The man I’m in love with.
Well. There it was. Out loud and everything, even if the only witness was a horse.
We’d wandered to the far end of the gardens, where the geometric hedges gave way to something grander. It was a hedge maze. The kind of hedge maze you’d see at an English country estate in a period film. The hedges were twice my height, dense and dark green, with tiny white flowers studded through the leaves like stars.
“What do you think?” I asked Periwinkle. “Shall we?”
Periwinkle walked into the hedge maze without waiting for me to decide, which I took as a yes.
It was peaceful in the maze. The high walls blocked the wind and muffled the sounds of the palace, so all I could hear was Periwinkle’s hooves on the gravel path and birdsong from somewhere above us. Dappled sunlight filtered through the occasional gap in the hedges. I kept one hand on Periwinkle’s neck and let him choose the turns, because he had a better sense of direction than I did, and at this point I’d accepted that the horse was the more competent member of our partnership.
There were flowers growing along the base of the hedges—small, delicate things in soft blues and pale pinks, the kind that looked like they’d been scattered there by a fairy tale. I picked one, then another, then a handful.
I started twisting stems together. It was fiddly work, and most of my early attempts looked more like a floral crime scene than a crown, but the repetitive motion was soothing. Periwinkle stood beside me, occasionally lowering his head to inspect myprogress, and at one point he ate a blue flower right out of my hand, which I chose not to take personally.
The actual, real problem, underneath all the panic, was that I wanted it.
I wanted to marry him. That was the horrifying truth of it. The Queen had said those words and my first thought, before the fear, before the spiraling, had been a bright, burning
yes.
And that was terrifying, because I was Pip from San Jose who danced in a cage at Club Vortex and whose greatest achievement prior to interdimensional travel was once getting a five-star review on Google for my customer service. I was not someone who married fae commanders. I was not someone who stayed in magical kingdoms. I was the kind of person things happened to, briefly, before the universe corrected its mistake and put everything back to normal.
Aeldryc would figure that out eventually. Maybe the Queen’s order had simply made him figure it out faster.
I twisted another flower into the crown. It was actually coming together nicely, if I did say so. Pale blue and soft pink, with a few of the tiny white hedge-flowers woven through. Coachella would have been proud.
Periwinkle, who had been grazing on a patch of something at the edge of the path, lifted his tail and deposited a generous pile of manure on the pristine gravel.
“Oh, man,” I said, staring at it. “That’s—that’s the Queen’s hedge maze.”
Periwinkle’s serene indifference was that of an animal who did not understand property rights and would not have cared about them if he did.
I glanced around. No one was here. No one had been here. The manure steamed gently in the afternoon light.
“We’ll just leave that,” I decided. “Someone probably handles that. There’s probably a whole team. Royal manure team.”
Periwinkle went back to grazing, completely unbothered, and I went back to my flower crown, and for a few minutes, everything was almost okay. The sun was warm and the birds were singing. My horse had pooped on the Queen’s garden, which was potentially treasonous, but the crown was coming along beautifully and I was choosing to focus on that.
I should go back,I thought.I should go back and find Aeldryc and say—what? What would I even say?
Hey, so, your queen ordered us to get married and you looked like you’d been hit by a bus. I just wanted to check in on that.
Hi, I know I fled like my ass was on fire, but I’m actually in love with you. Surprise!
Hello, I’ve been walking my horse around the garden like a dog for the last hour because I can’t ride him and I also can’t have a conversation about my feelings like a functional adult.
All excellent options. Very mature.
The silver at my throat pulsed, and I reached up to touch it. It was warm. It was always warm, but right now it was almost hot, like it was trying to tell me something. Or like Aeldryc was trying to tell me something through it. Could he do that? Feel me through the metal? He’d said the resonance connected us, that the silver sang because of what we were to each other, but he’d been annoyingly vague about the specifics, the way he was annoyingly vague about most things that mattered.
I finished the flower crown and put it on my head. It sat there nicely. The blue flowers brought out my eyes. Probably. I didn’t have a mirror, but I chose to believe it.
I made one for Periwinkle, too. His was bigger, obviously, and I looped it around one of his ears because his head was too wide for it to sit properly. He didn’t seem to mind and looked quite fetching, if you asked me.
“Right,” I said, standing up from the bench and brushing petals off my shorts. “Here’s the plan. We go back. I find Aeldryc. I tell him—”
I faltered.
