He groaned and sank to the ground with his head in his hands. “What am I supposed to do?”
Despite his size, he sounded so small and dejected that she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. “Wait until the curse is broken.”
“How long will that be?”
Lindy gave in to the exhaustion in her body and joined him on the ground. “I don’t know. A few weeks? Maybe less.”
“I can’t wait that long! What if something happens to Phoebe?”
Her guilt translated the impatience in his voice into accusation, and she quickly threw up her prickly wall of defense, forgetting any kind of sympathetic feelings. “I’m sorry if my curse-breaking doesn’t fit into your schedule. I can only work so quickly.”
“Can I help?”
“What?” The words might as well have been a foreignlanguage for as little as she comprehended them. No one had offered her any kind of assistance in years—not since her father had dismissed Master Pickering for having the audacity to stand against him in her defense.
“If I helped you, would it speed up the process?”
“I…I don’t know if you can.” Lindy’s mind was a jumbled ball of confusion.
“Why not? What exactly do you have to do?”
“I’m knitting them shirts out of nettles.” Her voice sounded far away to her own ears as her thoughts tumbled over one another.
Could he help? He does have a reason to want Jacques to be human again, but is it enough? Does he really want to subject himself to that amount of pain on the prince’s behalf?
Atlas made a strangled, choking sound. “I’m sorry, I think I misheard you. You’re doing what?”
“Knitting shirts out of nettles.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated. Suffice it to say that the curse was cast in hurt and anger, out of a desire to see the princes suffer, which means that only an act of willing suffering and sacrifice will break it.”
“But knitting? With nettles?”
If the subject hadn’t been so painful, Lindy was sure the expression on Atlas’s face would have been just as entertaining as before.
It really is a ridiculous solution, but also…
“There aren’t a lot of avenues out here to willingly inflict suffering other than starving to death, and that would be rather counterproductive. Knitting is one ofthe few things I know how to do, and…” She mashed her lips together as the memory of Lizzie’s shawl chafed at the raw edges of the open wound in her heart. “And it adds a layer of poetic justice.”
Atlas’s next words were cautious. “Is sleeping on the ground part of breaking the curse as well?”
“No, it just adds to the ambience.”
“Why don’t you go home then? Surely it would be easier to accomplish this if you didn’t also have to worry about surviving in the wild.”
“Current events really do take their time getting to you, don’t they?” She sighed wearily, resigned to the fact that his civility was coming to an end. “If I go back, they’ll throw me into prison and probably execute me. And while there is achancethat would be enough to break the curse, I don’t know for sure and it’s a risk I’d rather not take unless absolutely necessary.”
Suspicion colored his voice. “Why would you be imprisoned?”
Lindy dropped her head back, staring sightlessly at the speckled canvas of stars overhead. “Because they think I killed the king. I didn’t—but I did curse the princes.”
Chapter Seven
ATLAS
Atlas jumped to his feet so quickly he nearly lost his balance and toppled over backwards. “What?”
