Prince Grigori cupped his hands to help Petunia mount. She felt like she was preparing to be tossed over the moon as she put her knee into his hands. He lifted her into the saddle with a smile, and she scrabbled to adjust her cloak and get the reins in the right position. The horse shifted beneath her, and she broke out in a cold sweat. Her leather riding gloves felt thick and awkward, and she couldn’t remember how to hold her hands, suddenly. Olga was probably watching her through a window, sick with jealousy, and at that moment Petunia wished she could trade places with the maid.
“Isn’t she magnificent?”
Prince Grigori’s face was alight with plea sure. Petunia wondered if he wanted her to fall to her death. Before she could say anything, however, Violet’s husband, Frederick, started asking the prince questions about his horses’ bloodlines. Petunia just sat there like a lump with the reins wrapped around her hands, worrying about whether she would even make it through the front gates without falling.
“Here, you,” Poppy said, drawing up alongside her. Her horse was smaller, but that just meant that Poppy and Petunia were now the same height. She took the reins from Petunia, untangled them, and showed her how to hold them correctly. Fortunately, Prince Grigori was busy assigning horses to the others. Petunia refused to let him see how frightened she was. And not just of the horse.
“This seems like a terrible idea,” Petunia said to Poppy in an undertone.
“Yes,” Poppy said cheerfully. “That’s why we’re going to do it. He’s clearly up to something, and the only way to find out what is to go along.”
“And what if he … attacks … us?”
“Have you got your pistol?” Poppy looked scandalized at the very idea that Petunia might have left her bedroom unarmed.
“Of course I do,” Petunia said, off ended.
“Well then!” Poppy grinned. “We outnumber him and his little band of hunters, who can’t be very impressive since Oliver and his men have kept right on thieving under their very noses.”
Petunia looked around and realized that Poppy was right. Prince Grigori’s hunters were a sullen-looking group of no more than six men. They were on very large horses, and armed, but as Poppy said, they had tried and failed for months to bring in a single one of Oliver’s men.
And what were they going to do? Try to abduct the sisters on behalf of the King Under Stone? Did they even have a gate to the Kingdom Under Stone?
Petunia shook her head at her own fears and tried to concentrate on not falling off her horse instead. They left the estate and went into the forest, and Petunia discovered that if her horse kept moving it wasn’t half so alarming. It helped that it was a beautiful day, with the sun shining brightly through the bare tree branches, and those birds that had not fled for warmer climes calling out to each other.
They ambled down a trail that led east, away from the Analousian border and deeper into the Westfalian Woods, which Petunia found reassuring. But as they rode, Petunia’s relief at staying on Westfalian soil began to be replaced by a growing uneasiness. She knew that she had never been in this part of the forest before, yet it began to look increasingly familiar. She knew that there would be a small stream just ahead, and an elm that had been split apart by lightning, both halves of its divided trunk still reaching toward the sun.
Inside her gloves, Petunia’s hands grew slick with sweat. The pins that held her hat in place stabbed into her head, and she reached up with one hand and pulled them out, jabbing them inelegantly into the crown before removing it entirely. Violet was looking at her with concern, so Petunia didn’t discard the hat but set it in her lap, taking up the reins with both hands again. The horse’s ears flickered, as though sensing her uneasiness, and she prayed that it wouldn’t take the opportunity to throw her off.
When they passed a rock fringed with moss in a way that made it look a balding man, Petunia knew how she knew this part of the forest. It was the forest she had seen in her dream the night before. There were no roses, of course, and she was with Prince Grigori and not Oliver, but this was without a doubt the place she had seen.
Violet drew her horse alongside Petunia’s.
“Are you all right, Pet? You’re very pale.”
“I will be fine,” Petunia said, taking pains to keep her voice even. “I am just worried that this horse is very tall and I … there are yellow roses! There really are!”
Her horse jogged sideways as she shouted this, and Petunia sawed at the reins to make it stop. It bumped into Violet’s horse, which threw up its head in protest. Everyone halted as Petunia leaped from her own mount, even though it was still dancing around ner vous ly. She narrowly avoided being stepped on, first by her horse and then by Rose’s, as she bounded across the trail and off into the forest.
“Petunia! Where are you going?” Rose called after her. Petunia could hear their horses crunching through the dead leaves after her, but she didn’t look back.
Just there, just ahead, where she had dreamed that Oliver put roses in her hair, was an enormous rosebush. Despite the season, its leaves were a healthy dark green tinged with red, and it was covered with fat yellow blooms. They were precisely the glowing primrose yellow that Petunia and her father had been looking for.
“Petunia!” Galen’s voice was sharp. “Don’t touch those roses!”
But Prince Grigori just laughed. His enormous horse was between her and her sisters, and he leaned down and offered her a small dagger. “Take all you like, princess. It seems that they were meant for you.”
“Thank you,” Petunia said, taking the dagger without even looking at him.
She was studying the bush to find the best place to make a cutting. It was a pity that the bush was too big to transport whole. She wondered if they could come back later with better tools, to prune and uproot it. For now, though, a few slips would be sufficient.
She heard Galen’s voice again as she separated out a thick stem crowned with blooms and began to slice through it.
“Petunia, stop,” Galen said. “Roses don’t bloom in winter; they can’t be natural.”
Petunia heard harnesses jingling as several of the others dismounted to come after her.
“Who cares?” she called out. “Father will be ecstat—”
Just as she heard Lily and Heinrich shouting almost in unison for her to wait, the ground opened up beneath her feet. The thorns of the stem she was holding went right through her leather glove and into the palm of her hand, but she just gripped it tighter.
A heartbeat later, she landed with a thump on all fours on black soil that glittered faintly. She looked up through the silver branches that swayed over her head, but all was darkness above them, with no sign of the hole she had fallen through. She stood and shook the glittering dirt from her cloak and gown, leaning against one of the silver trees for a moment to get her bearings.
After a time, when no one else arrived, she made her way to the shore of the black lake. Across the lake, the jagged black spires of the Palace Under Stone cut the murky air, as familiar as her own home.
Kestilan was waiting on the shore with a single silver boat.
“Hello, beloved,” he purred. “Welcome home.”
Petunia didn’t reply. What was there for her to say? Still holding the yellow roses in one hand and Grigori’s dagger in the other, she stepped into the boat.
Tested
Oliver was nervous about knocking on the door of Bishop Schelker’s modest home next to the palace. But he should have reckoned that the bishop, having been so long the advisor and confidante of the royal family, would have seen stranger sights than a wanted fugitive appearing out of thin air on his doorstep one morning.