“Awful,” I admitted. “It’s mostly fondant, and it’s got raisins in it. Still makes for a nice change. Want some?” I offered her a forkful.
She took it, chewed, made a face, and kept chewing.
“You look bonnie,” Sam told her.
Her face grew even sourer, and she mumbled something as she chewed that sounded vaguely like “Can’t walk” followed by a rude word.
“I understand you’ll be leaving us soon,” Gervase said. He made a gesture that took in both Sam andme.
“Yes,” Jack said, swallowing. “Since she was unable to steal my bridegroom, she’s stealing my brother instead.”
“Oh, hush,” Sam said. “You know I had to practically beg her to take me along. Days and days of ‘It’s not safe!’ and ‘My stepmother is an evil sorceress-queen!’ ”
“Well, she is,” I pointed out. Again. “You’ll be in terrible danger.”
“You, too. We’re going together,” Sam said firmly. “That’s what couples do.”
Small smiles lit on the faces of Jack and Gervase at that, and they twined their fingers together. The hero and heroine, content in their happy ending. Good for them. I could only hope the secondary characters in their story would do as well. No one ever bothers to mention the fate of the helpful companions or the ex-fiancées.
“It’s about time, really,” Jack told Sam. “I’ve had quite enough of you following me around like a lost puppy. Go have a romance of your own.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” he answered, and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. She released Gervase’s hand and embraced her brother tightly.
All things considered, maybe Sam had graduated out of helpful-companion status. He wasn’t one of Jack’s decoy duplicates anymore. And he was certainly my hero.
Speaking of the decoy duplicates, by this time the other hunters had abandoned Jack’s train and pushed through the crowd to the table, considerably impeded by their billowy bridesmaids’ dresses—in matching forest green, of course. It wasn’t as surprising a sight as it might have been a few months earlier; several of them, although not all, had taken to wearing gowns or skirts when they weren’t out hunting. I’d overheard a couple discussing how glad they were to be growing their hair out and how much of a relief it was to be perceived as women again. To which another had replied that the chance to have short hair and put on a pair of breeches was the whole reason they’d been so eager to run off with Jack in the first place. During the wedding procession, I’d noticed that one of the hunters—Jules?—had already cut, resewn, and modified their bridesmaid’s dress until the bottom half had effectively been turned into a pair of wide trouser legs. I wondered if I was seeing a new fashion in the making.
They all pressed in close to us, a cluster of uncannily similar faces bidding their goodbyes to Sam and me. The masks were long gone by then, but I still had trouble telling most of them apart. The duchess’s six siblings could have been the exact same person at slightly different ages.
“May the wind be ever at your back,” one of them said.
“Keep warm,” said another.
“I wish you a swift journey,” said a third, who might have been standing on a single leg; the swathes of green skirts made it difficult to tell.
The one in the trouser dress handed me a rose and thenstepped aside to make way for one with tears streaming down her face. “I was wrong about you,” she said. “This is so romantic.” She pressed a small, beautiful frog into my hands. It was patterned like a harlequin with splotches of yellow, orange, red, blue, and green.
An overlapping chorus of farewells followed, which sometimes grew muffled as Sam insisted on hugging them all close, one after another. Just as that was quieting down, one of the hunters drew herself up, spat on the floor, and said, “Ah hawp ye twa eejits dinnae die oan th’ road.”
We left early the next morning, hungover but lighthearted. The bridge to the shore remained broken, so we took a skiff across the bay to the town. Travel to and fro had been a tremendous pain all winter, and more than one disgruntled engineer had asked whether it had been absolutely necessary for me to smash all the stone giants into powder rather than leave a few corpses around to use in rebuilding projects. I apologized and said that next time, I would refrain from taking such rash action and let everybody get murdered instead. That usually shut themup.
The horses the king and queen had gifted us were waiting in the town—a piebald stallion for Sam and for me, Poma. She’d been found cropping grass at the edge of the forest only a few days after I had turned into a lake. I fussed over her greatly as soon as we were reunited, which she calmly ignored, although she seemed to bear me no ill will for placing her in dangerous straits on our previous outing.
Though we were caught in bad weather more often than not, this time without even a carriage to keep it off our heads, the journey was pleasant. Partly because I’d had the foresight to bring along a bedroll stuffed with goose down, which meant I got a good deal more sleep than I usually did when I was traveling. Not all of Angelique’s approaches to problem-solving had been terrible.
But mostly, it was a better trip because of Sam. I didn’t mindgetting drenched in a sudden storm quite so much if he was there to complain about it with me. I began to enjoy seeing the sunrises and sunsets, the wildflowers and the clouds, the ancient oaks looking embarrassed by their tiny baby leaves, bright green and delicate as lace. Sam was much better company than an entourage of animated teeth.
On perhaps our third night of travel, we took shelter beneath a willow tree, lying on the bedroll and listening to the patter of raindrops making their way from leaf to leaf in the forest. A stream burbled nearby, overfull with runoff snowmelt. In another day or two, we’d be out of Tailliz altogether, leaving the trees behind and crossing the plains. Making our way to the rolling hills that would slowly rise until they became the mountains of Skalla.
We’d lain in silence for some time before he asked, “Are you sure you want to go home?”
I propped myself up on my elbows but didn’t reply for a moment. A little way off, Poma and the stallion companionably chomped on a patch of dandelion greens, heedless of the rain.
“I’ll have to confront her sooner or later,” I said at last. “Might as well make it sooner.”
“Do you, though?” he asked, sitting upright and turning to face me. “What if we, I don’t know, went across the sea?”
“To Ecossia?”
