“Why do you want to be queen?” I asked.
She pulled back slightly. “What on earth do you mean?”
“You must have a reason beyond it being denied to you.”
“I thought that would be obvious.” She tilted her head, peering at me like a bird. “Wealth. Power over everyone else. Instant obedience to our whims. Anything we want brought to us the moment that we want it.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s everything, surely. That’s why kings and queens exist, so others might serve them. Who would rather serve than be served?”
“I see.”
It wasn’t an unusual opinion. In my travels, I had seendespots of every type. I’d heard every version of Angelique’s argument—that this was simply the way of things, that the only options were to be in command or to be commanded.
But I could not help but think of my stepmother’s kingdom, where ogres no longer sucked the marrow from human bones and the fae folk had stopped stealing babies. To defy her, thieve from her, or insult her was to risk terrible punishment, but during the years of her rule, her people had thrived and prospered, protected from all predators except my stepmother herself. Angelique had not once given a thought to the villagers crowded into the castle courtyard or the soldiers defending the walls, facing horrible death by tooth, tentacle, and claw.
I have made many mistakes in my life and undoubtedly will do so again, but I was not about to ally myself with a woman who somehow managed to beeven worsethan my stepmother.
I threaded my fingers into my hair. Since no reasonable escape plans were coming to mind, I’d have to try an unreasonable one.
“Do you know,” I asked, “what happens to someone stopped midway through growing out their hair?”
“No.” She sounded baffled. “What?”
“Probably nothing much.” I threw the whole tangled mass of it toward her and commanded it to grow.
Growfast.
It shot out with enough force to knock her off her feet. Within seconds, it filled up the room, pressing up against the monster cages and through the bars as the creatures inside howled and shied back from the snaking strands.
Keep going,I commanded my hair.More.
I’d never tried anything like this before, and I hadn’t been sure it would work. But hair growth was the first magic I’d mastered and still the one I was best at. If there was anything I could command without a devil’s hair, the Golden Key, or True Love’s First Kiss, it would be this.
I didn’t dare let my concentration drop. By this time I no longer saw anything but my own tresses, the whole of my vision a wall of snarled brown curls. The monsters screamed, and the stone walls groaned with the strain as the hair took up all the room in the chamber and continued to pack more densely, seeking space that wasn’t there. It pressed against me, threatening to push me out the window.
I letit.
The moment I was outside, the noises cut off. Frigid air hit me like a slap. I dropped a short distance and stopped with a jolt that threatened to rip my scalp off.
Above me, my hair pulled taut, rising straight up until it vanished into thin air. To all appearances, I was dangling from nothing above the ruined building where Sam and I had spent the night. Whatever spell Angelique had used to make the upper floor invisible and inaudible, it was a strong one.
The tug on my scalp became more uncomfortable with every passing second. I focused on lowering myself to the ground. As I did so, the air in front of me began to glow with a golden, misty light. It quickly spread to the stone building below. The entire structure must have been a magical construct of some kind, and my hair, still expanding within it until the very stones cracked, was breaking the spell. I sped up my descent, not wanting to find out what would happen if it reverted to its original form while I kicked in midair.
Just as my feet touched the earth, the tower collapsed in on itself, twisting and shrinking until it was an acorn that hovered in the air for a fraction of a section before dropping into the snow. Twenty feet of hair fell around me, sheared off at the end by the vanished window but heavy enough to land with a thump even so. I was relieved that I’d been spared from being crushed under the thousands of pounds of it that had vanished along with the tower. Without question, I hadn’t thought this plan all the way through.
Angelique was nowhere to be seen. Had she suffocated in my runaway locks, or been transformed into an oak seed? Or simply been crushed to death when the spell broke, compressed to the size of an acorn?
I was still wondering when a huge dark bird, easily twice my size, dove out of the sky with an ear-piercing cry. Its talons reached for my neck.
I barely managed to fling myself out of the way before it could rip out my throat. As it hurtled past, I saw that it had Angelique’s warm brown eyes, narrowed in fury.
Her offer of an alliance had not extended past my second attempt to kill her.
She reached the edge of the clearing that used to house the tower and wheeled around for another go. Out of ideas, good and bad alike, I gathered my hair in my arms and ran.
My effort was doomed from the start. I still had too much hair dragging behind me, catching on roots and shrubs. Even if I’d had the means to cut it off, she could fly faster than I could run. I’d stumbled no more than a few feet out of the clearing when the bird’s shrieking cry sounded just behindme.
