Winter Glass Read online

  Dedication

  To the memories of George and of Ellen:

  may eternal peace

  include some great reads

  Map

  Epigraph

  Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away.

  —Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

  [The sea] is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free

  —Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  The Myth of the Hart Slayer

  Part I: The Heart of the Deer Laid Bare

  Chapter 1: Malfleur, the Last Faerie Queen

  Chapter 2: Isabelle

  Chapter 3: Belcoeur, the Night Faerie

  Chapter 4: Aurora

  Chapter 5: Isabelle

  Chapter 6: Binks, a Male Faerie of Modest Nobility, Who

  Chapter 7: Isabelle

  Part II: Whose Blood Must Slay

  Chapter 8: Wren, Formerly a Maiden of Sommeil, Indentured to the Mad Queen Belcoeur

  Chapter 9: Aurora

  Chapter 10: Isabelle

  Chapter 11: Aurora

  Chapter 12: Malfleur, the Last Faerie Queen

  Part III: So Cry the Future Sayers

  Chapter 13: Aurora

  Chapter 14: Isabelle

  Chapter 15: Aurora

  Chapter 16: Wren, Formerly a Maiden of Sommeil, Indentured to the Mad Queen Belcoeur

  Chapter 17: Isabelle

  Chapter 18: Aurora

  Chapter 19: Wren, Formerly a Maiden of Sommeil, Indentured to the Mad Queen Belcoeur

  Part IV: Among All Men and Across All Fae

  Chapter 20: Isabelle

  Chapter 21: Aurora

  Chapter 22: Isabelle

  Chapter 23: Verglas, the Ice King

  Chapter 24: Malfleur, the Last Faerie Queen

  Chapter 25: Vulture

  Part V: No Heart Can Be Braver

  Chapter 26: Aurora

  Chapter 27: Gilbert

  Chapter 28: William, Once Merely the Third Prince of Aubin, Now Both Crown Prince of Aubin and King Consort of Deluce

  Chapter 29: Isabelle

  Chapter 30: Malfleur, the Last Faerie Queen

  Chapter 31: Isabelle

  Epilogue: Violette, a Faerie Duchess of Remarkable Bearing, According to Her Selves

  Epilogue: Gilbert

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Lexa Hillyer

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE MYTH OF THE HART SLAYER

  Sing high in the air

  For the heart of the deer

  Laid bare

  By the hunter who roams

  The royal forest.

  Good king’s betrayer:

  Hero of the poor,

  His name, no one knows,

  Whose blood must slay

  Man’s greatest foe.

  Or so cry the future sayers:

  For among all men

  And across all fae,

  No heart can be braver

  Than that of the hart slayer.

  PART

  I

  THE HEART OF THE DEER LAID BARE

  1

  Malfleur,

  the Last Faerie Queen

  Sleep is a vast and dreamless dark.

  But then: tiny lights, like seeds, shower across a corner of the black. Something has snagged its claws in the soft flesh of night.

  The panther is upon her before the queen has fully awakened: the scent of flowers and meat on its breath, a feral purr rumbling at the base of its throat. The tight leather muzzle Malfleur always keeps chained over the animal’s mouth has torn loose.

  She does not have time to wonder how the panther—afflicted by the sleeping sickness for many weeks—woke up from its spell. With the speed of thought, her hand has found the letter opener beside her bed and wrapped around its thin handle, just as the animal’s fangs tear into her shoulder.

  The queen cries out; pain ricochets through her body as she thrusts the letter opener in an arc over her head. It is only meant for hacking open a waxen seal, too dull to cut through the creature’s skin, but never mind—its point has found the eye. The panther roars, pulls back and flails, slashing the pillow beside Malfleur’s face, sending bloodied feathers into the air. The queen gasps and rolls off her bed as the animal continues to wail—a sound like a rent in a glacier: half scream, half growl.

  Dawn’s cool light barely illuminates her royal chambers, but it’s just enough to catch the glint of her dagger, unsheathed, on the window ledge. She crawls to it, her right arm shaking from the shock of her wound. Clinging to the ledge, she pulls herself up. The panther has noticed her movement. It lunges, a blur of white fur and fangs—the letter opener still jutting out of its face at an angle, like the tusk of the fabled unicorn.

  Malfleur sucks in a breath, then strikes with the dagger, which jolts raggedly into the beast’s rib cage.

  A gargling howl fills the air, seems to swallow up all the light in the room. Time slows. Malfleur sways with the aftershock. The panther’s claws catch the skirt of her nightgown as the beast thuds to the floor, forcing the queen down onto her knees.

  Still it struggles, legs scrambling, claws scraping stone.

  She breathes roughly, leaning over the body as it continues to writhe for several moments more; her nightdress is torn, covered in blood half the panther’s and half her own. She can’t feel her shoulder.

  Finally the panther goes still, steam rising from its nostrils. The queen’s breath begins to calm too as she stares at the majestic creature, who always seemed to her like an incarnation of winter, full of pale fury and long, cold solaces. How ugly it has become now, where once the animal was all grace, its purr deep as a subterranean tremor.

  This was her favorite pet—her companion, her creation—but it turned on her. Betrayal rings in Malfleur’s bones, so familiar by now it has come to feel like a passing season. For a moment, it is not her shoulder wound that aches and pangs but the sudden depth of her loss, echoing through her.

  She collects herself, calculating the facts as she staggers slowly to her feet.

  There was nothing truly sentient driving the attack, that much is obvious. Malfleur can still sense the animal’s panic and hunger lingering in the air like the electricity of a storm. The large white beast—pristine, dangerous, loyal, trained—must have forgotten itself while it slept, forgotten the humanity the faerie queen had breathed into its mind, using the powerful magic she has accumulated over the years.

  The panther had even warned Malfleur about the sleeping sickness, and the gaping purple flowers surrounding the palace of Deluce, before falling into its own slumber several weeks ago. Hungry for hungry for, the cat had said in their last conversation, struggling to isolate the words.

  Poor animal. Most humans cannot find words for such things either.

  Still, the question that tugs at Malfleur’s mind—as she steadies herself to force the dagger from the panther’s flesh—is not why her pet attacked her, but why it broke free from its long sleep in the first place.

  And how?

  She wipes the knife clean. The smell of guts and bile is stifling; it’s as though the queen herself has been consumed. She sways, then stumbles to the wall and pushes open her shuttered window.

  She heaves a breath of fresh air. The smoky undulations of LaMorte seem, at just that moment, almost peaceful, swept in a morning gauze just shy of blue, no longer silver.

  There can only be one answer to her question, she realizes.
>
  The faerie curse has been lifted.

  Princess Aurora has awakened.

  “Happiness is like starlight, my Marigold,” Malfleur’s father told her one summer evening when she was very little. King Verglas had always enjoyed the sound of his own voice. But Malfleur thought he was right, in a way: we do what is necessary, for our joy in this world is scarce and must be wrestled down from the black vault of all that is random and meaningless.

  And so, less than a week after Aurora’s awakening and the panther’s attack, the queen and a small retinue of soldiers—using information she gleaned from her squeamish and simpering cousin, Violette—push their way into the royal forest of Deluce, dense with the heady coniferous scent of pine needles and sap. Even in the dead of night, the abandoned cottage isn’t hard to find. The breath of memories comes to her, soft and stirring, but she does not let it touch her.

  Now Malfleur stands in the doorway of the nursery she once shared with her sister, Belcoeur. There sits the spinning wheel, its gold contours flickering in the light of her torch. The instrument had been a gift to her beloved sister . . . and, later, a symbol of all that had splintered between them. She gazes at the rare, beautiful spindle. She takes her time; imagines threading her desire through the eye of the flyer, then carefully pedaling and pulling, pedaling and pulling, until the cord of revenge grows strong and taut and fine.

  Until it shines.

  2

  Isabelle

  Isbe shudders in the cold as she and several royal attendants pick their way across a field at dawn in the unpleasant business of scouring for survivors—and taking account of the lost. She is thankful, just now, for being blind. But then again, she doesn’t need to be able to see the sun push up through the fog hanging over the strait in order to know the unflinching cruelty it brings, doesn’t have to see the bones of the dead blanching in the grass, either—bodies forever fallen among thorny, shriveled vines, forming miniature castles for sparrows and mice.

  It has been a week since the sleeping sickness officially ended, but it has left Deluce in shambles. The moment Aurora shifted, gasped, and grasped her sister’s hand, everything changed: the purple flowers along the crenelated palace walls began to wither. Scattered servants and nobles throughout the palace startled into consciousness, though the vast majority remained still, their lungs frozen from the chill of winter, or their throats slit by pillagers. The list of the dead within the castle village has grown by eighty-three since yesterday. That number does not even include the eleven council members who died. The only one who lived is the chief of military, Maximilien.

  “Another courtier, Miss Isabelle,” says one of the servants in her party. A woman takes her arm and guides her to a body.

  Isbe kneels down and feels a sunken rib cage, covered in a surcoat of ermine and velvet. She scrambles for the buttons—something light, like fine gold, and something glossy, perhaps pearl—removing each one expertly with her bare hands. “Add them to our store.”

  When William first told Isbe that they must scour and save, she scoffed. “Deluce has more gold than any nation in the known world,” she told him. “Surely you know that.”

  “In war, every single jeweled ring in the land may be melted into a metal that could save a man’s life. Or a woman’s.” His comment made her think of the nasty Lord Barnabé—Binks—an ostentatious noblefaerie who wears ten ruby rings at once, one for each of his fat fingers.

  “My lady.” A servant tugs on her sleeve, and Isbe recognizes the kitchen maid’s voice, the buttery scent of her hair and clothes.

  “Yes, Matilda?” At least it isn’t Gertrude, who used to beat Isbe when she stole biscuits. Gertrude, like so many of the others, perished during the sickness. There’d been a rolling pin trapped in her clenched fist when her body was found.

  “The prince is asking for you. May I lead you to him?” She sounds a little out of breath.

  Isbe hesitates before answering. “Of course.” She places her hand on the older woman’s weathered wrist and allows Matilda to lead her back across the castle yards.

  Early spring has a bite to it. The wind stings and cools Isbe’s flushed face as she thinks of the prince. How there had been a miracle, a yes, on the tip of her tongue, a gift of a word. A yes that would have allowed her to skip right over a lifetime of no, over the impossibility of being born a bastard and not a princess. A yes that would have made her a queen, that would have made her William’s.

  The Aubinian prince has left an imprint on Isbe: she keeps replaying the way his words and hands tindered her, how she burned and was left shaking. But then Aurora awoke, and that alive thing—that inner self, that yes—withered on Isbe’s tongue, dissolved into dust. She feels overcome now with a bashful shame, stunned by the sickening glare of the obvious: Prince William of Aubin was never hers except in that brief instant, in the wine caves, when they felt they were truly at the end of all hope. He is not hers anymore, and she is certainly not his.

  But she has her sister back, and that is all that matters.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” William announces quite accurately, as soon as she’s deposited in the king’s tower meeting room.

  “I’ve been doing exactly what you’ve asked of me,” Isbe replies, keeping her voice calm. She reaches out to steady herself, touching the back of an elaborately carved chair.

  “Exactly that and only that,” William responds, and she could swear she feels his gaze sweep across her skin, lighting it on fire. He is always so cutting with his words, so frustratingly precise, so pointed—like darts driven into a map to mark a location.

  “You’ve expected more, then.”

  “Expected. Hoped.” He clears his throat. “As you know, there have been clashes in the western villages. Bouleau and Dureté have fallen, and we were unprepared.”

  We.

  “Queen Malfleur may be holding back the extent of her forces for now,” he goes on, “but I have persuaded Maximilien that our next step is to shore up our defense along the Vallée de Merle. In the meantime, we are sending scouts into the mountains to assess the cause of Malfleur’s delay. I’ve shown my new bombard design to the forge, and we’re moving forward with—”

  “William,” Isbe inserts. “If I may interrupt.”

  “You’ve certainly never asked permission before.” There’s a familiar amusement in his voice.

  It’s intolerable! He finds these little ways to insinuate that he knows her intimately, when in fact, as of a month ago, she was hardly aware that a third prince of Aubin existed—and, to be sure, he’d never heard of her.

  Never mind what had happened between them just seven nights ago, the kisses that left her lips swollen; his fingertips on her shoulders, her neck, her collarbone. . . . Never mind the fact that she too feels the same connectedness—feels that even when he surprises her, he does so in a way that further clarifies and satisfies her sense of his Williamness.

  “Sarcasm is ill-fitting on you,” she says now with a huff. “I don’t believe, William, that our problem is one of strategy.”

  “What do you mean, our problem? Our problem is Malfleur.”

  “Or maybe Malfleur is just a symptom.”

  “That symptom is murdering your people.”

  “Only those she has not persuaded to her side.”

  “The sword’s blade can be very persuasive,” William says dismissively, but she can hear the rhythm of his pacing as he considers what she said. “So too can the bands of thugs doing her dirty work, much like the ones who captured us back in Isolé.”

  “Perhaps,” Isbe admits, remembering how they’d been seized and tied together by the wrists, how certain she’d been that they were going to die. “But what if there’s more to it than that? Everyone knows Bouleau and Dureté are the worst villages.”

  “Worst?”

  She cringes. “Poorest, I meant. Unhappiest. I heard a story about Dureté. That the lord who rules there is a faerie whose tithe is compassion. I heard he lived for ye
ars in constant tears, while all those who worked his fields grew angrier and more heartless by the tithe. As he took their compassion, they became hard. Is it any surprise, with such inequities, that they fell to Malfleur? Perhaps our greatest weakness is not a lack of assets or intelligence but an issue of, well, attitude. I can’t help but think of the many tales we heard along the Veiled Road. . . .”

  The atrocities performed by Malfleur’s mercenaries are countless—barons and lords throughout the land brutally murdered and strung up in the village greens, a mockery made of their wealth and power: bodies stripped bare and mutilated (eyes removed, bloody guts leaking out of the M-shaped wounds carved into their exposed fat bellies), their fancy furnishings torn to shreds. Most horrifying of all were the fresh recruits, Delucian peasants dressed in fabrics made from the destroyed possessions of those lords, raiding and torching their manors, or sometimes hundreds of them taking up residence and wreaking havoc, feasting and celebrating while Malfleur’s soldiers offered them weapons and promises of liberation.

  To anyone who knows anything about Queen Malfleur, those promises should seem thinner than the brittle layer of ice that laces the creek Isbe used to scramble across in winter, delighting in the crackle as it shattered beneath her—yet another one of her dangerously foolish (or if you asked her, fearless) pastimes. So what’s making people believe the faerie queen’s promises, if not a deep, preexisting anger within them? This, Isbe is convinced, is Malfleur’s greatest weapon: a dangerous flame that lives inside all of us, that blooms and burns when stoked.

  And there is something worse, Isbe knows, than suffering backbreaking work, a hungry belly, or the burden of enormous levees and taxes, and that is the experience of being treated as though one’s life simply does not matter. Isbe knows that feeling.

  William has approached her; the velvet swish of his floor-length cloak against the stone floor mirrors the warm rustle of his voice. “I remember the rumors, yes. And everything we witnessed.” He pauses.

  Isbe is momentarily overcome by the prince’s limelike musk—part bitter, part sweet. She now associates that scent with a prickling sensation throughout her body, sort of like pins and needles, but searing as the spray of stray sparks from a forge.