Chapter Twenty What Is This Thing Called Love?
Chapter Twenty
What Is This Thing Called Love?
I came to consciousness slowly, watery thoughts dribbling out of my head until they were replaced by a human mind once more. At some point in the process, I noticed I had a splitting headache and, except for something warm pressed up against my side, I was freezing cold.
I couldn’t tell exactly where the warmth was coming from, because I was having difficulty opening my eyes.
It took me a while to understand the problem, because first I had to remember that I had a body and then that my body had eyes that could be opened.
At that point, I tried to open them. And failed.
This caused me a moment of panic, until I realized the sensation was familiar. I’d encountered the same problem during my time on the plain of ice at the top of the world. My eyelids had frozen shut.
Have I mentioned how much I hate the outdoors?
My teeth ached from the cold, and the hairs in my nose had iced up as well, an irritating sensation something like being permanently on the verge of a sneeze. I pressed my hands against my eyes and waited for the heat of my body, little enough though there was, to melt the frost around my lashes.
“It was very odd,” said Sam, close enough that I felt his breath on my cheek, “being a goose.”
Well, that explained why my left side was less frozen than my right.
“Sorry,” I told him.
“Better that than being mashed to a pulp. And I didn’t say it was horrible. Just odd. I ate a lot of grass. Pounds and pounds of it, every day. It must be doing terrible things to my digestion now that I’m no longer a bird.”
I was able to open my eyes at last. I blinked at him a few times. He and I were both half-covered in snow. We staggered to our feet.
“You’d think so,” I said, brushing snow off my skirt and leggings, “but you probably won’t have any problems. I doubt you’ll throw anything up, even if you stuffed yourself so full that your liver turned into foie gras.
It doesn’t count somehow. Although if you’d injured your wing, you might have a broken arm right now. ”
He frowned and ran his fingers down his side. “Are you sure? The bruises I got from the stone creatures don’t hurt anymore. I can’t even feel my stitches pulling. They’re gone, I think. I feel better than I did before I turned into a goose.”
“Huh. Maybe you wouldn’t have a broken arm, then.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “Logic and magic don’t exactly go hand in hand. And a good thing, too.” I glanced around at our surroundings. “Otherwise, I’d have ended up killing a lot of innocent animals. By all rights, Lake Me should have drowned every squirrel on this…um.”
We weren’t on the hill anymore.
Instead of a rise ringed by massive trees, we were in a shallow dip on the bank of an icy, burbling brook.
From the looks of things, we were still in the Tailliziani forest. But beyond that, I had no idea of our whereabouts.
Lake Melilot had spanned miles and miles.
Who knew where in that wide expanse we’d ended up?
Snow coated the ground and frosted the branches, and more snowflakes sifted through the treetops like fine sugar. “Why is it still so cold?” I asked, rubbing my upper arms and shivering. “Did Max lose his hat?”
Sam gave me an odd look. “Max flew off with the rest of them. Back to the castle, I’d imagine. It’s winter.”
“It’s…what?”
“You were a lake for weeks. Maybe a month? I didn’t keep track of sunsets and sunrises as well as I’d have liked; geese don’t really understand numbers. But there were more than a few.”
“Oh.” Geese were better at counting than lakes, apparently.
I remembered the light and the darkness, now that I thought about it more, and had dim memories of the air above me warming and cooling, wisps of mist steaming off me in the morning and vanishing as the day progressed.
But I couldn’t have said how many times it had happened.
I certainly wouldn’t have guessed a month.
Sam peered up into the sky. “I hope the others are all right. Have they been birds until now, too?”
“I don’t know, honestly.” I’d never achieved anything of this scope before and had no experience to draw from. It was entirely possible they’d turned back into people once they were far enough away. “They might be better off than we are.”
The weather was going to be a serious problem.
Neither Sam nor I was dressed for winter.
It wasn’t as bad as it might have been; Sam wore a green jacket over a green cambric shirt, and I had my good red hooded cloak.
Better still, I was wearing more sensible footwear than the last time I’d had to tramp through these woods on foot.
I doubted we’d freeze to death as long as we kept in motion.
But it didn’t strike me as a wise idea to bed down for a night in the great outdoors if we could avoid it. On the plain of ice at the top of the world, I’d had a magic stone that kept me from dying of exposure while I slept. Nothing like that seemed likely to come to hand.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” I asked.
“None whatever. I take it you don’t, either?”
“No.” My sigh became a small white cloud in the frigid air. “We should try to find some kind of shelter.” I looked around. No direction seemed more promising than any other.
“Downstream?” He motioned at the brook. “The burn here might run toward the sea. It could lead us to the castle.”
I nodded my assent, and we set off, following the stream.
It was tough going, with the usual difficulties of fighting our way through a trackless wilderness made worse by having to slog through the snow.
Often, we had to take circuitous routes, when the brook dove into a defile, or the banks were clogged with impassable undergrowth.
We did our best to keep it within earshot so that we could find our way back.
And of course, every now and then, there were the creatures, peering at us from the bushes and trees.
A beakless owl, its three cavernous mouths filled with the teeth of a lamprey.
A fox with no eyes that felt its way forward with two long, whiplike antennae.
An enormous mound of snoring fur in the bushes. We kept our distance from that one.
None of them attacked us—at least not yet.
“I’ve never seen anything like what happened when you turned into the lake,” Sam said after a while. “You were there, and then you were water, and then you were everywhere. And I was a bird.” He gave me a sideways glance. “That was no minor work of sorcery.”
“It’s more than I’ve ever managed before.
And likely more than I ever will again.” There was no guarantee I’d be able to repeat my success.
Magic doesn’t merely defy logic; it doesn’t behave in any orderly, reasonable manner.
Casting a spell is more like trying to ride a bolt of lightning than it’s like mixing measured ingredients to make a medicinal tincture.
“And in this case, I had…certain advantages.”
“Like what?”
Like the kiss. True Love’s First Kiss, to be precise. A power that has been known to break mighty enchantments, revive the nearly dead, and amplify magic a thousandfold. It had been the wildest of desperate gambles. I hadn’t really thought it would work.
I hadn’t really thought about what it might mean.
And I still didn’t know. Was Sam in love with me?
Was I in love with Sam? Did we know each other well enough to say?
Perhaps it meant we would fall in love at some later point.
Or simply that we could fall in love. I’d heard of True Love’s First Kiss happening for two people who had only danced together at a ball three times.
Or being used to break a sleeping curse by a couple who had never exchanged a word before that very moment.
Surely they couldn’t have already been in love?
I’d never considered the subject very deeply before.
I’m not sure I’d believed it would ever come up.
Instead of answering Sam’s question, I asked one of my own. “Why did you stay,” I said, “when everyone else flew away?”
“Ah, well.” Sam appeared to become fascinated by his boots crunching through the snow.
“I thought you might need someone around when you came out of it. Or as much as a bird can think such a thing, anyway. I had to fight against the urge to migrate. Some days I would fly south for a few miles before I remembered.”
“Well…thank you. I’m glad I’m not alone out here.”
“It’s no great sacrifice on my part. The king can make do with eleven hunters protecting him instead of twelve. For a while, at least.” Despite what he said, he sounded troubled.
“He only had six when we were fighting the spider wolves,” I pointed out.
“I know. It’s only that before now, I haven’t ever…Jack must be worried about me. The two of us have never been apart for very long. We’ve always been there to look out for each other.”
“Jack,” I said. “Jacqueline.”
That brought Sam’s gaze up from his boots. The snow was pouring down, puffy white pellets that clung to our clothing. The wind had picked up as well.
“You figured that out, did you?” said Sam.
“Hardly. The king called out her name in a moment of panic. She was his fiancée, wasn’t she? Before he was engaged to…” I stopped myself before saying “me.”
“Aye, she was.”
“Are all of the hunters women in disguise?”
“Most. Not quite all.”
“Jack kept a version of her name,” I mused. “To keep things simple. Did the others? Is Harry short for Harriet? Max for Maxine? Kit for Kate and Clem for…” I had to puzzle over that one. “Clemence?”
“Clementine. She hates it.”
“And what about Sam?”
“Just Sam. Nothing more. As I said, not all of us are women.”
Conversation halted for a few minutes while we forced our way through a dense thicket.
Some twisting plant with inch-long thorns had hidden itself inside, so the whole of our attention was spent detaching spiky vines from our clothes before we were both scratched bloody.
Neither of us was entirely successful, and I was left with a red, dripping gash on my cheek.
When I dragged myself through to the other side, grabbing Sam’s hand to assist me, I asked, “So, is Jack your fraternal twin, then?”
Sam went still, and there was a long pause before he answered. “No,” he said at length. “We’re identical twins.”
“Oh, of course.” I dabbed at the blood on my face with my glove. Something in the line of Sam’s shoulders relaxed ever so slightly.
In Skalla, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to realize they weren’t what everyone had assumed at the time they were born. But I doubted such things were treated with as much respect here in Tailliz, with its rigid gender roles enforced by the ruling class.
“Did Jack borrow your clothes, then?” I asked. “When she adopted her disguise?”
“At first. It helped that we’re the exact same size.”
We resumed our trek through the snow, ducking our heads as the wind blew heavy flakes into our faces. Four-legged sparrows regarded us with beady, faceted eyes. I pulled my cloak around me. The weather was getting grimmer as the day went on.
“Are any of the others men?” I asked.
“I’ve never polled the whole group.” Sam sounded amused in spite of the cold. “Jules seemed extraordinarily happy to switch from skirts to breeches. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“Jules—that’s the frog spitter?”
“No, that’s Jude,” Sam corrected me. “Flowers spring up from the ground wherever Jules walks.”
“I never did learn the names of all the duchess’s siblings.”
“Alex can eat anything, Nick can make anyone sneeze, Drew can cover tracks so well that no beast or bird can follow them, and Fred can make small windows into somewhat larger windows.”
“That one…doesn’t sound especially useful.”
“It is if you want a somewhat larger window.”
“Well,” I said, “I can see why no one suspected their secret. Your abilities must distract everyone from anything else about you.”
Sam grinned sourly. “For the most part, aye. Not entirely.”
I mulled that over as we pushed through the shrubs along the bank of the creek. Who had figured out most of them were women?
“The lion,” I realized. “That’s what he’s been testing for. How on earth did he come to believe peas on the floor would prove anything?”
Sam’s laugh was almost a snort. “He has odd notions about how humans operate. According to the Doctrine of Lion, laddies stomp, but lassies prance, and…it’s hard to explain. He’s written a whole book about it. You should read it. It’s hilarious.”
“But why does he care? What does it matter?” I was bewildered—I knew it was deeply important to the lion, but I couldn’t fathom why he would be concerned about the gender roles of an entirely different species.
“He’s been told there are rules, and he thinks it’s his job to impose them.” Sam’s mouth compressed into a thin line. “He’s hardly alone in that.”
We walked in silence for a long while after that.
The clouds overhead darkened from light gray to charcoal; behind them, the sun must have been dipping low on the horizon.
I had to clench my teeth to keep them from chattering as it grew colder.
One of my boots had sprung a leak at some point, and my foot was thoroughly soaked. So much for better footwear.
Snow still plummeted from the sky, and the drifts were getting deeper. Soon, we’d have to start worrying about frostbite—or worse, unless our circumstances improved before nightfall.
Frostbite should be treated by moving the patient to a warmer area as soon as possible. Immerse the affected body parts in tepid water, if available, but never in extremely hot water. Severe cases of frostbite can lead to gangrene and may require amputation.
I tucked my hands into my armpits to keep them as warm as I could. We’d be in a great deal of trouble if we couldn’t find a place to bed down. And in the vast, untamed wilderness, that didn’t seem very likely.