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“I wanted to,” she said. “Quite a lot, really. And I wanted to find out if you felt the same way. It seemed like you did.” There was a hint of a question there.

“I did. Do.” Something I was only just now realizing. I can be very slow on the uptake where my own feelings are concerned. “But, uh…”

“If you’re going to say you don’t have a clock and bells, I already know,” she said. “I figured out a while ago that the outfit doesn’t match the equipment.”

“Ah.” That was one worry alleviated. I did have another one, though. “Aren’t you, um, engaged to be married to the Red Emperor?”

“Oh.” She made a sour face. “You know about that.”

“Yes, I—”

“I don’t want to be,” she said. “As soon as the Red Emperor asked for my hand, my family packed me off to the Crimson City. Like a box of old shoes.”

“Against your will?”

“Yup. So on the way over, I slipped away from my guards. I thought I’d hide in the Swamp of Monsters. Who’d look for me here? Just my luck”—she made a noise too bitter to be a laugh—“that stick-racing genius was waiting in ambush. I ran right into him.”

There was a dismal feeling curdling in the pit of my stomach. “What are you planning to do now?”

“I don’t know. You live in one of the little northern kingdoms, right? Could we go there?”

“The thing is,” I said, the words emerging reluctantly, “I’m supposed to bring you to the emperor. You and the Freemartin.”

She pulled away from me, her eyes wide with shock. Then she spat out that bitter non-laugh again.

“And here I was thinking I’d been rescued. Turns out it’s just another lather-sipping abduction.”

“I didn’t know!” I protested. “I’m not…I thought maybe you wanted to be an empress. I was told—”

“What? That I would be thrilled to marry an old man I’ve never met? Squirt out a screaming little imperial heir for him?”

“He said he loved you.”

“Yeah.” Her shoulders slumped. “A lot of guys say that. It means ‘I have heard this Ilyana is very pretty, so I would like to shove my cake in her dent.’ ”

She looked away. I didn’t know what to say.

I slapped at a deerfly that was trying to sample my blood. A dozen of its cousins flew in to see what the fuss was about. I let a few sundews blossom. The flies could see how they liked it when something wanted to feed on them instead of the other way around.

“So you’ve got no interest in co-running the empire, then?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Terrible job. How long do you think I’d last after I give birth and Emperor Osvald croaks? Maybe a day?”

Most likely she was right. No doubt the Red Empire had its own Baron Trebalhs. Ambitious schemers hoping for an orphaned imperial heir to give their regency a fig leaf of legitimacy. If there were a few of them hanging around in a backwater kingdom like Tailliz, how many more would want to seize control of half the continent?

“Hey,” Ilyana said. “This doesn’t have to scrawl everything up, right? You didn’t know. Now you do. So, flunk the boat-swiping emperor. Don’t take me to him.” She took my hand in hers, the grip loosening and tightening as her fingers changed their size and shape. “Let’s do what we want.”

“The problem,” I told her, “is that the emperor is holding one of my sisters hostage. He’ll kill her if I don’t bring you back.”

“Oh. Fudge-knuckles. I’m sorry.”

“Then he’ll invade the country where I live in search of you.”

“Double fudge-knuckles.” She briefly considered the mess I’d gotten myself into. “All right. Obviously, we can’t let your sister die and all that. I’ll go with you. We’ll figure it out from there. Maybe I can turn him down with no hard feelings.” She didn’t sound at all certain of that. Refusing the Red Emperor was difficult to the point of being fatal. I hadn’t risked it. Her family hadn’t, either. “And if he won’t take no for an answer,” she continued, “I could always knife him on our wedding night.”

“Um…”

“Relax, I’m joking. Mostly. If being his widow is a death sentence, being his widow and his murderer would be, I don’t know, double death.”