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But it happens whether the Juleses want it or not. Sometimes it’s a punishment for trapping a magical animal. Or a curse hurled after a fleeing thief. Or a fox that leaps out of the undergrowth and affixes new genitals to the heroine’s groin for no particular reason. That one’s even weirder than the duck story.

Does everyone who marries a princess long to be a prince? I doubt it. But the fairy tales pin them there, a path with no other branches. The same happy, heteronormative ending as every other happy, heteronormative ending. One penis for two people, no more and no less. To reach the end of the story, you have to be the right kind of hero.

Well.

Fuck that.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Mission Improbable

After nearly three days of sailing up the coast, our boat was so overgrown with flowers that the roots were the only thing holding it together. Seagrass had covered the whole of the hull long ago, and the interior decking resembled a botanical garden. This did not make our craft especially seaworthy. Water seeped in through the slowly widening gaps in the planks. Wooden boards are much easier to infiltrate than a brass wall.

I was doing my best to slow down the plant growth, concentrating on keeping it at a minimum. But we had reached the point where Winifred and Drusilla were spending most of their time bailing out the ship while Alexandra and the horses worked at cropping away as many flowers as their stomachs could hold. My entire family had volunteered to help as soon as they learned that Yudit’s life was at stake. As had Sunbeam and, once again for whatever reason, Jinjur. She was currently handling the tiller.

It was strange not to have Yudit by my side. I kept expecting to find her there when I turned. Or hear her voice. Her absence caused me far more misery than her constant presence ever had. I fretted about her incessantly; it gnawed at me like a canker.

For that matter, I was worried about the rest of us as well.

The voyage was taking longer than I would have liked, but Lulach was hauling a lot of weight. Still, with him tugging us along during the day and a fair wind at night when he slept, we were making slow but steady progress. There was a decent chance we’d reach our destination before a particularly aggressive rhododendron split the ship in two. As long as I stayed alert.

Concentration was becoming increasingly difficult. I’d been awake for most of the trip, moving around the boat to spread out the damage. Early on, I’d managed a few catnaps with my sisters keeping a close eye on me, but after a while the flowers became so rampant that even a brief doze would have killed me.

I was so exhausted that my hands were shaking and my head was throbbing. It probably didn’t help that I’d carefully grown a tea plant in the prow and had been chewing on the leaves near constantly. They were as bitter as lemon peels. But they did keep me from falling asleep.

“We can’t have much farther to go,” Sunbeam said from behind my shoulder, startling me so much that I swallowed the wadded mass of tea leaves in my mouth.

“Guh,” I replied, or something similarly coherent.

The horse gave me a sidelong look. “Are you sure you can handle this?”

“I’m all right,” I said brusquely. I couldn’t afford not to be. “Be worried about Nicki if you’re going to worry about anyone.” The deluge of flower pollen hadn’t been good for my youngest sister’s allergies. She’d spent the trip hacking up so much mucus into the water that it must have been falling like rain on the tentacle-pigs Lulach was so fond of.

“If you say so,” Sunbeam replied doubtfully. “I just wanted to ask, should we go ahead with the haircut while we still have time?”

“Right, of course. I’ll fetch the scissors. You get Alexandra.”

Alexandra hadn’t been entirely thrilled by the idea of getting her hair chopped off, so we’d been delaying the inevitable. I don’t know why so many of my sisters hated the very idea of it. I thought I looked better with short hair.

“Why do I have to pretend to be Yudit?” she groused as she plopped her rear end on one of the deckhouses. “Or, I mean, pretend to be Yudit pretending to be a boy.”

“We’ve been over this.” I wound a strand of her hair around my unsteady fingers. “If I can’t break Ilyana out of wherever they’ve put her, you can.”

“Winifred—”

“Would be no use if the room doesn’t have a window. Hold still.”

Alexandra eyed my tremulous grip on the scissors with a certain degree of mistrust. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Just now.” It was true. I’d swallowed a whole mouthful of tea leaves. Anything more than that in my stomach made me feel sleepy.

Someone plucked the scissors out of my hands. “I’ll do it,” Winifred said, dropping her bailing bucket on the deck. “You shouldn’t stand still that long.”

It was kind of her not to mention that I risked accidentally lopping off Alexandra’s ears. Besides, she wasn’t wrong. Clematis was already snaking around my ankles. I yielded the task to her without protest and resumed my previous job of meandering restlessly around the ship.

Jinjur grunted an acknowledgment as I passed the tiller, and Nicki greeted me with a weak wave and a phlegmy cough. Wherever I walked, the flowers thickened and the wooden boards creaked ominously. We were sailing low in the water; the leaks were outpacing the bailing, weighing us down. I hoped we would sight our destination soon.

It was, thankfully, only another hour or so before Sunbeam shouted, “There!” I raced to his side and peered to the east. Far inland, the tip of a brass tower glittered in the sunlight.