“That was an unpleasant shock.”
“What? The kiss? Or the fact that the man in question turned out to be a badger?”
She looked at him strangely. “Does it matter?”
The question took Ambrose by surprise. Did it? If it was his own lips on hers, would she have shoved him away—or pulled him closer?
Yes, whispered a corner of his soul, at the same time that he replied gruffly:
“Not in the least.”
Chapter 10
Imelda and Ambrose traveled the road until they found themselves at a lively inn that was not filled with cannibals but, rather, stuffed to the gills with happy, red-faced patrons who had traversed their own roads from far and wide to celebrate a wedding that they were not invited to but were hoping to sneak into nonetheless.
The day faded to evening, bringing us to the day of the wedding of the kingdom that so rudely refused to invite me.
Imelda and Ambrose have promised to retrieve my potion, but I can tell something is amiss. I can sniff their wants growing. Shifting, perhaps. But at the bottom of it is the lingering taste of Love’s Keep fruit—freedom crisp as an apple, and just as sweet; belonging like a candy that never sours.
No sweet is truly sweet without the rich earth of bitterness.
And here is a bitterness they can’t shake:
Lost, unremembered love.
It tastes like a wisp of smoke on the tongue.
Chapter 11
IMELDA
Imelda knew there was no freedom in love.
Every morning when she and her eleven sisters lined up in the hallway outside their bedroom, holding out their calloused and blistered feet for inspection, their ragged slippers dangling from their fingertips, their legs aching and their hair rumpled, their smiles vicious with their secret, her father would merely shake his head.
He was never mad that the slippers broke. He believed them when they said they had no idea how it happened. He was not, Imelda knew, a bad father.
He just worried.
“I had a sister who was lured into the woods, poisoned, and kept in a glass casket,” he would tell them, as if somehow in the space of day and night, they had completely forgotten the story that had shaped their whole lives. “Do you know that I visited her grave for every birthday and left a slice of cake on the casket? She was so funny and lighthearted, and she was taken from me. My mother died of grief. My father went mad and married an ogress who tried to cook me! And my sister, when she finally woke, had changed. That casket had changed her, and she did not even stop by our home to collect her things or her favorite blanket before she married the king who had awoken her.”
Her father would always sniff loudly, dabbing his eyes with the ends of his cloak.
“She never wrote, you know,” he wept.
He would snap his fingers, and the court magicians would dutifully slip on the princesses’ new slippers, each outfitted with a protective enchantment.
“I do this to keep you safe because I love you,” her father would say mournfully.
The worst part was, Imelda believed him. She believed him when she ran too fast down the halls, only to be jerked back in mid-air because her father knew what she was doing and wished her to stop, for she might trip and fall and break something. She believed him when she paused too long in the mirror, pivoting on her heels to inspect her body as she grew older, only to be yanked forward because her father thought such displays unseemly for a lady. She believed him when she dragged her heels to every lesson, only to find herself suddenly speeding toward the classroom because her father insisted that a gently bred lady was never late.
The taste of Love’s Keep fruit was a promise of freedom, which necessitated the absence of love. Up until now, that was all she’d wanted.
But the more time she spent around Ambrose, the more she had begun to realize that was not all she wanted.
She wanted his sometimes grim and brittle commentary. She wanted to laugh with him and make him laugh. She wanted him to steal glances at her the way she found herself doing with him.
And so, when she opened her door—they’d had separate rooms this time—and found Ambrose standing there, when she saw how his eyes widened at the sight of her, how his gaze fell to the floor and the faintest color touched his cheeks, when she discovered an answering shyness unfurling within her…she heard a warning:
