“You tried to escape?” I sat down in the chair opposite her and fought the urge to reach out and grab her hand with my shackled ones.
“Well, duh, Fish Girl. What were we supposed to do? You’ve taken forever to get here. I was starting to think you weren’t going to bother, and then we’d never get home. You’ve got the only way back. So what took you so long?”
“Heidi…we thought you were dead. You and Jesse.”
“You what?”
“We thought you were dead,” I repeated.
She looked up, narrowing her blue eyes at me. “So you’re not here to bargain for our freedom? You didn’t negotiate our freedom as part of your peace treaty?” She reached out and grabbed the chain between my wrists and shook it. “What am I saying? Duh, stupid Heidi, of course you didn’t come here to save us. You’re a prisoner just like we are. When were you going to come for us? Forget when, were you ever going to come for us?”
“We thought you were dead! The Fate Maker told us—”
“We might as well have been,” she snapped.
“Heidi,” I started.
“It would have been better if we were,” she said, quieter this time. “It would have been better to let us die then force us to live like this.”
“Heidi, we didn’t know. We thought you were dead. The Fate Maker told us that you’d died in the forest during the first battle of the Crystal Palace. He told me you burned to death.”
“You didn’t bother to check? You just…what? Abandoned us here while you made plans to go back home?”
“He told us you were in the forest when it caught fire. He told us that you and Jesse had been being kept prisoner there by the wizards. We set fire to the trees where they were, and we thought you were with them.”
“Do you mean you set fire to a forest I was supposed to be hiding in? You tried to murder me? What the heck!”
“We didn’t know you were in the forest until after! We didn’t know where you were. You had disappeared, and then during the battle, there was magic coming from the forest so the dragons set fire to the trees to flush the wizards out. It started burning, and the wizards ran. But not everyone made it out. There were bodies.”
“My body? You saw my body?”
“No, well, yes… We thought we did. We couldn’t tell. It was burned so badly that we couldn’t tell for sure who it was. Then after we’d trapped the Fate Maker, he told us you were in the forest. Once we’d dealt with him, we tried to find you and Jesse, but all we found were the bodies, and we thought…”
“So you just wrote the two of us off as a couple of charbroiled corpses and walked away? Thanks a lot.”
“We didn’t just forget about you! We held a memorial. Okay, it wasn’t much of a memorial, but we had plans to do something bigger once the war was over. We were going to put up a marker for all the dead with their names on it, to make sure that no one had forgotten that you’d died here.”
“Great!” She stood up and threw her hands in the air before stomping over to the window. “I was going to be a name on a stone. That’s just great. Thanks a lot.”
“What did you want me to do? We thought you were dead. It’s not my fault.”
“It is your fault!” she yelled, and then she stormed back over to the table and picked up an empty pitcher before flinging it at me. I ducked to the side, and the pitcher hit the wall behind us, shattering. “You left us behind.”
“If we’d have known you were here, we would have come for you. We wouldn’t have left you behind.”
“You already had. You and Winston disappeared. Mercedes was surrounded by those green tree women, and they were all throwing these weird clingy vines at people and tying them up, and that big guy had his army, and we had nothing. We were just there, standing in a crowd full of screaming, terrified people.”
I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing I could do now to change what happened. I bit the inside of my cheek and listened.
“There were people with swords and all these monsters, and there was nothing we could do.” She kept going, and I could see tears collecting on her eyelashes and making muddy trails down her hollow, dirty cheeks. “Jesse and I just stood there watching. Neither of us could do anything. We were just trapped. We just had to stand there and watch. Then, these two men in black suits grabbed us, and I couldn’t even fight.”
“Heidi, I’m—” I started.
“We were screaming for someone to help, to save us, and I was trying to fight them, but they were too strong and they took us. And you want to know the worst part?”
“What?” I swallowed, staring at her as she raged.
“No one even turned around to notice,” she said, her voice cracking. “They took us, and no one even noticed. You left us alone and unarmed, and no one even cared.”
“Heidi…” I reached for her, and the girl who most loved to hate my guts launched herself at me, toppling us both over on the floor as she wrapped her arms around my waist and buried her head in my shoulder, sobbing.
I reached up and tried to pat her shoulder, but she winced as my bound hands brushed across her ribs. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
“They make us crawl,” she sobbed into my collar. “The guards and the people who work here. The servants, I mean.”
“What?” I swallowed and tried to blink back my own tears. The last thing that would help Heidi right now was me breaking down when she needed me the most.
“They take me and Jesse to the kitchen and make us crawl around on the floor while they throw bread at us. They laugh and they point at the maid and the boy who wanted to be king as they throw food at us like we’re animals.”
“They won’t do that anymore,” I promised her. “We’re going to find a way to get you out of here.”
She sniffled. “How?”
“I don’t know yet.” I shook my head and then swallowed again. “But we are getting out of here. I have an army, and now that I’m gone, they’ll be coming. They’ll rescue us.”
“If they manage to win,” she whispered.
“They will,” I said, trying to sound confident.
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s a big army,” I reassured her. “We managed to beat the Fate Maker after all.”
“Did you?” she asked, her voice filled with a wary sort of hope.
“We did, and now he’s never going to hurt anyone ever again.”
I heard the lock click and then the creak of the door opening again. “Aww,” Mikhail, the Hound who had captured me at the palace walls, said mockingly. “Isn’t this sweet?”
Instead of answering, I shifted so that Heidi wasn’t sitting on top of me anymore, and then I pulled myself up, using the table to support my weight. Once I was upright, I raised my chin a bit and sneered at him.
“Did you have a nice visit? Catch up a bit?” he taunted.
“Untie her and make sure she’s brought hot water and clean clothes,” I said, trying to sound every inch like the queen I was supposed to be.
“No.”
“I said—”
“You’re not the queen here!” Mikhail roared, his voice reverberating against the stone walls. “You’re a prisoner here, and your visiting hours with the maid are over. So come along.”
I glared at him. “No.”
He stalked toward me and grabbed the chain between my wrists, pulling me close enough that we were nose to nose. “It wasn’t a request, Rosy, my dear.”