“—even though she’s been lying about who she is, she forgot to mention she’s a witch—”
“Sorceress,” I protested.
“—and after she turned us into birds, you abandoned me to go traipsing off after her!”
“Because I’m supposed to follow along behind you, right?” Sam said. “So that Jack gets to be the hero, like always. Jack gets to have the grand romance. No one else can have a story of their own.”
“You’re not having a romance!” Jack shouted. “You’ve been enchanted!”
“The first lassie or laddie I’ve ever had feelings for, the first one, and you can’t handle it, is that it?”
“Will you for one second listen to what I’ve been—”
“All of you stop!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. The words stabbed my throat like a knife. “Stop it right now!”
Much to my surprise, they did, turning to look at me warily.
“If you’d just give me a chance to tell you what happened,” I managed to say with what was left of my voice, “then everything will become clear.”
They waited, tense but expectant. I took a moment to choose the best place to begin. It matters how stories are told. I needed to tell one that was true. Lies had only led to distrust. I decided to start with a woman kneeling in her stepmother’s throne room, waiting for the latest in a long, long series of impossible demands.
There’s no way to know what would have happened if I’d been able to tell the story. Before I had a chance, the mirror in my hand butted in to make its version of events known.
“Don’t trust her!” it bellowed. “She stole me! She’s a liar and a thief!”
Too many things happened at once.
I was so startled I dropped the looking glass. It shrieked as if I’d hurled it off a cliff. Clem’s arm tensed, her arrow tracking the mirror as it fell. Jack whipped out her sword, more out of surprise than anything else. But Sam leapt forward and grabbedJack’s shoulder, his fist cocked back for a punch. Protecting me from his sister. Jack looked so shocked it was almost comical.
That was when the third hunter, the one who’d stood by so quietly I’d almost forgotten about her, put her hand to her nose and closed one nostril, blowing through the other.
Oh, it’s Kit,I thought inanely.The Nose Blower.
Only the faintest brush of a breeze touched my face, but the wind plucked Sam right out of the snow, leaving only a deep pair of footprints behind. He went tumbling end over end until, dozens of feet away, his head slammed into a tree. Someone started screaming; I think it might have been me. If it still hurt my throat, I didn’t notice.
Jack and I both raced over to Sam. Behind us, Clem was yelling at Kit, and Kit was yelling right back as the wind subsided. Half-buried in a snowdrift, the mirror continued to hurl accusations: “She means to gather an army! I heard her say it! And she broke into my house and shoved me in a pile of leaves and dropped me in the snow! I could have broken! You all saw it!”
I knelt next to Sam. His eyes were open but didn’t seem to be focused on anything. They slid past me. “Prinzzess?” he murmured.
He turned and retched, little coming up except greenish strings of bile that dripped onto the white snow.
Concussion,I thought.Prescribe rest. Apply ice to any bumps or swelling. Observe symptoms closely in case they worsen over time. Check to see if the pupils are of unequal size; bleeding in the brain can be deadly….
Jack dropped to her own knees on Sam’s other side, her face gray. “I swear,” she hissed, “if he’s been hurt because of you, I’ll—”
“You’re blaming me?” The fury welling up within me was something I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Not since my stepmother had condemned me to the tower. The anger was like a physical force, a boiling black cloud swelling inside my body. Itdimmed the edges of my vision. The tree beside us creaked, as if something was bending the trunk. Other trees joined the chorus, rustling, crackling.
“Are you nimble, Jack?” I whispered. She didn’t answer; she’d gone quiet. “Are you quick? If you start running now, do you think you can escape my wrath?”
My hair twitched and lifted, blown by an unseen wind. Moving and growing, twining its way toward Jack’s pale, exposed throat.
“That’s enough o’ that.”
I looked up to see an arrow pointed at my eye. Clem was standing only a few feet away. Behind her, a sour-faced Kit kicked at the snow.
“Kit didnae mean tae hurt Sam,” Clem said. “So please stoap doin’…whitevur it is ye’re doin’.”
“What…? I didn’t…” I blinked, and my vision cleared, the dark blurriness vanishing. The sound of straining wood died away. The reaching tendrils of my hair dropped; it had grown long enough to spread out around me on the ground. It would brush my ankles when I stood. “I wasn’t going to…” My voice trailed off.
