Your Princess Is In Another Castle
Chapter eighteen
Ethan woke with the sunrise. It was hard not to when you were camping—even in his tent, the glow of the dawn on the nylon was inescapable, and last night he had fallen asleep on the ground.
Mara had molded it to his body, of course, so he wasn’t as stiff as he could have been, but still. It was the ground.
He pushed himself up to sitting with a groan, blearily looking around. There was no sign of Mara. Of course. He didn’t think he’d rudely fallen asleep mid-story, but there was no reason for her to stick around after he’d crashed. Maybe she’d come say goodbye when he was done packing.
Or maybe not. Maybe she had already done her own hasta la vista, baby, don’t let the cholla hit you in the ass on your way out thing and was back to making flowers bloom with her grief.
Maybe he would never see her again.
Fuck.
Still, he couldn’t dwell on it. He had a campsite to pack and a hill to trudge painfully down and ugh, he hoped Mara had either left his boards and ladders in place or de-weaponized the cacti, or he was screwed.
She wanted him to leave, though, so she’d probably made him a path already. Nice and easy.
He was digging in his cooler—which wasn’t all that cool now, but at least worked for storage—for one of his last remaining protein shakes when he saw it.
His drone.
His goddamn buried-forever-with-no-treasure-map drone.
And there were his power tools, too. Everything Mara had sucked away into the earth, sitting in a neat pile next to his tent. Just as if she’d never whooshed them away.
His notebook was on top of the pile, the breeze riffling the pages.
He scrambled over to it, snatching it up.
It was a diagram of Mara’s hill. There were the blooming plants, the maze leading up to the top. At the peak of the hill, a doodled grove of trees with a long-haired stick-figure woman in their midst.
At the top of the page were two lines written in Mara’s swooping cursive.
Your princess is in another castle.
And below that: Come and get me.
He looked up and saw her.
She was perhaps halfway up the hill, separated from him by several rows of her plants. There was something different about them, but he couldn’t care about that. Not when Mara was gazing down at him with a challenging smile.
With a toss of her hair, she danced out of sight.
Ethan scrambled to his feet, frowning at the hillside. It was wrong. It was weirdly wrong, and what was—
The flowers were gone.
Not all of them—the upper part of the hill was still a riot of color and pollen, buzzing bees and fluttering butterflies. But every plant up to the point where Mara had been standing was back to normal, exactly as he would expect for the season.
It took Ethan about half a second to make up his mind.
He had no fucking clue what Mara was up to. Why she was laughing, why she had done something with the flowers that had meant everything to her just the day before.
But he goddamn well wasn’t going to pack up and leave before he found out the answers.
His first instinct was to run, to chase her at top speed without care for anything else, but he immediately understood that first instinct—like, he had to admit, many of his first instincts—was deeply stupid. This wasn’t a lark. It was another siege.
And he knew what that siege would take.
He drank two protein shakes and plenty of water. He wrapped his ankle—though it was mostly better now, really—and packed his backpack with more food and water. He changed into clothes that were…well, not clean, but at least dry and not smelly.
And he put on his armor. One piece at a time, feeling like drums were beating in his veins.
This time, he would be victorious.
Or he’d end up crying Mara’s name to the uncaring skies again. He didn’t know what the fuck she had planned for him, really.
He just knew he had to try.