CHAPTER 18

I don’t know if I asked the next question to absolve some of the guilt I was feeling, or to punish myself. It had fully sunk in how much of a bastard I had been, disappearing in a fit of pique the way I did. One of the last things I had said to Lucille—other than a grunt or a monosyllable—was that she was an ungrateful bitch.

“How is Lucille? Is she all right?”

Sir Forsythe shook his head. “The Dragon Prince is angry.”

Of course she was. “I guess I can’t blame her.”

“The whole of the Lendowyn court, your husband especially, are convinced that your disappearance was at the hands of agents of Grünwald and King Dudley. That was why I was sent, My Liege. I was to gather proof of this, and retrieve you if I could.”

Given my past interactions with Grünwald and the Grünwald court, that had been a pretty logical conclusion. Wrong, but logical. “Mission accomplished, I guess.”

“You sound troubled.”

“Where’s Prince Bartholomew? He woke up in the princess’s skin and he just left?”

“You disappeared, My Liege.”

I nodded. Talking with him further, it seemed that Princess Snake had vanished the morning I’d made the bad decision to wear the Dark Lord’s wedding gift. He would have had to make a run for it almost immediately. I couldn’t quite reconcile that with what I had found out about this guy. I couldn’t see him not taking advantage of the position he found himself in.

But he had disappeared, and I thought about what Sir Forsythe had said. “The Dragon Prince is angry.”

The burned Grünwald village was even more disturbing now. Lucille hadn’t waited for Sir Forsythe to return with evidence before attacking. Perhaps she took his capture to be that confirmation. Had she destroyed that town in retaliation for something that never happened? My heart sank.

What had I done to her?

We had to get me back to the Lendowyn court before this escalated any further.

 • • • 

I led Sir Forsythe in out of the cold. Inside the temple, the girls had sat down in a circle and turned their heads to face us as if they were in the middle of some sort of debate. It was still disconcerting to see them dressed as acolytes of the goddess of beauty and love. Now that I was less distracted by the aftereffects of contact with the Goddess, I noticed Lysea had gone beyond clothes and hairstyling. Most of them had elaborate makeup applied, including painted lips and nails. All except Krys.

I also noticed that Krys’s clothing was different than everyone else’s; her tunic had longer sleeves and a looser cut with a round neck hole rather than a vee. Also, while the other girls had jeweled accessories, necklaces, and bracelets, Krys had a pair of solid bracers on her wrists covered in elaborate knotwork.

In other words, she looked like the boy counterpart to the acolyte dress of the other girls. She also appeared more at home in her ensemble than the others did in theirs.

The fact that most of them still had salvaged swords and other weapons made the scene all the more surreal.

“He’s still here,” Grace said, looking at Sir Forsythe.

“So am I,” I said. “What did we interrupt?”

Mary glared at me. “You lied to us.”

I glanced at Laya. “To be fair, you were holding a crossbow on me.”

“You dragged us miles away from—” Mary rose to her feet.

“Mary,” Grace said.

“—and nearly get us killed by these Grünwald—”

“Mary!” Grace snapped again, grabbing Mary’s arm.

Mary stopped and sat back down.

“She’s still right,” Laya whispered.

Grace stood up. “We’re not holding a crossbow on you now. Does that mean we part ways now?”

Sir Forsythe stepped forward and said, “We will never abandon a distressed maiden to her fate. You need not worry, I will—”

I held up an arm to hold him back. “Quiet,” I told him. “Let the maiden tell you if she needs rescuing.”

“My Liege?”

I asked Grace, “Do you want to part ways now?”

“There is no treasure in Lendowyn, is there?”

I shook my head. “There’s barely a treasury.” I patted Sir Forsythe’s chest and dropped my arm. “The crown pays this guy with food, board, and the opportunity for extreme acts of self-sacrifice.”

“I do not serve for crass material gain,” Sir Forsythe said.

“Point made,” I said.

“Then why bring us at all?” Krys said. “After you slipped into that assassins’ camp, you didn’t have to stop for us. You could have ridden the carriage on your own through Grünwald. Why bring us?”

“I didn’t want to abandon you.”

“What?” Grace sounded insulted.

I hooked a thumb at Sir Forsythe. “This guy is a bad influence.”

“You thought we needed saving?”

“I didn’t know what I thought. I was improvising. Sometimes it works out—”

Grace glared at me. “Sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t,” I agreed.

“We didn’t need no saving until we got involved with you,” Mary snapped.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I messed up. Happens a lot lately.”

Six pairs of eyes stared at me and I felt more uncomfortable in my skin than I had since before I’d ever come to Lendowyn. I wanted to shout that this wasn’t me.

Maybe that was why I clung to Snake’s identity with them long after I had decided the guy was reprehensible, trying to disown my stupid decisions by being someone else.

“So in Lendowyn,” Grace asked, “do they round up people for sacrificial offerings?”

“Uh, no.”

“And there’s less of Grünwald between us and Lendowyn than there is between us and anywhere else?”

“Yes.”

Grace nodded. “Fine.”

“Fine, what?”

“If you want to make things up to us, lead us across the border to Lendowyn. We can ply our trade anywhere, but I’d prefer somewhere that doesn’t have a history of human sacrifice.”

“But I want to go home,” Thea said.

I saw Mary roll her eyes. “The farther from White Rock, the better.”

“But—” Thea started to blubber. Krys reached out and pulled Thea to her. She rocked back and forth with her, whispering, “Shush, your home’s with us.”

“If that’s what you want,” I said.

“My Liege?”

“What?”

“May I make a suggestion?”

“Still trying to rescue us?” Laya asked.

I sighed and shook my head. I doubted Sir Forsythe could make things worse. “Go ahead,” I told him.

“You have the right to declare your own retainers.”

“What do . . .” I trailed off.

“I’m sorry,” Grace said. “What is he talking about?”

“He means that I should offer you all an opportunity for something other than an outlaw life in the woods living off of what you can steal.”

“And if that’s what we want?”

I shrugged. “Then that’s what you want. Unlike Sir Forsythe, I’m not into non-consensual rescue. But he’s right. I’m the new face at the court, and most of the people around me have other loyalties. The more people I hand pick, the better.”

“So,” Mary said, “servants?”

“Handmaids that can do some serious damage if needed,” I said.

Sir Forsythe bowed and addressed them all: “My Ladies, just over the border I left a camp of the princess’s most loyal followers. They only wait for me to return with her, or news of her. You can join the court immediately.”

Grace shook her head with a half-smile. “And you’d pay us as much as this guy?”

“At least as well,” I agreed.

“You’re not thinking—” Mary began, but Grace held up a hand.

“What about martial training?” Grace said.

“I’m sure Sir Forsythe here could teach you a thing or two.”

Grace said to the others, “Let’s think about it.”

“Uh huh,” Mary said. “There’s one problem here.”

Only one?

“What?” I asked.

“You’re not a princess right now.”

There was that.

 • • • 

Sir Forsythe had overlooked the main flaw in his idea, that the same Lendowyn laws that had made me the princess in the first place meant that, by law, Snake was the actual princess of Lendowyn right now. And he’d remain the princess until someone else inhabited Lucille’s body.

“Damn,” I said, “it seemed such an elegant solution too.”

Sir Forsythe rubbed his chin, smoothing his goatee. “I only know the basic lore, but the effects of the Tear are supposed to be temporary.”

“Tear?” I repeated.

“The Tear of Nâtlac,” he responded.

“What, in the name of all that’s unholy, is the Tear of Nâtlac?”

“That is the jewel the Dark Lord gave you, My Liege. Didn’t you know?”

Apparently I had missed some orientation when I fell into the role of nominal priestess of Nâtlac.

According to Sir Forsythe, every time the Dark Lord gives up possession of a soul, he sheds a single crystal tear. Of course, the crystal has some magical properties having to do with soul-swapping. Anyone who puts on the jewel will have their soul exchanged with someone whom the Tear deems compatible, a body where the soul is most comfortable.

“So he takes it off, we swap back, right?”

“No,” Sir Forsythe said. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Of course not. “How does it work, then? You said it was supposed to be temporary.”

Well, it was temporary, he told me. The traditional length of the enchantment was a year and a day.

I may have said something unkind.

“Is there any other way to reverse the effect?”

“The stories say that the death of the physical body will reverse the process.”

“The death of—”

Mary stood and placed a hand on the hilt of her salvaged sword. “Want my help?”

“No!”

A year and a day. I cursed my own stupidity, especially now that I knew one of my own retainers had all this information about the thing. “What if . . . What if he’s taken it off, and one of us puts it back on again?”

“That is not part of the lore. But I suspect that if Prince Bartholomew would re-don the jewel, his soul would be drawn back to his original body—but if you wore it? I don’t even think the Dark Lord Himself could predict where you might find yourself.”

Great. We just had to find Snake, and the jewel, and force him to put it on again. Simple . . .

Something was wrong.

Snake was a member of the Grünwald court, an exiled bastard member, but still, a member. That group was steeped in the lore of Nâtlac. King Dudley certainly assumed that his bastard half-brother knew enough of their evil little rituals to have planned a coup around sacrificing a bunch of teenage girls rather than, say, raising an army.

All that meant that, unlike me, Snake was probably quite aware of what happened as soon as he woke up in the wrong body. He’d only had to look at the necklace for confirmation.

So if that was the case, why would he run off? He’d know that by removing and replacing the necklace he’d return to his own body. If Sir Forsythe was right, slitting the princess’s throat would do the same thing.

Probably, since I swapped him out while Weasel’s goons were roughing him up, he hesitated returning right after it happened. But he’d know that his body was still around as long as he stayed put . . .

But still, he could have taken some sort of advantage from being the princess. Why did he disappear?

I was obviously missing something.