“You should check,” I said.
She nodded sharply, green locks of hair whipping forward and then back again. “Of course. From the sound of it, someone is in great danger.”
I opened my mouth to agree, but then I hesitated. She wasn’t wrong.Your love one breath away from death. It occurred to me that rejecting their offers of help might be a mistake.
But it was my words that were supposed to rescue my love from death—whoever my love might be. My words. Not theirs.
While I was considering that, their faces and bodies began to stretch and distort. They blinked in and out of sight like fireflies on a dark summer night.
“You’re waking up,” Jonquil said through her pulled-taffy mouth, her words sounding distant. “Quick, give us a hug before you go.”
My rancor toward them diminished. I had no idea when the celestial spheres would be aligned again—whatever that meant—and I did appreciate their visits, even if they couldn’t help being their overbearing selves. I wrapped my arms around each of them in turn, holding tight as their limbs went rubbery and whipped out of control. It was a bit like trying to wrestle with angry snakes, although angry snakes don’t try to whisper last-minute wedding-night advice in your ear.
“Thanks for the needle and thread,” I said to Liam as I hugged him. By the time I reached him, he was barely more than a suggestion of a torso and face. “They came in very handy. Pity you can’t give me anything useful in a dream.”
He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and winked at me. “Maybe I can’t, hen,” he said, “or maybe I can.”
He vanished, and the quality of the darkness changed from the nothingness of nowhere to the more familiar black that lurks behind closed eyelids.
I opened them to discover that my chamber in the women’s wing was scarcely brighter lit. Morning had not yet come; the sky outside the narrow window remained a deep purple. But I was wide awake and not likely to fall back asleep anytime soon. I tossed aside the bedclothes and arose. Although the moment my feet touched the cold stone floor, I reconsidered getting out of bed, then or ever again. When I managed to convince myself I couldn’t stay wrapped in warm blankets for the rest of my life, I untied a borrowed silk scarf from around my hair and got dressed, careful not to wake any of the Yvettes who shared the room with me. The air was filled with snores. Heavy scents of perfume and powder wafted up from their nightclothes.
My outfit for the day’s hunt was evidence of a debate I had not been party to. I had been provided with riding boots and leggings, but since that was not considered appropriate clothing for a woman in Tailliz, I had also been given a long skirt to throw over them. However, someone must have pointed out this rather defeated the purpose of the leggings; I could not possibly ride astride in a full skirt and would fall off my horse if it went into a gallop while I was riding sidesaddle—Jonquil might have been able to stay poised on the back of a flying dragon while wearing an elaborate gown, but that was not a skill possessed by many. So as a compromise, my skirt had been slit up the back and hastily finished—the stitching around the slit was obviously new. Women’s riding clothes were such an alien concept here that they had to be improvised.
Leaving the women’s wing without permission or an escort was, of course, also on the long list of forbidden activities. But I decided that if one of the rules had stopped applying to me, I might as well act as if they all had. I was heading out with the hunting party anyway come the dawn. There didn’t seem to bemuch point in spending the intervening hours pacing to and fro in an overfamiliar room.
I threw on my newly mended red cloak and made my way to the viewing balcony, where I wedged myself through the gap between the screen and the wall and clambered down. Fifteen feet of roughly hewn stone wasn’t much of a challenge for someone who had once climbed a glass mountain to fetch a fruit (it wasn’t worth the trip—its peels cured all wounds, which was nice, but it was mealy and rather sour).
In the courtyard below, almost everyone was still asleep, animals and humans alike. I wandered between the banked cookfires and ramshackle shelters, stepping carefully so as not to accidentally tread on anyone sleeping on the bare ground, and drew my cloak in closer. The air was chilly, even with the castle walls blocking the ocean breezes.
Would the villagers still be huddled in the castle’s shadow when autumn gave way to winter? Once again, I resented the waste of space in the women’s wing. Surely at least some of the younger girls shivering in the cold could have bedded down there, if the taint of male presence was too offensive to Tailliziani tastes. I would have to bring it up with Gervase whenever I finally admitted to my true identity, if he was the kind of king who would listen to his queen, rather than treat her as nothing but a prop or a broodmare. Perhaps today I would have a chance to find out.
My goal in crossing the courtyard was finding the stables; since I was up, I thought I’d let the horses become accustomed to me before the hunt. It’s never a bad idea to get to know your horse—I’d learned that much from Calla. I might not be able to beguile them into adoring me the way that she did, but the better acquainted we were, the less likely I was to be bucked off.
I’d had some experience being thrown from a horse. Back when my stepmother had sent me to search for the finger bone of the Deathless One, I’d ridden bareback on the Wild Stallionof the Taiga. His tail and mane were made of flame, and he could cross a thousand leagues in a single day. He also had a nasty temper.
For the hunt, I had been promised a gentle bay mare. I probably should have taken that as an insult, yet more evidence of the Tailliziani disdain for my gender. But to be honest, it hadn’t been very pleasant to ride bareback on a wild stallion with a tail and mane made of flame. Between the sore ass and the burned bosom, I’d regretted it for days afterward. A gentle mare would suit me fine.
The stable was dark, close, and smelly, with dozens upon dozens of horses dozing in their stalls—duns and bays, grays and chestnuts. A few of them blinked open their eyes and snorted curiously when I camein.
“Hello, horses,” I whispered. There were more than I’d expected, and I wasn’t sure which one was mine. “I didn’t bring any food for you, but I’m friendly, and, um…I smell good, maybe?”
“You do,” a voice agreed from the darkness.
I spun around, startled, wondering for an instant if there was a talking horse in Tailliz to go with the talking lion. But a moment later, one of the huntsmen stepped into view, masked and red-haired and clad in green.
There was something about his grin I thought I recognized.
“Sam?” I asked.
“Hello, Clover,” Sam replied. “You’ve changed your hair.”
“It was too tangled to do anything but cut it off. Did you like it better long?”
“I like it both ways.”
“Really?”
“Well…” He hesitated. “It’s a bit choppier now.”
