Never After

“Why did you leave?” she asked Mickel.

“It’s never good to overstay,” he replied, sounding quiet and tired. “What feels like magic one night becomes something cheap the next, if you don’t take care to preserve the memory. Familiarity always steals the mystery.”

“Always?”

“Well,” he said, smiling. “I believe you could be the exception.”

Sally smiled, too, glad the night hid her warm face. “Who taught you all these things?”

“We learned on our own, in different places,” Rumble said, the bench creaking under him as he turned to look at her. “All of us a little strange, filled with a little too much wild in our blood. Got the wander-lust? Nothing to do but wander. Now, Mickel there, he comes from a long line of those types. Knows how to recognize them. He put us all together.”

“And how long have you been at this?”

Patric flashed white teeth in the dark. “How long have you? You were quite good tonight.”

“I read. I held children and beat a drum, and stood while you threw a knife at my face.”

“But you did it easily,” Mickel said. “You made people feel at ease. Which is not as simple as it sounds. I know what Patric means. You have it in you.”

“No,” she replied. “I was just being… me.”

“As were we.”

“Mostly,” Rumble added. “I don’t usually keep chickadees in my pants, I’ll have you know.”

“That,” Sally said, “was a remarkably disgusting trick.”

“It only gets better,” Patric replied dryly.

They set up camp near the road, beside a thick grove of trees that was not the Tangleroot, but nonetheless made her think of the ancient forest. It was somewhere close, but if she kept going north with these men, she would lose her chance, lose what precious time she had left.

Perhaps it was for nothing, anyway. Despite her strange dreams and the behavior of the raven (her head still ached, and she could not imagine her appearance), the longer she was away from the gardener and her words, the less faith she had in her chance of finding something, anything, that could help her in the Tangleroot. It might be a magical forest, filled with strange and unca

You think too much, she told herself. Sometimes you just have to feel.

But her feelings were not making anything easier, either.

Rumble and Patric rolled themselves into their blankets as soon as they stopped, and were snoring within minutes. Mickel stayed up to keep watch, and Sally sat beside him. No fire, just moonlight. He wrapped himself in one of the new cloaks the villagers had given them, and fingered the fine heavy cloth with a great deal of thoughtfulness.

“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 ru

“My own unfinished business,” she replied. “I have questions.”

“Most people, when they have questions, ask other people. They do not go ru

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 ru

“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, ru

“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.