Chapter 25 #2
Periwinkle went back to grazing, completely unbothered, and I went back to my flower crown, and for a few minutes, everything was almost okay.
The sun was warm and the birds were singing.
My horse had pooped on the Queen’s garden, which was potentially treasonous, but the crown was coming along beautifully and I was choosing to focus on that.
I should go back, I thought. I should go back and find Aeldryc and say—what? What would I even say?
Hey, so, your queen ordered us to get married and you looked like you’d been hit by a bus. I just wanted to check in on that.
Hi, I know I fled like my ass was on fire, but I’m actually in love with you. Surprise!
Hello, I’ve been walking my horse around the garden like a dog for the last hour because I can’t ride him and I also can’t have a conversation about my feelings like a functional adult.
All excellent options. Very mature.
The silver at my throat pulsed, and I reached up to touch it.
It was warm. It was always warm, but right now it was almost hot, like it was trying to tell me something.
Or like Aeldryc was trying to tell me something through it.
Could he do that? Feel me through the metal?
He’d said the resonance connected us, that the silver sang because of what we were to each other, but he’d been annoyingly vague about the specifics, the way he was annoyingly vague about most things that mattered.
I finished the flower crown and put it on my head. It sat there nicely. The blue flowers brought out my eyes. Probably. I didn’t have a mirror, but I chose to believe it.
I made one for Periwinkle, too. His was bigger, obviously, and I looped it around one of his ears because his head was too wide for it to sit properly. He didn’t seem to mind and looked quite fetching, if you asked me.
“Right,” I said, standing up from the bench and brushing petals off my shorts. “Here’s the plan. We go back. I find Aeldryc. I tell him—”
I faltered.
“I tell him that I love him and that I would marry him tomorrow if he asked, but he has to actually want it, not just do it because the Queen told him to. And if he doesn’t want it, I need to know now, before I—before this gets any—”
My voice cracked, which was embarrassing, because I was rehearsing a speech to a horse.
Periwinkle nuzzled my hair, knocking the flower crown sideways.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “You’re a good horse.”
The hedge maze, it turned out, was significantly easier to enter than to exit.
We’d been wandering for at least an hour.
Every path looked the same. Every hedge was the same height, the same shade of green, the same maddening perfection.
I’d tried the classic strategy of always turning right, which had led me to three dead ends, a second stone bench, and the pile of Periwinkle’s earlier contribution, which meant we’d gone in a complete circle.
“Okay,” I said. “New strategy. Left turns only.”
Left turns only led to another dead end with a small stone statue of a bird, judgmental somehow.
I sat down on the grass, which was cool and springy, nothing like the sun-scorched lawns in a California park. Periwinkle stood nearby, chewing on some clover.
It was fine. Everything was fine. I was lost in a magical hedge maze in a magical kingdom with a horse wearing a flower crown, and I was going to have to explain to the Commander of the Fae Guard and the actual Queen of Feravael that I had not, in fact, fled the country.
I had simply gotten trapped in their garden.
I picked more flowers. Made a little chain of them, a bracelet, started on a second, larger crown because the first one had gotten squashed when Periwinkle nuzzled me.
The sun moved across the sky. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear what might have been a bell, or might have been a bird, or might have been the sound of my dignity giving up and going home without me.
I thought about Aeldryc. I thought about the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, like I was something he couldn’t believe he was allowed to touch.
I thought about the iron ring and the way his eyes had gone dark when he’d told me not to move.
I thought about the trolls, the four of us, the way Aeldryc had kissed Brogan and Davik freely because I’d asked him to, because he would do anything I asked.
He would do anything I asked, I thought. Including marry me. That was the problem, wasn’t it? He’d do it because the Queen said so, or because the resonance demanded it, or because Pip asked nicely, and I would never know if he actually wanted it. If he actually wanted me.
Periwinkle lowered himself onto the grass beside me, which I hadn’t known horses could do so gracefully. He folded his long legs underneath him and sighed, and I leaned against his warm side and watched the clouds drift overhead and tried hard not to cry.
I didn’t cry. I kept my hands busy, twisting vines into a third, more ambitious flower crown.
“My roommate Jess is probably wondering where I am,” I told Periwinkle.
“She thinks I flaked on my shift. It’s stupid.
I only fell through that mirror because I was drunk and some finance bro was a dick to me.
Not exactly a heroic origin story, you know? ”
“Do you think Aeldryc knows I love him?” I asked.
Periwinkle’s ear twitched.
“You’re right. He probably does. He knows everything. He’s insufferable like that.” I paused. “He’s also the best person I’ve ever met, which is annoying because he’s technically not a person. Not a human person. He’s a person. Obviously he’s a person. You know what I mean.”
Periwinkle did not know what I meant, but he was polite enough not to say so.
By the time I found the exit—which turned out to be roughly thirty feet from where I’d been sitting, hidden behind a hedge that I’d walked past at least four times—the light had gone golden in a way that suggested I’d been in the maze for far longer than I’d realized.
“Right,” I said, straightening my flower crown and brushing grass off my shorts. “Right. We go to the stables. We find Aeldryc. We have a conversation like adults. We do not cry. We do not run away again. We—”
I rounded the corner of the stable block, Periwinkle clopping along happily behind me with his flower-crown ear decoration bobbing gently, and stopped.
The stable yard was full of people. It looked like someone had mobilized a small army. There were guards and stable hands running back and forth, and someone was shouting orders, and in the center of it all was Aeldryc, and he was—
He was terrifying.
Not in the way he was terrifying when he fought, or when he used his magic, or when he looked at me with that dark, hungry expression that made me forget what I’d been about to say. He was terrifying in a way I’d never seen before. He was pale, jaw locked, eyes wild. His cloak was off.
He was scared.
Oh, I thought distantly. Oh no.
I’d done that to him. To the man I very much loved. And I supposed it was up to me to fix it now.