Chapter Eleven

 

Genevieve

“Camping?!”

“Yes, camping. As in, sleeping outdoors in a field, preferably a forest, with absolutely nobody around and –”

“Julian, I know what camping is. I just haven’t experienced it before, given that I was locked in a tower for twelve years and –”

“And you’re a princess,” Julian finished for her. “Yes. I know.”

Evie frowned for nobody to see. Something was wrong with Julian. Well, something has been wrong for a while now, but this is different. Something happened to him when I was in the tailor’s shop.

She hurried along behind him, struggling to keep up with Julian’s long legs even as his grip tightened on her arm. The town was well behind them now; Evie had to wonder what he was so concerned about. Back at the marketplace she’d thought Julian was worried about the young men who kept stealing glances at her. It had reassured Evie to know that he was looking out for her, but it became quickly apparent this extended to more than keeping away amorous youths.

“Julian, please, slow down!” Evie insisted when they reached a tall, ancient oak tree. It signalled the beginning of a forest so large that she couldn’t see where it ended.

He turned, letting go of Evie’s arm in the process. Though his eyes were on hers it seemed altogether like Julian was looking through her, instead. She didn’t like it. It was only when he took the basket of food Evie had been precariously holding against her chest that he finally seemed to see her.

“Your dress is nice,” Julian mumbled before looking away.

The comment should have made Evie happy – had he complimented on the dark green, leaf-embroidered fabric outside the tailor’s shop then she’d have been ecstatic. As it were, Evie knew Julian was deflecting from telling her what was really going on. But the two of them had been doing that to each other from the very beginning, so she sighed and moved past Julian into the forest. He wordlessly followed.

“Was it expensive?” he asked after ten minutes. Evie almost laughed, then slid her hand into one of the pockets sewn into the dress and threw a number of coins at Julian without looking to see if he caught them. Going by the string of curses he bit out she could only assume each and every one of them fell to the forest floor.

“Not so expensive as to be worried,” she said, slowing her steps until Julian had finished picking up the coins. “The woman working in the shop loved my hair so much that she gave me a discount, I think. Is my hair meant to charm people, Julian? What did you weave into it?”

He glanced at her. “It shouldn’t charm people, per se. But it’s meant to disarm them, and make them trust you.”

“Why would you put that in my hair?”

“So that nobody bothers us with suspicious questions,” Julian answered simply. “The fact you got a well-fitting dress out of it is an unexpected benefit.”

This time Evie did blush at the mention of her new clothes. It was an adult dress, made for a woman instead of a child. It cinched in at her waist and accentuated her curves without squeezing or hurting her, and the wide skirt actually fell below her knees. It was cut low across her shoulders, exposing Evie’s collarbones and the hollow of her throat. It was still a far cry from the opulent dresses she remembered being popular in Willow back when she was a child, but it was a fine improvement upon what she’d been wearing before.

Evie spun on the spot before jumping onto a fallen tree trunk. She grinned at Julian. “It really is a nice dress. I forgot what proper clothes felt like.”

Julian was silent. Even an hour or two ago he’d have likely passed comment about how it wouldn’t surprise him if Evie had never known what being in proper clothes was like, simply to insult her. But now he had nothing to say.

Something is wrong, Evie thought, more sure than ever before. If I ask him what’s happened will he simply ignore me again?

And so the two of them weaved through the forest in silence for a while, Evie leading the way even though she didn’t know where she was going. Her hair continued to unravel as it had been doing since that morning until it was once more long enough to trip her up; by the time the braid became completely undone the sun had set over the trees, casting the pair of them in pre-emptive twilight.

“Julian, are we going in the – ouch!”

“Will you watch what you’re doing, you idiot?!” Julian exclaimed, dropping the basket of food in order to catch Evie before she fell to the forest floor. Her hair was entangled around a low-hanging branch, preventing Evie from walking any further until she was set free.

She stared at him dolefully. “I wasn’t the one who wanted to leave the road so urgently. Why haven’t you magicked my hair back into a braid, anyway?”

Evie thought Julian wasn’t going to reply as he delicately unwound her hair from the branch. It always unnerved her to see him use his hands for such small, everyday tasks when she knew how much power he could hold in them.

But there was no magic sizzling in them now. There was no magic around Julian at all.

“I can’t enchant your hair right now,” he admitted. “Not until we find another town where someone else’s magic can cover the trail of me doing it.”

Evie flinched when her hair snagged on a thorn-covered vine twisting along the branch. Julian pulled out a knife from somewhere within his voluminous cloak and cut the offending greenery to pieces before gently removing it from her hair.

“I didn’t know magic left a trail,” Evie said, voice quiet as if she were whispering a secret.

Julian nodded sagely, though he didn’t look at her. “All magic does. An experienced tracker can find a specific wizard or magician if they know what to look for.”

“And…someone is looking for you? Or…me?”

Eventually, with one final twist of his fingers, Julian set Evie’s hair free. He indicated for her to sit down on one of the tree’s massive, twisting roots, then knelt down behind her, pulled out a comb from his bag and got to work untangling her hair from the bottom-up.

“Julian, you really don’t have to do that,” Evie began, feeling her face grow hot even as the air slowly grew cooler around them. When night fell she imagined it would be cold this far inside the forest.

He chuckled humourlessly. “If I don’t want you to become a permanent fixture of the forest I’ll have to. Do you really want to entangle yourself on every branch, thorn and flower in this place?”

“No…”

“I could still cut it, you know.”

Evie gasped at the thought, outraged. “You know I won’t allow that!”

“Then tell me why.”

The request was so softly made Evie thought she had imagined it at first. Julian had asked her about her hair before, of course, but she’d resolutely kept silent on the matter. Part of her still wanted to keep her answer to herself, though not for her original reason. Yes, Evie’s memories of life in the palace were all the proof she had of who she was. For a girl with no material possessions who’d lived a solitary existence, they were more important than diamonds.

But Evie no longer lived in a lonely nightmare in the tower, and over the past three weeks she’d had more of a life travelling with Julian than she’d ever had before, even when she lived in the palace. Though she’d always treasure her childhood memories, they were no longer quite as precious as they once were.

“In the evening,” Evie began; her voice took on an almost sing-song quality to it. She recognised the shift in tone as belonging to her mother, and she smiled. “In the evening before I went to bed, whenever my mother was home in the palace, she would come to my chambers with a comb as golden as my father’s hair, and a brush so soft it would put a baby’s hair to shame. Well, that’s what mama said, anyway.”

“Whenever she was home?” Julian interjected politely. Evie could hear him working through knots and tangles in the lower half of her hair; she shivered pleasantly to think of how it would feel when he reached her scalp.

She tilted her head backwards to look at him. “She wasn’t home often. She was always travelling with my uncle.”

There was something about the way Julian’s eyes shone that made Evie think he was about to set the forest alight. But then she blinked and the glow disappeared, suggesting that all she’d seen was some last ray of sun flashing within his blue irises.

When Julian put his hands on either side of Evie’s head to tilt it back to its original position she didn’t protest. His fingers brushed against her neck. She resisted the urge to move closer to them – to feel them dig into her skin instead of merely whispering across it.

“So your mother would comb your hair, and you treasure the memory, and that’s why you don’t wish to cut it?” Julian asked, so matter-of-factly that Evie scowled, all previous unruly thoughts about the man vanished from her mind.

“Well when you put it like that it sounds stupid,” she complained. “But I was eight, and I never got to see her much, and she would be so gentle and sing songs to me and tell me how beautiful my hair was.”

“When you put it like that it still sounds stupid,” Julian remarked, sliding the comb through the roots of Evie’s hair until it no longer snagged even once. He worked his fingers through it, separating her hair into three sections before beginning to braid it. “Though I understand, I guess.”

Evie hesitated before asking a question that had been on her mind for days. She twisted her hands in her lap, wondering if Julian would avoid answering her as he had with everything else so far.

“What is it you wish to ask me?” he murmured, so close to Evie’s ear that she let out a cry of surprise. He snickered. “If it’s about my childhood I’ll do my best to answer you, since you’ve told me about your hair.”

Fighting against the throbbing of her heart, Evie asked, “Where are your parents? Were you close with them?”

“Both dead.” A pause. “I was closer with my mother than I was my father, but then she died when I was fifteen. Her death brought me and my father closer together than we had been before.”

“When did your father die?”

“About twelve years ago,” Julian replied. His fingertips grew a little rougher against Evie’s scalp as he answered her, but then they slackened once more when he reached her neck.

“How old were you?”

“Eighteen.”

“Ahh.”

Evie could feel Julian frowning even though she couldn’t see him. “What is ‘ahh’’ supposed to mean?” he asked, making quick work of the rest of her hair as he braided it down her back.

“I’ve been wondering about your age for a while now, since you act like such an old man.”

He clucked his tongue. “I’m ten years older than you, you brat.”

“Not old enough to act like my father.”

“When have I ever acted like your father?!”

Evie turned her head; Julian had finished braiding her hair and was beginning to coil it around his hand like a rope. She couldn’t help but laugh, seeing him kneeling amongst pine needles and leaves and dirt with an affronted expression upon his face.

“You scold me all the time,” she said, “and tell me what to do. And warn me not to misbehave, and –”

“That’s because you’d die half a dozen times every day if I didn’t,” he complained, finishing winding up Evie’s hair before flinging it over her shoulder and watching the braid fall into her lap. “I wouldn’t say that’s me acting like your father. I think you’ve just spent far too long away from people that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be looked after.”

“Sometimes I think the same thing about you,” Evie mumbled, looking away from Julian as she stood up. Her braid was still long enough to trail on the ground, but she could easily hold it up from the forest floor in her hand. “Thank you for fixing my hair.”

“It’s just as much for my benefit as it is for yours,” he said, ignoring Evie’s first comment. He stood up, brushing leaves from his cloak before making his way further into the forest. Evie picked up the long-forgotten basket of food from the ground, replacing a few apples that had rolled out of it.

He said that the first time he fixed my hair, Evie thought as she wordlessly followed Julian beneath the murky boughs of the trees. Yet if he truly only wanted to keep it out of the way he would never have spent so much time and magic on it.

The two wound their way deeper and deeper into the forest until Evie was stumbling over unseen roots rather than her hair. She was cold, and tired, and her feet hurt, and her eyes could scarcely make out anything in front of her. But just as she was about to complain Julian stopped in front of her.

“We’ll camp here for the night,” he said. “I can hear a stream close by. Can you go and fill up our water skins?”

Numbly Evie did as she was told. All she could think about was warming up by a fire and falling asleep. But when she returned from the stream it didn’t seem as if Julian was preparing a fire at all.

“We can’t risk the smoke,” was all he said, answering the question on Evie’s face without telling her anything about who he didn’t want to see said smoke. She grimaced.

Tonight was going to be a long, cold night.