She hesitated. While she was deciding on her reply, I backed out of my sisters’ embrace. They reluctantly let mego.
The noise and bustle in the room resumed. I pretended to once again become fascinated by the contents of my underwear drawer. It was full of spiders now. I hoped they had better taste than squirrels.
It was easy enough for Calla to tell me to defy the queen. She got what she wanted without needing to. And Jonquil was too dutiful to refuse any request her mother made of her. Neither of them had ever put their foot down and said, “Enough. I won’t. No.”
All three of us had suffered in the queen’s service—Jonquil by far the most. If it hadn’t been for fairy magic fueled by Gnoflwhogir’s burgeoning affection, my older sister would still be in bloody pieces strewn across the grassy hillocks of the Summerlands. But neither of my sisters had ever faced the queen’s direct and personal wrath.
I’d taken what had happened to me as a warning. A year anda day of imprisonment was a light sentence by her standards. All I’d had to face was the loneliness. The boredom. The humiliation when my misguided attempt at escape had only proved that my judgment was as poor as she’d always thought. The self-loathing I’d felt after watching someone fall, down and down and down, into the piercing thorns of the rosebushes I had grown. Self-loathing because I should have felt anguish and horror when the thorns stabbed out his eyes, but I hadn’t.
And of course, I’d also had to face the knowledge that my refusal to obey my stepmother’s commands had ultimately been pointless. That I was merely a cog in her machine. One she’d handily replaced when I proved defective. After she’d clapped me in the tower for my insubordination, she’d simply assigned my task to Jonquil, who completed it more quickly and easily than I ever could. My defiance meant nothing to my stepmother because I meant nothing to her. She’d made it plain she could snuff me out like a candle in a hurricane whenever she wished.
Calla believed my fears of poisoned apples and glass coffins were overblown. That my previous punishment had been light not because it was meant as a warning but because the queen regarded me as her daughter and wished me no harm. But even Calla wouldn’t go so far as to say my fears had no basis whatsoever.
“It’s possible that you’ll like him, you know,” Jonquil said. “Gervase.”
Possible, yes, but it wasn’t anything I could count on. “I suppose.”
“Kill Gervase in his sleep,” Gnoflwhogir muttered from the carpet. A rabbit sniffed at her necklace of ears, wrinkled its nose, and movedon.
“Or that you’ll like Tailliz,” my stepsister continued, trying to ignore her wife.
“Slice his throat.” Ignoring Gnoflwhogir was difficult. “Drip poison in his ear.”
“Perhaps you’ll like it more than here,” Jonquil tried once again.
I gave up on trying to shake the spiders out of one of my lacier pieces and shut the drawer. “So far all I’ve heard is that it’s magically backward and haunted by unnatural creatures. Oh, and they take advice from a talking lion. Is the lion nice?”
“No,” said Liam.
“You can see why my enthusiasm isn’t exactly unbounded.”
“It can’t possibly have nothing whatsoever to recommend it, can it?” Calla turned to Liam in appeal. “Surely you know something worthwhile about Tailliz. Or Gervase.”
He pondered for a moment before he answered. “It’s a lovely country, Tailliz,” he said at last. “Forests full of massive trees, fifty times your height, so wide at the base a dozen people couldn’t clasp hands around them. And Gervase is well liked, both in Tailliz and elsewhere. He was engaged to an Ecossic lady, before…” Liam’s voice trailed off. I assumed he meant before Gervase broke it off to send a proposal in my direction. The situation had no doubt changed now that Gervase was king rather than umpteenth in line to the throne.
How, I wondered, was his previous betrothed feeling tonight? Most likely, no one had asked her. With a throne in the offing, it mattered very little how she felt, or how I felt, or even how Gervase felt.
“Anyhow,” Liam continued, “there aren’t stories of him kidnapping women to make them spin straw into gold. Or drowning any wee bairns prophesied to marry someone inconvenient. He likes hunting, I think. I’ve heard he has a healthy stable of horses and a good pack of dogs.” His brow creased as he considered, and then he reached in his pocket and took out a slender sewing needle and a spool of silk thread. He held them out to me. “Here. You should take these. Keep them on you if you can.”
I looked at them in confusion. “In case my clothing tears during a hunt?”
He shook his head. “No. You’ll need them if you’re ever attacked by wolves.”
It’s easy to harbor the illusion that Liam is the normal one in the family, until you talk to him for more than five minutes. I took the needle and thread.
I still didn’t have much to go on regarding Tailliz and Gervase. Tall trees and a king fond of hunting. I supposed it was conceivable that the two of us would get along. Hunting wasn’t my favorite activity, but I knew enough about it that he wouldn’t think I was a complete ignoramus. My mother and father had served as attending physicians at more than a few hunts; it’s amazing how many accidents can happen when an angry boar confronts a skittish horse.
Perhaps I wouldn’t mind living there. The decision to go might have been taken out of my hands, but once I was out from under my stepmother’s thumb, maybe I’d find a way to make a fresh start. Forge my own path at last.
“He can’t be the worst person in the world if he likes horses and dogs. I guess I’ll find out the rest soon enough.” I plucked a satin chemise out of the paws of a badger and edged my way around the other furry creatures crisscrossing the floor. “Is there still room for this in the chest?”
There wasn’t a great chance I’d find happiness in Tailliz. But a sliver of hope is better than no hope at all.
Part II
How to Get Lost in the Woods
Chapter Four
