“Don’t!”
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
The horse cloak sighed.So we are not trampling.
“But what if you stay that way? What if you don’t come back?”
Imelda paused. Was that a slight flush coloring her cheeks?
“I can’t imagine why I’d stay away,” she said softly.
There was something in how she said it, a softness to her voice he’d never heard before. Before he could ask another question, she knocked back the whole potion, shuddering a bit. “Ugh. Tastes like rocks.”
A tinge of gray worked its way up from her feet, netting across her dress.
A door slammed in the distance. Then another. Cold rushed through Ambrose’s heart. The guards must have cleared the dining room and were now checking the bedrooms, looking for them.
“Oy!” Ambrose yelled. “Queen sent me on an urgent journey to deliver one of these.”
He looked over his shoulder, something catching in his throat as he realized that Imelda had fully turned to stone. Her smile, coy and slightly pouting, looked lifeless and each of her wayward curls eerily chiseled.
“But the crate!” the dockworker protested.
“It’s a special mission,” Ambrose said hurriedly.
He pushed the oar into the water. The soldiers had slammed the last door and were hurrying down the steps of the hall. He grimaced as the bottom of his oar struck the side of a statue.
The barge sailed silently forward.
Ambrose heard a soldier yell, “Stop!” and pushed faster.
The opening of the river channel brightened before him. One more push and they were free, caught by the river’s current and borne far away from this bizarre kingdom. His pulse pounded through him, but not because they’d escaped…
But because he couldn’t stop thinking of Imelda’s face and the last words she’d uttered to him:“I can’t imagine why I’d stay away.”
They were nothing but a handful of words, but to Ambrose, they’d roped him in, closing up the last of the distance he’d tried to put between them.
Chapter 13
AMBROSE
Ambrose watched the castle pull away from them with every stroke of the oar. Hours passed as the current swirled beneath the boat, the water ahead now draped in heavy mists. The smell of village woodsmoke reached him, and hunger scratched at his stomach.
Ambrose risked a glance over his shoulder. It was far too strange to see Imelda stretched out like that, hair fanned about her, lips frozen in that coy smile, her hands strategically folded around the remaining stone potion so that it could not be taken from her. He found himself unaccountably furious with her. What she’d done was brave and reckless, but that wasn’t what made him angry. It was her stillness when he burned to ask her questions.
What did she mean,“I can’t imagine why I’d stay away”?
Did that mean what he thought it meant?
Ambrose shook his head, trying to clear out the multitude of foolish questions boiling inside him.
The cloak sighed and asked in a small voice,Did I perform poorly? Is that why Imelda is a statue and not talking to us?
Perhaps a few days ago, Ambrose would’ve informed the cloak that it was not, in fact, a horse. But it was as if Imelda’s glare worked through stone, and he found himself saying:
“You performed quite admirably. Best, er, horse I’ve ever encountered.”
Really?
