Chapter Twenty-Four The Welcoming Committee
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Welcoming Committee
The skies remained clear, and the next leg of our journey was noticeably easier without a blizzard blowing into our faces.
Shuffling through the deep snow made it an exhausting hike, nonetheless.
I hadn’t eaten in so long I’d stopped being hungry—never a good sign.
Foraging seemed pointless. Little would be available, and even less would be visible, thanks to the previous day’s storm.
More dangerous still, now that we’d traveled away from the stream, we had no ready source of fresh water.
Snow makes a poor substitute—it draws heat from your body and ends up doing more harm than good.
I considered attempting to turn into a puddle so Sam could drink from me, but he found the idea unsettling.
I tried to reassure him that the water wouldn’t turn back into my organs in his stomach, but that somehow only made things worse.
My sore throat had been growing more painful by the hour. And despite the cold, I had broken out in a fevered sweat. My hands shook. I wasn’t able to hold them steady.
We were both somewhat buoyed, however, by the knowledge we were headed toward warmth and a meal.
Traveling in a straight line was impossible in the dense forest, but we recalibrated our position with the looking glass whenever we worried we were getting off track.
It provided this help unwillingly. Even more so since we were forced to put it in a variety of undignified positions in order to supply appropriate rhymes.
(“Mirror, mirror on wet leaves, point us to the castle’s eaves,” and so on.)
Unfortunately, I had no luck in tricking it into telling us anything about its master, no matter how clever my attempts.
I was particularly proud of “Mirror, mirror in the air, show your master in their lair,” but Sam made me stop after that because I’d flung the mirror as high as I could, and he’d only just managed to catch it before it hit the ground.
He rightly pointed out that a broken mirror wouldn’t do us any good.
We had to travel for the next mile or two with a looking glass insulting my intelligence, virtue, and parentage—the last of which grew increasingly improbable the longer the tirade continued.
But I would have considered that a small price to pay if my ploy had worked.
Toward the end of the day, a final check of the mirror showed the castle less than half an hour’s walk ahead. Tired, thirsty, ailing, and frozen as I was, I picked up my pace in anticipation.
Then an arrow thudded into a tree trunk scant inches from my face.
I was so surprised that I didn’t scream, only stumbled to a halt, blinking in bewilderment.
“Clem!” Sam shouted. “What the hell?”
Three masked hunters stepped out from the shadows of trees like ghosts appearing from thin air. One—Clem, presumably—had her bow nocked, with the arrow trained on me. The other two could have been any of them.
“Hello, witch,” the one in front greeted me.
“Sorceress,” I corrected automatically, my voice hoarse and cracking. If I’d been given three guesses as to which hunter this was, I’d have said Jack for all of them.
Her eyes, hard and sharp as a pair of nails, locked on me as unwaveringly as Clem’s arrow. “Come back to assess the damage? I think you’ll find it wasn’t as much as you hoped.”
“What are you talking about?” Surely Jack didn’t still imagine I’d been the one behind the assassination attempts? Not after I’d rescued them.
But other than Sam, I realized, no one could have known for certain I’d done that.
Everyone else must have been left baffled by the appearance of the lake and their sudden transformation.
If a month ago, Jack had thought I brought the stone giants upon us, she’d been given no reason to change her mind.
The three hunters watched me in tense silence. Silence that could snap at any moment into something dangerous.
“Look,” I said. “I can explain—”
“Are you all daft?” Sam stepped in front of me, cutting me off. “Clem, put your bow down.”
Clem’s aim adjusted by a fraction of an inch. “Git oot th’ way, Sam,” she answered. “Till this gits sorted.”
“There’s nothing to sort!” Sam stared at his cousin in disbelief. “She didn’t summon the monsters. She’s the one who saved us!”
“You’re not even making sense,” Jack said. “No one saved us.”
“She turned us into birds!” Sam shouted.
Jack’s face twitched. “She was the one? You’re certain?”
“I saw her do it.”
“Thirty days as a goose,” Jack growled. “A month trapped in that nightmare.” So they hadn’t changed back any earlier than we had. Useful information if I was ever able to cast the spell again. Although surviving Jack’s rage would be a necessary first step toward that goal.
Sam was shaking his head. “You don’t understand. If she hadn’t—”
“The whole kingdom thought we were dead until yesterday morning. They thought the king was dead. They had to appoint a regent.” She bared her teeth.
“Did you hope for our deaths?” The question was directed at me.
“Did you think I would get eaten by a fox? Or that Gervase would?” Her eyes flicked to Sam.
“It nearly happened. I had to drive it off him. Hitting it with my wings. Where were you?”
I shivered—standing still let the cold creep up my feet. Clem’s bow followed the motion like a reflection. Keeping a bowstring taut for that long takes astonishing strength. She must have had an arm like an iron bar.
“Dinnae shift.” Her tone was empty of any emotion. “Ah’ll shoot afore ah let ye cast anither spell.”
I’d no doubt she could do it, too. Not that I’d be able to cast much of anything without the benefit of True Love’s First Kiss.
“Clem,” I rasped, my throat raw and aching.
Speaking felt like shoving my words through a grater.
“You saw me run from those creatures. Do you really think I brought them down on us? I did…the thing I did so we could get away.”
Her aim didn’t waver, but her voice did, ever so slightly. “Ah dinnae ken whit tae think.”
With a valiant effort, I refrained from screaming. It wouldn’t have done my throat any favors.
And although I wasn’t eager to admit it, as misdirected as Jack’s ideas might have been, they weren’t completely without cause. She was suspicious of me because I had been behaving suspiciously, from practically the first moment we had met.
Enough was enough. It was time to come clean.
“There’s a very simple explanation for everything I’ve done.” I took a painful swallow and then at last admitted, “I am Princess Melilot.”
There was a moment of profound silence.
Then Jack laughed. “No, you’re not.”
“Yes, I am,” I replied crossly. That wasn’t the response I had been hoping for.
“Then, when we met you in the forest, where were your servants? Your guards? What became of your carriage? You were alone and unaccompanied. It makes no sense.”
My own words, flung back at me. Had I lied too well for my own good? “They were…they were teeth,” I tried to explain. “And a pumpkin…”
Jack took a step closer, her hand on her sword hilt. “I’ve been wondering what you did with the real Princess Melilot.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “She still hasn’t arrived. I wasn’t looking forward to her wedding day, but that was no fault of hers. She didn’t deserve death.”
“I didn’t kill her!” Shouting hurt just as much as I’d thought it would. I grimaced in pain and dropped my voice to a scratchy mutter. “Me, I mean. I didn’t kill myself.”
“Jack.” Sam moved to interpose himself once again, his eyes flicking between Jack and the arrow still targeting me. “She really is the princess. She told me yesterday.”
“She told you.” Jack sighed. “Sam, has it crossed your mind you might be ensorcelled?”
Sam’s mouth dropped open. His face turned the dark red of beet juice. “I might be what?”
Clem looked thoughtful. “Jack haes a point.”
“No,” Sam said. “That’s absurd.”
Jack stepped in closer, until their faces were only inches apart. “You’ve been mooning over her since the moment you saw her—”
“Oh, that’s rich,” her brother interrupted, “coming from you!”
“—even though she’s been lying about who she is, she forgot to mention she’s a witch—”
“Sorceress,” I protested.
“—and after she turned us into birds, you abandoned me to go traipsing off after her!”
“Because I’m supposed to follow along behind you, right?” Sam said. “So that Jack gets to be the hero, like always. Jack gets to have the grand romance. No one else can have a story of their own.”
“You’re not having a romance!” Jack shouted. “You’ve been enchanted!”
“The first lassie or laddie I’ve ever had feelings for, the first one, and you can’t handle it, is that it?”
“Will you for one second listen to what I’ve been—”
“All of you stop!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. The words stabbed my throat like a knife. “Stop it right now!”
Much to my surprise, they did, turning to look at me warily.
“If you’d just give me a chance to tell you what happened,” I managed to say with what was left of my voice, “then everything will become clear.”
They waited, tense but expectant. I took a moment to choose the best place to begin.
It matters how stories are told. I needed to tell one that was true.
Lies had only led to distrust. I decided to start with a woman kneeling in her stepmother’s throne room, waiting for the latest in a long, long series of impossible demands.
There’s no way to know what would have happened if I’d been able to tell the story. Before I had a chance, the mirror in my hand butted in to make its version of events known.
“Don’t trust her!” it bellowed. “She stole me! She’s a liar and a thief!”
Too many things happened at once.
I was so startled I dropped the looking glass.
It shrieked as if I’d hurled it off a cliff.
Clem’s arm tensed, her arrow tracking the mirror as it fell.
Jack whipped out her sword, more out of surprise than anything else.
But Sam leapt forward and grabbed Jack’s shoulder, his fist cocked back for a punch.
Protecting me from his sister. Jack looked so shocked it was almost comical.
That was when the third hunter, the one who’d stood by so quietly I’d almost forgotten about her, put her hand to her nose and closed one nostril, blowing through the other.
Oh, it’s Kit, I thought inanely. The Nose Blower.
Only the faintest brush of a breeze touched my face, but the wind plucked Sam right out of the snow, leaving only a deep pair of footprints behind.
He went tumbling end over end until, dozens of feet away, his head slammed into a tree.
Someone started screaming; I think it might have been me.
If it still hurt my throat, I didn’t notice.
Jack and I both raced over to Sam. Behind us, Clem was yelling at Kit, and Kit was yelling right back as the wind subsided.
Half-buried in a snowdrift, the mirror continued to hurl accusations: “She means to gather an army! I heard her say it! And she broke into my house and shoved me in a pile of leaves and dropped me in the snow! I could have broken! You all saw it!”
I knelt next to Sam. His eyes were open but didn’t seem to be focused on anything. They slid past me. “Prinzzess?” he murmured.
He turned and retched, little coming up except greenish strings of bile that dripped onto the white snow.
Concussion, I thought. Prescribe rest. Apply ice to any bumps or swelling. Observe symptoms closely in case they worsen over time. Check to see if the pupils are of unequal size; bleeding in the brain can be deadly….
Jack dropped to her own knees on Sam’s other side, her face gray. “I swear,” she hissed, “if he’s been hurt because of you, I’ll—”
“You’re blaming me?” The fury welling up within me was something I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
Not since my stepmother had condemned me to the tower.
The anger was like a physical force, a boiling black cloud swelling inside my body.
It dimmed the edges of my vision. The tree beside us creaked, as if something was bending the trunk.
Other trees joined the chorus, rustling, crackling.
“Are you nimble, Jack?” I whispered. She didn’t answer; she’d gone quiet. “Are you quick? If you start running now, do you think you can escape my wrath?”
My hair twitched and lifted, blown by an unseen wind. Moving and growing, twining its way toward Jack’s pale, exposed throat.
“That’s enough o’ that.”
I looked up to see an arrow pointed at my eye. Clem was standing only a few feet away. Behind her, a sour-faced Kit kicked at the snow.
“Kit didnae mean tae hurt Sam,” Clem said. “So please stoap doin’…whitevur it is ye’re doin’.”
“What…? I didn’t…” I blinked, and my vision cleared, the dark blurriness vanishing.
The sound of straining wood died away. The reaching tendrils of my hair dropped; it had grown long enough to spread out around me on the ground.
It would brush my ankles when I stood. “I wasn’t going to… ” My voice trailed off.
Had the trees slid closer to us?
There was a more important matter to attend to. “We have to get Sam to the castle,” I told Clem. “He needs treatment.”
“Aye.” She nodded. “We kin figure oot th’ rest efter.”
Kit and Jack managed to get Sam upright and stumbling forward, supported on both sides.
At some point, I didn’t fully notice when, Jack picked up the looking glass, which was still mumbling dire warnings about me.
I was somewhat distracted by the fact that while Clem lowered her bow, she kept it strung and ready at hand.
I couldn’t blame her. If I’d wanted to make a case for my innocence, I doubted I could have done a worse job. Although I still wasn’t sure exactly what I’d been doing. Or how. There’d been no kiss this time to enhance my abilities. What had just happened?
I’d have to be more convincing at the castle. Or at least less terrifying than when I’d threatened Jack. Never in my life had I sounded more like my stepmother.
Maybe I had learned something from her after all.