Chapter Nine Ask Not for Whom the Hamster Screams
Chapter Nine
Ask Not for Whom the Hamster Screams
After a while, I began to spot the differences among the huntsmen—they might have looked much the same in their domino masks, but they weren’t at all similar otherwise. Jack remained inscrutable to me, but the rest were coming into sharper focus.
“Hey, Harry,” said Max—Max was the one who liked to tell bad jokes. “Did you know I can cut down a tree just by looking at it?”
“No,” said Harry. “Really?” Harry was the one who liked to hear bad jokes.
“It’s true! I saw it with my own eyes!”
Harry guffawed, while Clem looked pained. “Eejits,” he muttered. He was the one who hated bad jokes.
Kit hardly said anything, although he frequently turned aside to hold a finger to his nose and blow the autumn leaves into swirling gyres, grinning too widely whenever he did. I was beginning to find him slightly unnerving.
Sam, when he was up to talking, mostly asked me questions about my life, which I fended off. I did the same to him, and he returned the favor.
I thought about what Clem had said and decided that flirting was an accurate way to describe what Sam and I had been doing. Practically since the moment we’d met. I liked Sam. His easy smile and his sense of humor. His attentiveness, despite his own injuries. I liked him rather a lot.
Which was perhaps not a feeling I should have been allowing to germinate when I was set to be married to someone else, and the consequences of endangering that engagement could be severe.
I’d been fixated on my stepmother sticking me in a glass coffin if I defied her will, but that was only one of many possibilities.
She might turn me into a bird and lock me in a cage instead.
Or put me to sleep for a hundred years behind a wall of thorns.
Assuming the huntsmen’s intentions toward me were not nefarious, and I was being taken to the castle as they claimed, then whatever was going on between Sam and me would have to end as soon as I revealed my true identity.
A pang of loss struck me at the thought, which was ridiculous considering I had known him for less than a day.
But it would have been nice to find out what might have developed if I had really been a handmaiden named Clover trading veiled glances with a hunter named Sam.
Or even if I were a princess who’d been abducted by an attractive outlaw. I had heard of successful relationships with stranger origins.
Perhaps, I thought as we stopped at the bank of a wide river, I could still hold out some hope I was being kidnapped.
Our insanely dangerous route through the forest couldn’t possibly be the easiest way to get to the castle.
It seemed far more likely to lead to a robber’s den.
Criminals might brave the dangers lurking in the woods to avoid a prison sentence—or a noose.
“I’m fairly sure we can ford it,” Jack said, staring into the swift-flowing water. “I don’t think it’s too deep.”
A virulently purple fish with the extended eyestalks of a slug poked its head out of the river, blinked at him, and then disappeared again with a quiet plop.
“Maybe not,” said Sam. “We don’t know what’s in there.”
“I can blow the rest of you across,” Kit offered.
Before I could point out what a terrible idea that was, Clem shook his head. “Och, ye dafty! We’d break oor arses oan they rocks.”
An argument immediately broke out, all of them talking at once.
“I’ll freeze the water so solid, the fish will think they’re already in the icebox—”
“—freeze us to death, more likely—”
“—shoot an arrow wi’ a rope tied tae it—”
“—worst idea I ever—”
“—if Sam can punch out a tunnel underneath—”
“—if I can what?—”
“—we should throw Harry’s leg over to the other side—”
“—drink the river dry—”
“—somehow learn to teleport—”
“—no, no, levitate—”
“—teleport!—”
“—levitate!—”
“—won’t even work, it’s not flying, you can’t go sideways—”
“Or,” I shouted over them, “we could make our way to the road! Where I imagine there is a nice, solid bridge over this river.”
Silence fell over the group. “There is,” one of them admitted after a moment. “But…”
I sighed. “We aren’t going to the castle, are we?”
“We are!” Sam said.
“It’s fine if we’re not. You’re a nice enough bunch, for criminals, and it’s not as if there’s a lot I can do about it, anyway.”
Jack leaned against a tree. “We’re avoiding the road because we’ve already been ambushed there. Going back to it would be pressing our luck.”
“Ambushed?” I said. “Who ambushed you?”
“I’m surprised you have to ask, considering you’ve got their claw marks in your shoulders.”
“Oh.”
I’d assumed the spider wolves were just a local hazard, the kind of danger that might beset any unwary soul wandering through the woods. “Ambushed” implied the attack wasn’t a matter of chance. That it had been planned.
Planned by whom?
“The spider wolves—they’ve been hunting you?” I asked.
“Yes, lately. Although they first showed up a year or so before we entered into the king’s service.
” Jack’s gaze wandered away from mine. He seemed to be looking at nothing in particular.
Or perhaps at something no one else could see.
“When Gervase was still a prince, his eldest brother was torn to bits by a pack of them while he was out on a hunt, along with almost the whole of his hunting party. It was assumed to be bad luck, an unfortunate encounter with the dangers of the wilderness. There’d been rumors about strange things in the forests of Tailliz for years, after all.
“His next-eldest brother, however, was carried off by an enormous horned bird only a few months later. The family held on to the belief he might be alive until they found his arms and legs scattered across a clearing. Another brother was dragged shrieking into a hole by something with too many teeth, and then their father died a lingering death after being bitten by a furred snake with fins.” His eyes returned to mine.
“Since taking our position as Gervase’s huntsmen, we’ve had to fend off assaults by all of those creatures, as well as things that were almost, but not quite, bats, rats, cats, badgers, and hamsters. ”
“Hamsters?” I asked.
“I can assure you that a screaming twenty-foot-tall hamster is not a foe for the faint of heart. No one knows why these things are happening, or how, or what is causing them, or when they will strike next. So while the forest may be full of oddities these days—”
“You’re choosing to stray from the path,” I said. “You brave the dangers of the unknown for the concealment that it offers.”
He nodded. “We avoid the road as much as we can and vary our routes. And until we know the cause of the attacks,” he added with a faint smile, “we also treat any strangers we happen upon in the woods with the gravest suspicion.”
“Jack,” Sam protested, “you can’t possibly believe she—”
“I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt, for now,” Jack said, “because she was attacked herself and injured in the bargain. Which would be quite a risk to take if it was only to deceive us. But I am looking forward to what is, I’m sure, the very reasonable explanation for why Skalla sent a wedding planner out on her lonesome, without a guard, companion, or chaperone, into the notably dangerous wilderness between the two countries.
” He sketched me a quick bow. “And now, if you please, we should make our way across this river.”
Drat. And I’d thought my story had been so believable, too. I suppose once someone’s been beset by monsters in the woods a time or two, they learn to be more wary thereafter.
It was eventually decided that Max would freeze the river while the rest of us waited a safe distance back, and soon we were sliding our way across slick ice.
I found myself more than a little bit nervous during the crossing.
If anything was going to leap out of the forest and attack us again, we were presenting it with a prime opportunity as we inched forward, one firm push away from being flat on our backs. But nothing came to bite our heads off.
All things considered, I no longer regretted avoiding the road.
In fact, the rest of the journey passed without incident. When the late afternoon sunshine cast a warm orange glow on the few leaves still clinging to their branches, we clambered out of a small gully, and the towers of a castle heaved themselves into view.
Jack gestured toward it with a flourish, as if it were his and he were presenting it to us for our entertainment and delight. “Castle Tailliz. The stronghold of King Gervase.”
At long last, I had arrived.