I fumbled for words. “If you hadn’t…I don’t want to be ungrateful—”
“That’s not what I meant!” She looked horrified. “We should trust you to know—”
“Stop it!” Gnoflwhogir shouted. “You three are giving me a headache.”
Into the ensuing quiet, Liam said, “She’s not wrong. Trying to out apologize one another isn’t going to solve anything.”
Calla muttered her embarrassed agreement, and after a moment, Jonquil and I did, too.
Underneath us, the forest of Tailliz was a vast patterned carpet of evergreen needles and white snow, spreading out toward the dim, bluish mountains far to the north. The gargantuan trees pierced through the canopy like the upthrust spears of a disorganized army, but even they were far below. The thin, freezing wind of the upper air swept through our clothes, leaving me grateful for the heat of the dragon.
“So, this sorceress,” Jonquil said. “Does she have a weakness?”
“I don’t know.” It wasn’t uncommon for those steeped in magic to have some kind of tragic vulnerability. If they melted when you threw a glass of water at them, that made for a rather easy fight. But if you had to find their heart, which was concealed in an egg inside a duck inside a hare in a locked chest buried under an oak tree, then things got rather complicated. I had never figured out my stepmother’s weakness, if she had one.
“We will stab her, then,” Gnoflwhogir said. “Stabbing is everybody’s weakness.”
“I have a more important question,” Calla broke in. “Tell me about Sam. Is he cute?”
I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice. “Really? That’s your question?”
“Monsters attack you all the time,” Jonquil pointed out, not unreasonably. “Sam is the first person you’ve sounded so much as vaguely interested in since that dreadful prince Mother had to throw into a rosebush.”
“Well, it hardly matters,” I snapped. “I’m engaged to someone else.”
Jonquil and Calla exchanged A Look, which didn’t seem fair, since I was closer in age to either of them than they were to each other, and they therefore had no business whatsoever exchanging Looks that were meaningful to each other but completely unreadable tome.
“He’s not unattractive,” I said. “He has a face. Blue eyes, red hair, freckles.”
“Oh,that’swho was in the dream!” Liam said. I rolled my eyes.
Gnoflwhogir glared at the others, her patience at an end. “All this is irrelevant.”
“Yes!” I was pleased to be moving on at last. “Thank you. Can we—”
She turned the glare on me. “Appearance means nothing. How is he in battle? Is this Sam capable of slaying your foes?”
“He’s—Wait, I told you what he did against the spider wolves and things. Weren’t you listening to my story at all?”
“No,” Gnoflwhogir admitted. “It was very long.”
I tried to take a steadying breath, but the thin air rendered it ineffective. “He’s supernaturally strong. And extremely good at slaying foes. All right?”
“Excellent,” said Gnoflwhogir. “I agree with your sisters. Take him as your mate.”
I buried my face in my hands. Between my fingers, I saw Jonquil and Calla exchanging another Look.
I didn’t want to think about Sam, because it made me queasywith anxiety. I had no idea whether he’d recovered from his head injury. Or perished in the siege. “Would you please just tell me how you found me?”
“We used this.” Liam lifted the looking glass. It caught the sun and flashed a painfully bright blaze of reflected light.
“Unhand me, you cretin,” it snarled.
I considered that half an explanation, at best. “That only raises more questions! Where did you get hold of that? And when? And how did you end up saving me in the nick of time?”
“Well,” Calla said, “I first heard you were in trouble when a beaver splashed its way over to me while I was asking some aardvarks to redirect a river. The beaver told me it had heard from a fox who heard from a bear who heard from a swallow who heard from a rat that my sister had been imprisoned in a foul dungeon in the Kingdom of Tailliz.”
“Oh,” I said. “So I did talk to the rat? I wasn’t sure that really happened.”
