They wound their way up towards the pass. Most of the snow had been cleared, but it still muffled the sounds of the horses’ hooves. The whitened branches of pine on either side seemed to wrap them in cotton wool, and even the sun had slipped behind a thin, gauzy veil of cloud.
Everything seemed muted, in fact, and Isobelle couldn’t think why.
She remembered the journey back from the slaying of the dragon – exhausted, Gwen injured, all of them shaken by what they had wrought. But still there had been a lightness to them. A kind of giddy relief, because the thing wasdone, and nothing that came after could ever be so bad. There had been a feeling of togetherness, as well – this group of girls and women, walking through the early dawn together, bonded by what they had become in the night.
She ought to have felt an even greater lightness, now. She loved Gwen, and Gwen loved her, and they had said so. The town was safe, the sea monster had retreated to the depths. Fear had been banished, and all was well.
There was Tabitha, of course. But though Isobelle knew her sister’s fate would lie upon her heart for many years to come, this strange dullness was from a different source.
Abruptly she reined in Princess Buttercup, who actually deigned to stop, and wheeled her mare around to face back the way they had come. It was possible Princess Buttercup cooperated because she hoped they were abandoning this madness, and returning to her warm stable.
‘Isobelle?’ Gwen halted too, and turned Achilles so she could join Isobelle in looking back down at the last glimpse of the town below.
‘I don’t want to go back to Darkhaven,’ Isobelle said softly, trying out the words as the realisation settled into her. And then, louder, ‘I’m not going back to Darkhaven.’
‘If you spend any more time in those hot springs, you’ll boil yourself,’ Gwen pointed out, but it was a gentle tease, an invitation to tell her what was really happening.
And whatwashappening? Isobelle waited for the answer to arrive, for her mind – or perhaps her heart – to tell her why she had reached this decision with such certainty.
‘If we go back, nothing will change,’ Isobelle said. ‘We’re riding straight back onto Whimsitt’s chessboard. He’ll send us out again, and we’ll go, and all these new questions will just … what? Wait? Until when? Untilthey’ve faded away, and he’s found a way to confine us as he wishes to, and it’s too late to find out the truth?’
‘What would you like to do instead?’ Gwen asked gently, nudging Achilles with her heels, so he moved up alongside Princess Buttercup and let the knight reach out for Isobelle’s hand.
‘What we should have done all along,’ Isobelle replied, turning her hand over to weave her fingers through Gwen’s. ‘Choose for ourselves.’ She let out a slow breath, looking across at Gwen’s familiar face – at the love in her green eyes, the faint curve of her lips towards a smile. ‘I was afraid, before. I’m not anymore.’
‘No?’
‘Well, of course I am,’ Isobelle conceded. ‘Whimsitt has my fortune, my parents granted him that. And it turns out I know nothing of my parents, so for all his flaws, Whimsitt might be my only safe harbour. If I defy him, I’ll lose that. I’ll have nowhere to go.’
‘And yet?’ prompted Gwen gently, that hint of a smile growing, a light in her green eyes that told Isobelle to keep talking. To keep thinking her way through this momentous decision.
‘And yet,’ said Isobelle, ‘I find that fear isn’t enough to keep me from what I need to do next. It’s not a reason to step back from a challenge. It’s a sign that the challenge is worth taking on. That it matters.’
Gwen squeezed her hand, glancing up the road towhere the others had stopped, nearly out of sight but still visible, to wait for them. ‘Then where are we going?’
Isobelle took a deep breath. ‘To find the Order. To find my father, and hold him accountable for everything that happened here. To demand an explanation. I want to know about magic. About my sister. About what the Order is, and what it wants.’
There was not a flicker of hesitation on Gwen’s face. She simply nodded, and released Isobelle’s hand to reach for Achilles’s reins. ‘Good thing we took on extra supplies before setting out,’ was all she said. ‘We’ve got everything we need for a long journey.’
Isobelle gazed at her, almost overwhelmed by her own tangle of love and loyalty. And now she felt it – the lightness that had been missing. ‘Just like that?’ she said. ‘You’ll leave everything you’ve known?’
‘I won’t be leaving what matters most,’ Gwen replied. ‘I’ll be following it.’ She turned Achilles, and Isobelle absently guided Princess Buttercup after him. ‘And speaking of those who’ll follow you,’ Gwen continued, ‘the others are waiting up at the pass.’
Isobelle followed her gaze. There were Jane and Hilde, Sylvie and Orson, and Olivia, upright on her mare, still as a statue. All of them waiting.
‘So they are,’ she said.
And so the two of them rode towards their friends, into the sunrise.
The End … for now.
