Silence fell over the group. “There is,” one of them admitted after a moment. “But…”
I sighed. “We aren’t going to the castle, are we?”
“We are!” Sam said.
“It’s fine if we’re not. You’re a nice enough bunch, for criminals, and it’s not as if there’s a lot I can do about it, anyway.”
Jack leaned against a tree. “We’re avoiding the road becausewe’ve already been ambushed there. Going back to it would be pressing our luck.”
“Ambushed?” I said. “Who ambushed you?”
“I’m surprised you have to ask, considering you’ve got their claw marks in your shoulders.”
“Oh.”
I’d assumed the spider wolves were just a local hazard, the kind of danger that might beset any unwary soul wandering through the woods. “Ambushed” implied the attack wasn’t a matter of chance. That it had been planned.
Planned by whom?
“The spider wolves—they’ve been hunting you?” I asked.
“Yes, lately. Although they first showed up a year or so before we entered into the king’s service.” Jack’s gaze wandered away from mine. He seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. Or perhaps at something no one else could see. “When Gervase was still a prince, his eldest brother was torn to bits by a pack of them while he was out on a hunt, along with almost the whole of his hunting party. It was assumed to be bad luck, an unfortunate encounter with the dangers of the wilderness. There’d been rumors about strange things in the forests of Tailliz for years, after all.
“His next-eldest brother, however, was carried off by an enormous horned bird only a few months later. The family held on to the belief he might be alive until they found his arms and legs scattered across a clearing. Another brother was draggedshrieking into a hole by something with too many teeth, and then their father died a lingering death after being bitten by a furred snake with fins.” His eyes returned to mine. “Since taking our position as Gervase’s huntsmen, we’ve had to fend off assaults by all of those creatures, as well as things that were almost, but not quite, bats, rats, cats, badgers, and hamsters.”
“Hamsters?” I asked.
“I can assure you that a screaming twenty-foot-tall hamster is not a foe for the faint of heart. No one knows why these things are happening, or how, or what is causing them, or when they will strike next. So while the forest may be full of oddities these days—”
“You’re choosing to stray from the path,” I said. “You brave the dangers of the unknown for the concealment that it offers.”
He nodded. “We avoid the road as much as we can and vary our routes. And until we know the cause of the attacks,” he added with a faint smile, “we also treat any strangers we happen upon in the woods with the gravest suspicion.”
“Jack,” Sam protested, “you can’t possibly believe she—”
“I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt, for now,” Jack said, “because she was attacked herself and injured in the bargain. Which would be quite a risk to take if it was only to deceive us. But I am looking forward to what is, I’m sure, the very reasonable explanation for why Skalla sent a wedding planner out on her lonesome, without a guard, companion, or chaperone, into the notably dangerous wilderness between the two countries.” He sketched me a quick bow. “And now, if you please, we should make our way across this river.”
Drat. And I’d thought my story had been so believable, too. I suppose once someone’s been beset by monsters in the woods a time or two, they learn to be more wary thereafter.
It was eventually decided that Max would freeze the river while the rest of us waited a safe distance back, and soon we were sliding our way across slick ice. I found myself more than a little bit nervous during the crossing. If anything was going to leap out of the forest and attack us again, we were presenting it with a prime opportunity as we inched forward, one firm push away from being flat on our backs. But nothing came to bite our heads off.
All things considered, I no longer regretted avoiding the road.
In fact, the rest of the journey passed without incident. When the late afternoon sunshine cast a warm orange glow on the few leaves still clinging to their branches, we clambered out of a small gully, and the towers of a castle heaved themselves into view.
Jack gestured toward it with a flourish, as if it were his and he were presenting it to us for our entertainment and delight. “Castle Tailliz. The stronghold of King Gervase.”
At long last, I had arrived.
Part III
Yonder Lies the Castle
Chapter Ten
I Am Greeted with a Toad to the Face
Castle Tailliz was not as breathtaking a sight as the soaring giant-carved spires of my stepmother’s palace. It wasn’t very big, as castles go, but it was imposing in its own way: a solid, pugnacious-looking edifice designed for defense and not pretending otherwise. The castle took up the whole of a small island in the center of a half-moon-shaped bay, the walls rising straight up from a high cliff face of white stone. Narrow-windowed towers loomed over the ramparts at every sharp corner. A single wide bridge leapt across the bay on soaring arches, connecting the castle proper to a stout keep on the mainland.
