26 Hugo
Hugo
Princess Evangeline De Clare was standing in front of him, looking just as she had years ago when he had last seen her. Long,
dark brown curls framed an olive-skinned woman dressed in simple skirts and a bodice, a silver locket around her neck glinting
in the firelight.
“Please stop kneeling,” she said, motioning for him to stand.
“Hugo?” Eira said. “What’s going on?”
Eira didn’t know who this was. She truly didn’t recognize her best friend. Just another drop in the bucket to prove this memory-magic
theory they had.
“Eira.” He quickly turned to her as he stood and grabbed her hands, the tension from his identity being exposed momentarily
forgotten. “This is Evangeline.”
“Oh!” she said, eyes taking on a wide stare, just like when she’d discovered her elemental magic.
“What are you doing here?” Hugo asked, stepping away from Eira. “And how did you find us, when I couldn’t find you?”
The princess smiled—devilish, as it always had been.
“Eira,” she said, ignoring Hugo. “Are you okay?”
The princess motioned for Eira to sit with her at the firepit and Eira followed, sitting across from her.
Hugo did the same, leaning over the pit and starting a quick fire, despite pointedly not being invited. Glad to see the princess still doesn’t like me—feels like old times, he thought.
She glared daggers at him as he sat next to Eira.
They all waited for the other to speak, an awkward circle of silence enveloping them.
“Evangeline,” Eira finally said. “How did you find us?”
The princess took a deep breath and let it out before speaking. The silence led to a palpable increase in tension around the
fire.
“I’m the fucking rabbit,” she said.
Hugo barked out a laugh. “What?” he almost yelled. He would have kept laughing if Eira’s panicked face searching for Pennyroyal
hadn’t stopped him dead in his tracks.
“Eira cast a spell that allows me to turn into a rabbit before she lost her memory.”
“That’s absurd,” Hugo dismissed the notion, shaking his head in disbelief.
“We needed a way for me to get away from the Iron Retinue, and I was pretty recognizable back then.” Evangeline held her hands
out before pointing at Hugo. “It was a way for me to be able to safely get from town to town with Eira. It worked well enough
to fool you, didn’t it?”
She had a point there; Hugo hadn’t liked the rabbit per se, but he wasn’t much of an animal lover anyways. He’d assumed his
dislike was because he didn’t like small rodents, not because it was literally the princess he’d been searching for.
“You mean to tell us you’ve been traveling in a bag with Eira this whole time? How is that even possible?” He didn’t want
it to be true; all of this running around, and she’d been here the whole time?
“Precisely,” she said. “And believe me, it’s both possible and miserable.”
Hugo watched as the princess flicked her gaze back and forth between him and Eira. Eira was figuring something out, her brow crinkled in thought as she watched the fire and then looked to Evangeline.
“I have memories of Pennyroyal going back to my first days in Cilirien,” Eira said, eyes focused on the burgeoning fire as
she thought.
“Yes,” Evangeline answered, holding her hands out to the fire and warming them against the chill in the night air.
“Which means you were there when I lost my memory,” Eira continued.
“I was,” Evangeline said concisely.
Hugo knew where Eira was going with this. If Evangeline could tell her who cast the spell, then they would have their first
clue to getting Eira’s memory back . . . but something was stumping him. Why would the princess have remained a rabbit all
this time?
“Who cast the spell on me?” Eira asked. “And how do we find them? I need my memories back.”
“Technically, you don’t,” Evangeline answered, sitting up straight and looking directly at Eira. “You wanted them back to
find me, and now you have.”
“Evangeline,” Hugo said, his voice a low growl. “Eira has a right to know what happened to her own memories, even if we found
you. There are other reasons why her having her memories back will be useful, anyway.”
The princess looked at Hugo, concern in her eyes, a silent interaction happening between the two of them. Evangeline asked
without words if they truly wanted to know the answer, and Hugo instantly knew it wasn’t going to be good.
“Trust me when I tell you it doesn’t matter anymore who cast it,” she said, finally.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Hugo said, his anger rising with each prickly evasion from the princess.
“Eira . . .” Evangeline trailed off, ignoring the warning in Hugo’s tone.
Hugo looked to Eira, her brow furrowed as she tried to decipher the evasion she used to know so well from the woman who had
been her best friend before everything changed.
“It does matter. Who cast the spell? Why do you think it doesn’t matter? Were they killed?” Eira asked breathlessly, her words all
running together.
“Eira,” Evangeline said, her voice thick with grief. “Eira, darling, it was you.”
Eira balked. “No,” she whispered. “No, you’re lying.” Eira turned to Hugo, frantically searching for answers. “Is she usually
a liar? Is this normal for her?”
Her eyes brimmed with tears as Evangeline watched with little reaction. Had becoming a rabbit made her lose even more of her
empathy? The princess had always been icy and devoid of emotion, capable of hiding her true thoughts beneath a humorless mask,
but this was something else entirely.
“It was only supposed to be for six months. The spell was meant to expire, and your memories would come back.” She turned
toward Hugo, eyes still locked on Eira. “You cast it in a rush though, we’d been in Cilirien only long enough to set up the
shop and we hadn’t found a memory witch to help us. The Iron Retinue showed up in town and we thought they were going to find
us . . . you of all people know how persistent they were, Commander.” Evangeline’s eyes cut sharply to him. If looks could kill, Hugo would be dead. “Eira figured that if her memory was gone,
then a truth-sense witch wouldn’t be able to decipher that she was lying, because she wouldn’t have been lying.”
They sat in silence.
“It felt like our only solution,” Evangeline spoke again as she fiddled with the locket on her neck, voice quieter this time
as her eyes flicked to Eira over and over again.
“So why is my memory still gone then? Years later?” Eira asked, voice thick with held-back tears and frustration.
“I . . . I don’t know,” the princess said, eyes softening as she looked back to Eira. “You must have made a mistake, or the
Flow wouldn’t listen to you once your memories were gone. I’m not a witch. I don’t pretend to understand the machinations
of what you can do.”
“A mistake?” Hugo said incredulously. If it wasn’t so horrifying, it would be funny.
“Oh my,” Eira said, standing and pacing. “I need a minute. I need to wash my face or something.”
Eira walked away toward the creek, lighting a lantern with trembling fingers before she left. Silence fell as the two of them
watched Eira walk as far as they could see into the darkness of the night.
“You’re not going to follow her?” Evangeline snarled at him from across the fire.
“Aren’t you?” Hugo responded.
“I’m not leaving you alone for a minute,” Evangeline spit, her thick brows arched and angry.
“You don’t have to like me for what we need to do to succeed,” Hugo said.
“Oh, well thank you for your permission, high and mighty Commander Venton of the Iron Empire,” Evangeline spit.
“Commander Venton” sat strangely in Hugo’s ears. The last time he’d heard a title with a last name was before the Iron Empire
had risen . . . before Lord General Kerrigan used first names to allow his soldiers to rise based on their own merits, and
not on the backs of their family names.
“I’m not a commander anymore, Princess.” Hugo smiled, flicking pieces of a twig he’d been breaking apart in his hands into
the fire in front of them.
“You know what I never noticed, Commander?” Evangeline said, repeating the title he’d learned to hate.
“Don’t call me that,” Hugo grunted.
“I never noticed the way your gaze melts when you look at her,” the princess chuckled darkly. “I was so wrapped up in being
a princess, I never noticed that you were in love with the viscountess.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hugo said, hoping denial was enough to get Evangeline’s attention off of this
topic. It wasn’t.
“I know exactly what I’m talking about,” Evangeline snarled. “And if you’re not careful I’ll start telling her things you
don’t want her to know, even if she asked not to know unless she specifically asked.”
This was the Evangeline De Clare he remembered: brazen and argumentative. But there was something else to her, an edge in her
voice that hadn’t been there before. Hugo imagined it stemmed from whatever she’d had to deal with over the last few years.
Evangeline didn’t know how conflicted he was. How, yes, he wanted nothing more than to touch Eira, but was it fair to Eira
for him to act on his feelings when she couldn’t remember their history?
“Are you . . . okay?” Hugo asked in an attempt to change the subject. “Being stuck as a rabbit and losing your best friend
can’t have been easy.”
Evangeline’s snarl faltered for a moment as she looked past Hugo in the direction Eira had gone. He could hear her splashing
water in the distance—she’d be back any minute.
“I’m as okay as anyone whose entire family was executed and then needed to become a shape-shifting rabbit in order to survive
would be doing.”
“So, not well?”
“Most definitely not well,” she answered tartly, refusing to meet Hugo’s eyes as she stared into the fire.
“What made you change your mind, Commander?” Evangeline asked, finally looking up at him. “You hated my family, you hated our monarchy, you hated everything about it, so why are you here? Shouldn’t you be working toward being the heir—sorry—‘next in line’ for lord general?”
“You sound bitter that you lost,” Hugo said mildly.
“I am,” Evangeline said. “We were betrayed by our closest allies—who wouldn’t be bitter?”