“The princesses,” Maria said, before Petunia could shush her.
Petunia closed her eyes in despair, but only for a moment. She quickly refocused on the bandit, making sure that her aim was still true. She did not want the Wolves of the Westfalian Woods to know she was a princess. They would assume that she was loaded with gold and jewels, and they would not let her go until they had searched every inch of the coach.
“The princesses taught me how to shoot, when I was at court,” Petunia said hastily. “Though I am only the daughter of a lowly earl.”
“Only a lowly earl’s daughter, is it?” the bandit snarled. “What a pity.”
Petunia refused to be fazed by the bandit’s sudden anger. He was no doubt hoping for better quarry, but that was hardly her fault. She inched the pistol forward until it was almost touching his nose.
“I can hardly miss from this distance,” she told him coldly. “Call off your men!”
The bandit had gray eyes, as gray as the dyed leather of his mask, which gave him a cold, wintry look. Petunia almost made a remark that wolves were supposed to have yellow eyes, but she didn’t think he would find it particularly amusing. It was more something Poppy would do, anyway. She concentrated instead on her hands, which were about to start shaking from the strain of holding the pistol still for so long.
Finally the bandit stepped back. “Come now, lads, it seems that this young lady is only the daughter of a lowly earl,” he called.
There were hoots of derision from the rest of the bandits.
“She can hardly have anything worth stealing, now can she?” their leader continued in his bitter, amused voice.
“Is she pretty?” asked one extremely large man, stepping into Petunia’s line of sight.
She promptly transferred her aim to him.
“Not bad,” countered the leader. “For an earl’s daughter.”
“Faugh!” There was the sound of spitting. “The only earl I’ve ever known was uglier than the backside of a donkey!”
The bandits seemed to find this the height of hilarity.
“Drive on, drive on,” Petunia chanted under her breath.“Why won’t you just drive on?”
None of the bandits that she could see were paying attention to their coach anymore. Was the coachman having the vapors? Maria appeared to be doing so, but Petunia couldn’t spare her much attention. Petunia released the hammer of her pistol and rapped on the roof of the coach with the butt, signaling for the driver to pick up the reins and move.
The coach moved. Not, however, in quite the way Petunia had in mind.
The noise of her pistol on the roof apparently scared the guard sitting on top of the coach, and he fired his rifle at one of the bandits. The bandit fired back, startling the horses. They bolted, dragging the coach behind them. There were shouts, and more shots fired, and the sudden lurching motion of the coach threw Maria off her seat and into Petunia’s lap. Petunia dropped her pistol, and her knitting basket fell to the floor, the contents spilling out and entangling her and Maria in red wool.
There was a scream from the roof of the coach, and then a thud on the road as the guard fell off. Maria, still on the floor of the coach, was now praying loudly.
Petunia tried to stick her head out of the window to see what had become of the guard, but she was thrown sideways, landing on top of Maria. The horses screamed, the coachman cursed, and they came to a halt with the coach tilted so far to the right that Petunia would have fallen out the window had it not been filled with earth and grass from a roadside bank, upon which they had apparently stuck fast.
She extracted herself from Maria, braced herself against the sloping seats, and tried to get the door open. She was short, but surely not too short to reach up and just—
“Allow me, Your Highness,” said the coachman, flinging open the door from the outside and making Petunia shriek in surprise. “Sorry,” he said, abashed.
“It’s all right,” she told him, when she had taken a deep breath.
She grabbed his forearm and allowed herself to be pulled up and out of the door, to sit on the upward side of the coach. The coachman stretched back through the door to pull out Maria, who stopped having hysterics long enough to clamber out with much groaning and panting.
From her vantage point, Petunia could see exactly what had happened: the road curved sharply to the left on its way through the forest. The panicked horses, going much too fast with a heavy coach behind them, had failed to make the turn and smashed into the high bank.
The other outrider was with the horses, soothing them. Petunia could see that one horse was severely injured, and another looked to be favoring a foreleg. She looked back up the road but couldn’t see any sign of the two-legged wolves or the injured man.
Petunia did not know what to do. She was not good with blood, preferring to spend her days gardening in the calm of her father’s hothouses. And as the youngest, she rarely had to make any decisions, her father having very strong ideas about what his daughters could and could not do, and her eleven sisters nosing in on anything that their father didn’t. The most drastic thing Petunia had done in recent memory was to have one of her oldest sister Rose’s old gowns remade into this cloak.
But now what to do? She was supposed to be at the Grand Duchess Volenskaya’s estate by nightfall, but the coach was broken, a man was hurt, and the horses were in no state to continue. Should she and Maria walk back to Bruch? Or should they wait for someone to find them? A shiver ran down her spine. The bandits had surely seen what had happened.
“Are there any estates close by?” she asked the coachman.
“None until we reach the grand duchess’s, Your Highness,” he said uneasily.
“What about an inn?”
“I’m afraid not, Your Highness.”
He, too, was scanning the forest for the bandits. He climbed down from the coach and went to confer with a guard who was removing the harness of one of the horses. The men talked in low voices for a moment, and then the coachman ran back along the road to the injured man.
“Should I go and help him?” Petunia called to the guard with the horses.
“No, no, Your Highness!” The man took an anxious step toward her. “You stay right where you are!”
Uneasy, Petunia clung to the side of the coach and looked inside for her pistol. It was there at the bottom among the tangle of her knitting basket. She felt an itching between her shoulder blades and knew the bandits were watching her from the trees.
“Allow me, Your Highness.”
One of the guards climbed inside and fetched the entire mess out, and Petunia distracted Maria from her fits by having the maid help her untangle the yarn and put everything neatly away, the pistol on top within easy reach.
“Now, just sit here and let the menfolk take care of matters,” Maria chided her.
Petunia tried. But sitting still, she was confronted with a more urgent question than whether to walk on or wait for help. She tried to ignore it, but by the time the coachman had helped the half-fainting guard back to the coach, she could no longer sit still.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, sliding down off the coach.
“Princess Petunia! Where are you going?” Maria squawked.
“Into the bushes,” Petunia said as casually as she could, while the coachman and the guards all opened their mouths to protest. “I’ll be right back, and I’m armed,” she assured them, tilting her basket to display the pistol resting atop her red wool, and then she climbed up the bank and into the underbrush before anyone could accompany her.
She did not need an audience to watch her relieve herself!
Kidnapper