“Farther if we have to. To unknown lands.”
East of the sun,I thought.West of the moon.I shook my head and lay back against him, feeling his warmth. “She came to me when I was a lake. When I was locked in the dungeon, too, I think. My sister found me in my dreams, and my stepmother is far craftier than Jonquil. I suppose there’s a chance we’d escape her notice if we made our way back to the mirrored hallways, but…I don’t much care for that idea.”
“No. Especially not if we’d have to curse ourselves into comas.”
“Dangerous to leave your body lying around like that,” I agreed. “You might wake up being kissed by some weirdo.”
“Ugh.” He tossed a pebble into the stream. We listened to the plunk. “If your stepmother did come to find you, maybe you could fight her off.”
“Me? I’m—”
“The mightiest sorceress I’ve ever seen.”
My first impulse was to argue, to deny it. True, I’d defeated a sorceress of astonishing power no more than a few months ago, but there were a hundred reasons that didn’t make me a match for my stepmother. I couldn’t imagine her being foolish enough to exhaust herself, for one thing. And I’d had help fighting Angelique and her army. The rest of my family. The king’s soldiers. A dozen hunters with supernatural powers.
But I’d done it. I’d screamed until rocks shattered and trees cracked.
“Hm,” I said.
Sam stroked my hair, unconcerned that it was as wet as a dishrag.
“You know, you never did finish that story,” he said. “The one about you.”
“The story I told you had ended?”
“Aye. I’d like to hear the rest of it.”
I was silent for a long minute. There was only the sound of the rain.
And then I said, “All right.”
Chapter Forty
The Tale of the Princess in the Tower
Once upon a time, when the world was younger and I was a little angrier, a wicked sorceress-queen imprisoned her stepdaughter in a tower deep within the trackless wilderness of Skalla. The tower had no doorway. The only opening in the sheer wall was a single small window at the highest possible point.
Every morning, Princess Melilot’s stepmother would stop by the base of the tower and call up to her, “Will you not let me in?”
And Melilot would yell, “Do not mock me, you poisonous snake! You know full well there is no door.”
Her stepmother remained unfazed by this. “Surely any daughter of mine can use magic to grant her visitors entry.” Then she would turn and depart.
Melilot spent her first month in the tower raging.
She spent the second month moping.
She spent the third month crushed by unutterable boredom.
In the fourth month, she turned her mind to the problem at hand.
At first, she focused her efforts on mighty feats of magic that proved to be far beyond her capabilities. She attempted to summon a powerful gale to bear a visitor aloft to her window, but after weeks of effort, she managed to create no more than a light breeze.
She attempted to command roses to twine up the tower and form a ladder of vines that a visitor might climb—for she did not much mind the idea that her stepmother might prick herself on a thorn or two—but after many days, she was only able to make a few squat rosebushes sprout around the base of the tower. The rosebushes thrashed their canes threateningly, for they had been made in a rage, and the rage remained. But their reach was short, and they were certainly useless for approaching the window.
Melilot attempted to turn herself into a vast lake, as her sister Jonquil had once done, in the hopes that any visitors could swim to her window. It also crossed her mind that she might employ this method to flow out of the tower and escape. But it mattered not; at the time, she was able to become nothing greater than a puddle.
But one day, almost as an idle thought, she willed her hair to lengthen, and to her great surprise it responded, cascading first to her waist and then to her ankles before spilling onto the floor. Although she had mastered nothing else, she had at least mastered this.
