Ihadsixteenmensaddled and armored in the stable yard. Bram was stamping beneath me, catching my mood the way warhorses do—pulling at the bit, nostrils flared, ready for a fight that did not exist because the enemy was not an enemy but a boy who had walked out of the Queen’s sitting room and vanished.
It had been three hours since I had stood in that room like a fool with the word “marry” ringing in my skull and done nothing. Said nothing. Let him walk away from me because my mouth had stopped working at the precise moment it mattered most.
I had checked all of his usual wandering spots; our rooms, the kitchens, the guards’ quarters, the tailor’s workshop. I had sent men to the gates. No one had seen him leave. No one had seen him at all. But Periwinkle was missing, and Thom was nowhere to be found.
He is small and he does not know this city and he was upset and he could be anywhere. He could be in danger, and it’s my fault.
“Commander,” Thyren said, pulling up beside me. “The gate watch confirms no one matching his description has left the palace grounds.”
“Could he have slipped out?” I tightened my grip on the reins. “Spread the search to the outer grounds. Every building, every garden, every—”
“Commander.”
That was not Thyren. That was Voss, and his voice had gone strange—tight with something I could not identify. I followed his gaze to the far end of the stable yard, where the path curved around from the palace gardens, and there was Pip.
He was walking. Not running, not injured, not in distress. Walking, at a pleasant amble, along the gravel path in his ridiculous shorts and his brightly colored shoes, leading Periwinkle by the reins as though the horse were a dog on a leash. Periwinkle was ambling too, his head bobbing contentedly, his tail swishing.
There was a flower crown on Pip’s head.
It was made of dahlias. The Queen’s dahlias. The pale blue and soft pink dahlias from the royal hedge maze—the ones for which, not six months ago, the Queen had threatened a gardener’sapprentice with execution for cutting a single stem without permission.
Periwinkle was also wearing a flower crown. It was looped around one ear, slightly crushed, made of the same dahlias. The horse looked as pleased about it as a gelding could look about anything.
Pip had a third crown in his hand. This one was larger, more elaborate, with trailing vines.
He looked up at the full company of the Grey Guard assembled in battle formation in the stable yard, and stopped.
“Oh,” he said. “Um. I think there may have been a misunderstanding?”
The relief hit me like a physical force—a wave of it, so sudden and so violent that for a moment my vision blurred and my hands shook on the reins and I could not breathe. He was alive. He was here. He was standing ten yards from me wearing a crown of stolen flowers and looking mildly confused about why there were soldiers everywhere.
Then the anger arrived.
I dismounted Bram, swinging down so fast that my boots hit the cobblestones hard and I crossed the yard in strides that felt too slow, each one a small eternity, and Pip’s eyes went wide as I reached him.
I boxed him in against the stable wall, an arm on either side of him. His breath caught and his ridiculous flower crown slipped sideways over one eye.
“Ow,” he said. He blinked up at me through a curtain of dahlia petals. “Why is the Grey Guard assembled? That wouldn’t be… to do with me, would it?”
I stared at him.
“Why is the—” My voice was a wrecked thing. I barely recognized it. “Because you vanished. You walked out of the Queen’s chambers and disappeared and no one could find you and I thought—”
I could not finish the sentence. The iron rings vibrated, pulsing, reacting to the panic still flooding my body even as the cause of it was right here, pinned against the wall, blinking at me with those impossible blue eyes.
“I thought you were lost,” I said. “Or hurt. Alone somewhere in a city you do not know. I was ready to send half the palace searching for you. I had riders at the gates. I was going to ride through every street in Feravael until I found you because I cannot—” My jaw locked. “I cannot have my resonant injured and cold and alone.”
Pip put a finger on my lips.
Just that. One small, warm finger, pressed gently against my mouth, and every word I had been about to say evaporated.
“Shh,” he said. “Be quiet for a moment.”
Behind me, I heard Voss inhale sharply. Then Thyren. Then what sounded like the collective intake of breath from sixteen armored soldiers who had just witnessed a five-foot-six human shush the Commander of the Grey Guard.
“I said—”
“Aeldryc.” Pip pressed the finger more firmly against my lips. His eyes were bright and steady and fixed on mine with an intensity I had not seen before. “I said be quiet. I have something to say.”
