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“Princess?” Niko tightened his grip on my hand. “Are you okay?”
“You don’t smell that?” I asked, barely wanting to breathe. “It’s—” I cleared my throat and then swallowed hard to keep my gorge from rising. “It’s awful.”
Niko gave Ozias a worried look.
“I smell nothing but ash,” Ozias replied carefully.
Every bit of his alarm carried through my connection to him, and it sent chills through me.
How could I smell something he couldn’t, especially something this awful? The smell was everywhere. It clung to my skin, my nostrils, even my eyes like a layer of sour grime I couldn’t place and couldn’t shake. I swore it was familiar somehow, but so suffocating I couldn’t hope to?—
Apples.
My chills grew stronger. That was it. The sour, sickly sweet smell of rotting apples, so strong I was gagging on it. But we were standing on a grassy plain without an apple tree in sight. How…?
Memories rose up as if in answer, but they only made it worse. I’d always loved apples. They were even part of the crest of the Queen of Aneira, a symbol that predated my stepmother, my mother, and countless others besides, all the way back to the creation of my country. I was certain that was why I’d chosen them as my word with Casimir and then Ozias.
But once, an apple had more or less killed me. Something about this smell—this stench—brought back the memory of that day like it was a foul creature rising from the grave.
My stepmother had been behind that magic too.
“Enough of this.” Ozias suddenly gripped my arm, moving us faster across the last stretch of scorched earth and then continuing into the field beyond, scanning it all like he didn’t trust a single blade of grass.
The stench faded as we put distance between us and the burned land.
“You all okay?” Clay called to us.
Niko gave me a worried look. “Are you?”
I made myself nod. “It’s gone now.” I braced myself as the others crossed the swath of land. “You all really didn’t smell anything?”
Heads shook. Even Casimir looked perturbed.
I glanced up at Ozias in silent repetition of the question. His head gave a tiny shake.
“What was it, princess?” Niko asked.
“Like rotting apples. Thousands of them.”
The concerned looks deepened.
“Maybe it’s a reaction to the burned ground,” Lars offered after a moment, as if trying to find an answer better than one where I was losing my mind. “Like the way some people detect a flavor they dislike in a dish while others don’t pick up on anything displeasing at all.”
“Yeah,” Niko added. “That makes sense. Maybe it was just something in the grass or the dirt that you have a sensitivity too. That happens.”
“Or it’s a reaction to the magic that took down the wall,” Byron countered in a much more somber tone, not meeting my eyes. “It was your stepmother’s power that made it, after all. And that turned you.”
If I’d been on edge before, that had nothing compared to now.
“So what, you’re saying it’s messing with the princess’s head?” Clay replied incredulously. “And you all claim I’m the one with no tact.”
“That was you having no tact,” Lars pointed out to him.
Clay gave him a dryly exasperated look, though it turned embarrassed when he glanced back at me.
“Whatever it was,” Dex interrupted before anyone could continue. “It’s gone now, yes?”
I nodded.
