TWENTY-EIGHT
AURORA CLIMBED DOWN FROM THE ROOFS NEAR THE western edge of the city. The buildings were sparser here, with beaten earth for roads. The whole place felt deserted. Everyone, it seemed, had gone to the wedding.
The wall loomed ahead. Aurora looked up, her eyes roving over every building nearby. Most of them were rundown huts, houses thrown up too quickly or old stone things that no one had bothered to care for except the birds. She tilted her head back toward the sky, following the path of lazy clouds, seeing the ragged ends of the wall, the high tower Finnegan had mentioned, and the few tall buildings in this part of town, crooked and twisted so much that they seemed to be held up by hope alone. A stylized fairy perched on top of one, balanced on tiptoe, her wand held out pointing north. She had taken quite a battering, and she was half toppled over, as though about to fall to her death.
The drunken fairy.
Aurora hurried over to the building, following the curve of the wall. The tower looked even more decrepit up close. Shadows hung from the windows, and a rough ditch wove through the ground in front, reaching toward the wall. The ditch ended in a patch of brambles. She scrambled forward and pulled the branches aside, revealing a carved hole in the base of the wall, just large enough for a small person to wriggle through. And beside it, hidden among the brambles, a brown satchel. She pulled it open. A flask sat on top, and she gulped down the liquid without stopping to check what it was, too thirsty and worn to care. Then she threw the satchel over her shoulder and crawled forward into the gap, pushing the brambles out of the way with one hand while keeping her balance with the other. Her knees scraped on the hard ground, and her skirts caught around her shoes and in the branches that crashed back behind her, but she kept crawling, until she was forcing herself through a tiny space in the stone. Her shoulders banged the wall, and she pictured herself stuck for the rest of forever, but then she wriggled free, her head plunging forward into the fresh air.
The forest grew right up to the edge of the city, with the highest branches brushing against the top of the wall. Light filtered through the evergreens, dappling the grassy floor, while buds, in pinks and whites and greens, were sprinkled over the branches of the otherwise naked, stooping trees. The smell of pine tickled Aurora’s nose, and she could hear the birds, hurrying about in a twittering, fluttering chorus.
It smelled like home. Aurora pressed her hand against the nearest oak. The gnarled knots on the trunk seemed to whisper a story under her fingertips, running round and round, deeper and deeper and older and older into the tree.
Every princess part of her, everything that connected her to the past, everything that had brought her solace in this past month had been discarded or burned or torn from her, leaving nothing but empty space. She was a mixture of guilt and fear and selfishness, yet for the first time in weeks, in her life perhaps, she was free of the panic that clutched her chest, of the restriction that weighed her down. She was breathing open air, and for this moment, even if it only lasted this very moment, she was free to be whoever she pleased. And no one, not the king, not Iris, not Tristan, not Celestine, could take that away.
She set off through the trees.
Light broke through the branches in dappled patches, and the birds were chirping above her, waiting for the spring. After a while of hurrying through the undergrowth, her knees shook with exhaustion, so she sat down against the trunk of a tree, pulling the satchel onto her lap. A woolen dress lay inside, of the modern style but cheaply made. Perfect for blending in. She tugged it on, stuffing the bloodstained wedding dress in the bag in its place. Blood clung to her fingers as well, although she had no memory of how it got there. It could have been anyone’s.
People were dead because of her. They had died, and she had not even looked over her shoulder as she’d run from them. But death had been inevitable, no matter what she chose. She had only had impossible choices, ever since she awoke.
She dropped her head against the tree trunk, hard, and the chain around her neck rattled.
Finnegan’s gift. A silver dragon, and a note pressed into her palm.
She slipped her fingers underneath the waistband of her wedding dress. The paper was still there. She pulled it free and unfolded and unrolled it, until she revealed a piece of parchment slightly bigger than her hand.
A map. Tiny but detailed, showing a city, with buildings all crammed together, surrounded by water on all sides. Vanhelm. A star lay in the very center, marking a large building labeled as the palace. Beyond the river on the left side, the cartographer had drawn a dragon, similar to the one she now wore.
Underneath, someone had scrawled a message in black ink. It had been slightly blurred in the rolling, but Aurora could still make out the words.
Burn them all, little dragon.
She almost balled it up but stopped herself, and instead placed it carefully inside her bag. He had helped her, after all. He had told her things she did not want to hear, but things that seemed truer with every day. And he had warned her that her escape would not come without cost. She could not trust him, not yet, but one day . . . one day he might prove useful.
When she set off again, she walked more slowly, allowing her hands to stretch out and wander across the trunk of every tree that she passed. I am not a dragon, she thought. I don’t know what I am.
The ground sloped upward, and she began to climb, using roots for leverage under her feet. She had never been this far into the forest before. She took a deep breath, trying to calm her trembling heart once again. The breath caught in her chest as she peered over the edge of the hill.
The ground dropped away sharply in a smooth, treeless slope, cradling a large lake at the bottom of the valley. It reflected the afternoon sun, but the surface was far from smooth, broken by drinking deer and the splash of birds. Beyond it, trees stretched out into the distance, an endless blanket of brown and green.
For a moment, she stared. Then she set off at a run, her skirts flying behind her. The bag crashed against her side, jingling with coins that would be her salvation. I know nothing, she thought as her feet pounded the ground, tumbling, down, down, down toward the lake. Not who she was, not where she was going, not what she should do. She was going to get her answers . . . but where that would lead her, she did not know. She had no path to follow, except instinct and desire and the sense that something awaited her, out in the world, beyond the edge of the trees. Duty would catch up with her, and she would play the part she was meant to play, but not yet.
She felt invisible, impossible. Infinite. I am nothing, she thought. Nothing but myself.