“This is a good land,” he said. “Despite the mercenaries.”
Sally raised her brow. “You say that as though you’ve never been here.”
He shrugged. “It’s been a long time. I hardly remember.”
“So why did you come back?”
“Unfinished business.” He met her gaze. “Why are you running? More specifically, why are you running to the Tangleroot?”
“My own unfinished business,” she replied. “I have questions.”
“Most people, when they have questions, ask other people. They do not go running headfirst into a place of night terrors and magic.”
Sally closed her fists around her skirts. “I suppose you’re lucky enough to have people who can help you when you’re in trouble. I’m not. Not this time.”
“Apparently.” Mickel did not sound happy about that. “Perhaps I could help?”
I wish, she thought. “I doubt that.”
“I have two ears, two hands, and I have seen enough for two lifetimes. Maybe three, but I was very drunk at the time. Certainly, I could at least lend some advice.”
Sally hesitated, studying him. Finding a great deal of sincerity in his eyes. It almost broke her heart.
“You don’t understand,” she began to say, and then stopped as he held up his hand, looking sharply away, toward the road. Sally held her breath, listening hard. At first she heard only the quiet hiss of the wind—and then, a moment later, the faint ringing of bells.
Sally knew those bells.
She stood quickly, weighing her options—but there were none. She turned and began running toward the woods. Mickel leapt to his feet, and chased her. “Where are you going?”
“Horses,” she muttered. “Deaf man, there are horses coming.”
“And?”
She could hardly look at him. “My father. My father is coming to find me, and when he does, he will drag me home, stuff me in a white dress like a sack of potatoes, and thrust me into the arms of the barbarian warlord he has arranged to marry me.”
Mickel, who had been reaching for her, stopped. “Barbarian warlord?”
“Oh!” Sally stood on her toes, and kissed him hard on the mouth. Or tried to. It was the first time she had ever done such a thing, and she was rushed. Her lips ended up somewhere around his cheek, left of his nose. Mickel made an odd choking sound.
“I do like you,” she said breathlessly. “But I have to go now. If my father finds me with you and your men, he’ll assume you all have dispossessed me of my virtue, in various unseemly ways. And then he’ll kill you.”
Mickel still stared at her as though he had been hit over the head with one of the rocks he was so fond of juggling. “I have a strange question.”
“I probably have a strange answer,” she replied. “But unless you want to see your man parts dangling around your neck while my father saws off your legs to feed to his pet wolves, I’d best be going. Now.”
He followed her, running his fingers through his hair and pulling so hard she thought his scalp would peel away. “Why would your father need to make an alliance with a warlord? He sounds perfectly ghastly enough to handle his enemies on his own.”
“Oh, no,” she assured him, walking backward toward the woods. “That’s me. I have a much better imagination than he does.”
A pebble was thrown at them, and hit Mickel in the thigh. Rumble poked his head out from beneath the covers. “Eh! Shut up, shut up! I’m trying to sleep! Can’t a man have a decent night’s—”
Mickel found something considerably larger than a pebble, and threw it back at him. Sally heard a thump, and Rumble shut his mouth, grumbling.
“You can’t go,” he said.
“Oh, really.” Sally marched backward, pointing toward the forest. “Well, here I am, going. And you should be thanking me.”
Mickel stalked after her. “You are the craziest woman I have ever met. You make me crazy. Now come back here. Before I…”
“Do something crazy,” Rumble supplied helpfully.
“If you’re so crazy, dear man,” she said quickly, “I don’t think that would be prudent.”
And she turned and ran.
Mickel shouted, but Sally did not look back. She wanted to, quite badly, with all the broken pieces of her grieving heart.
But her father would find her if she stayed with him, and she liked Mickel too much to subject him to the harm that the old king most certainly would inflict. He might not be an imaginative man, but he was thorough. And a princess did not travel with common performers, not unless she wanted to become a… tawdry woman.
Which, she thought, sounded rather charming.
The forest was very dark, and swallowed her up the moment she stepped past its rambling boundary, suffocating her in a darkness so complete that all she could do was throw up her hands, and take small, careful steps that did not keep her safe from thorns, or the sharp branches that seemed intent on plucking out her eyes. She had to stop, frequently—not for weariness, but because she was afraid, and each step forward was a struggle not to take another step back.
Or to simply hide, and wait for dawn, until her father passed.
But that would not do, either. Returning to Mickel and his men would endanger them, and she could not tell them who she was. No man—no common, good men—would want to deal with a princess on the run. All kinds of trouble in that, especially for one who was betrothed to the Warlord of the Southern Blood Wastes, Keeper of the Armored Hellhounds, Black Knight of the Poisoned Cookies—or whatever other nefarious title was attached to his name.
Sally could depend only on herself. She had been foolish to imagine otherwise, even for a short time.
And, like the gardener enjoyed saying, life never fell backward, just forward—growing, turning, spinning, burning through the world day after day, like the sun. One step. One step forward.
Until, quite unexpectedly, the forest became something different. And Sally found herself in the Tangleroot.
She did not realize at first. The change was subtle. But as she walked, she found herself remembering, Some trees are bark and root, and some trees have soul and teeth, and she suddenly felt the difference as though it was she herself who was changing, transforming from a human woman into something that floated on rivers of shadows. It became easier to move, as though vines were silk against her skin, and she listened as words riddled through the twisting hisses of the leaves, a sibilant music that slid into her bones and up her throat: in every breath a song. Sweet starlight from the night sky disappeared. The world outside might as well have been gone.
Sally had journeyed too far. The Tangleroot, she had thought, lay farther away—but the ancient had reached into the new, becoming one.
She was here. She had been drawn inside. Nor could she stop walking, not to rest, not even to simply prove to herself that she could, that her body still listened to her. Because it did not. Her limbs seemed bound by strings as ephemeral as cobwebs, tugging her forward, and though she glimpsed odd trickling lights flickering at the corners of her eyes, and felt the tease of tiny invisible fingers stroking her cheeks and ankles, she could not turn her head to look. All she could see was the darkness in front of her.
And finally, the children. Tumbling from the trunks of trees like ghosts, staring at her with sad eyes. Tiny birds fluttered around their shoulders, while lizards and mice raced down their limbs; and though there was no moon or stars to be seen through the canopy, their bodies nonetheless seemed slippery with light: glimpses and shadows of silver etched upon their skin.
The little girl from her dream appeared, dropping from the branches above to land softly in front of Sally. She was different from the others, less a spirit, more full in the flesh. More present in her actions. Her matted hair nearly obscured the silver of her eyes. She crouched very still, staring. Sally could not breathe in her presence, as if it was too dangerous to take in the same air as this child.