did not actually say it.
She sits up, letting his arm slip gradually off her, and pulls on her cloak. She fumbles along the floor until she finds her mask, discarded several paces away. Then, quietly, she pushes back the thick velvet curtain and moves along the row of wine casks, barrel by barrel, counting them. By forty-eight, she has reached the lip of the cave. And though it’s the most foolish, willful thing she’s done in a list of very foolish and willful things, she reaches for the ladder, and climbs.
She’s drawn back to Aurora’s bedside as if she were sleepwalking, as if some external force has guided her there instead of the plain fact that she knows her way, knows it in her bones and in her hair and in her fingertips. She will always know her way around this castle, and she will always come back to her sister, because Aurora is intrinsic to Isabelle. She is the truest part of Isabelle. She is her heart.
She kneels, as she did before William just hours ago, and once again takes her sister’s hands. “Please,” she whispers.
Aurora’s chest softly rises and falls. Rises and falls.
In the quiet, Isabelle can almost hear Aurora’s strange, unabashed laugh. But she has the forlorn impression that Aurora is not here—that this Aurora is but a snow sculpture they’ve made, and some detail, as yet undetected, is out of place. It scares her, almost, this other Aurora in the place of her real sister, who is gone.