Enchanted (25 page)

“Erik, would you please have a servant fetch us some refreshment?”

“Of course, Highness.” Erik bowed, which Sunday expected, and then he pointedly glared at the prince, which she did not.

Rumbold cleared his throat. Sunday wondered if she should fetch the water herself. The two men exchanged something understood but unsaid, and with a curt nod, Erik left them.

“I have to tell you,” he said as soon as they were alone. “I...” He pulled at his sash again. “I hated letting you go last night. The party wasn’t the same without you.”

“I missed you, too.” The truth hurt just as badly when spoken aloud. She’d hoped all the dancing would make a conversation with the prince less awkward. She needed to tell Rumbold about Papa’s discontent and his expectations, which meant presuming on a relationship between them she wasn’t even sure existed. It was time to find out. “Your Highness—”

“My friends call me Rumbold. Sunday,” he asked softly, “will you be my friend?”

Sunday could not address him so familiarly. Not yet. But his request gave her hope. “Your Highness, we can’t be anything. This pretense can’t go on any longer. Surely you know who I am, what my family is.”

“The past is past,” he said. “Can’t we put it behind us?”

How could he shrug off her brother’s death so lightly? Jack Junior’s fate had ruined her family. Rumbold had led a princely life, spoiled and pampered and locked away in his ivory tower, and Sunday could see that he was blissfully unaware of the exact situation. It was her duty to set him straight.

She held a hand to his mouth. “Please, let me finish.” He began to kiss her fingers. She must be dreaming. Someone in the crowd had handed her a poisoned goblet of wine and she was having visions. That would explain the wedding dress, the ghost of Wednesday, and what the prince was now doing with his lips to the pad of her thumb. “I am a Woodcutter,” she said, determined to make him understand. “Sunday Woodcutter.”

“‘...and you are doomed to a happy life,’ ” he finished. “I already know that part.”

Sunday froze. All the familiar words hit her in the gut at once. His asking her to be his friend. The first words that she had spoken to a frog all those very long, very hard days ago. The world spun around her and clicked—slammed—horribly into focus.

Grumble.

Rumbold.

The prince hadn’t been sick or off on holiday. He’d been enchanted. That last kiss she had given the frog, the one filled with all her friendship and gratitude and ... love,
that
had finally broken his spell. Grumble hadn’t died in the thunderstorm. Or, rather, he had, and had been reborn into the man who stood before her. The trading of the golden bauble for royal tokens, the prince picking her out of the crowd only seconds after her arrival. How worried she had been, how torn, how miserable! She had tormented herself with first Grumbles absence and then Rumbold’s presence. She had wondered if her feelings were unrequited. Only he’d been in love with her the whole time—and toying with her like a puppet on a string.

Prince Rumbold’s eyes twinkled, and he kissed her fingers again. How much fun he must be having at her expense. How he and his friends must laugh at her. Her stomach roiled. Oh, she was such a fool.

A dog’s faraway howl at the moonlight snapped her out of her shock, reminding her exactly how much royalty had already taken from her family. Jack Junior. Monday. Wednesday. He would not have her as well.

“I love you, Sunday,” he confessed.

Wrenching her hand away, she turned and fled.

This time the hellion horde worked in her favor: the women of Arilland were all too eager to see her leave the festivities and all too happy to mob the prince in the ballroom and slow his pursuit. Sunday heard her sisters’ voices calling after her, but she did not stop for them. She did not stop for anyone until she met Trix on the carriageway. He sat on the steps there, waiting for her.

“Come,” he said. “I will run with you.”

She didn’t stop to tell him it was no use, that the prince would saddle his horse and overtake them, that his hunting hounds would nip at their heels until he arrived. They ran, her snow-white birds flying the path before them. They ran through the fields and the scrub woods, on and on, until her breath was knives in her throat and the baying and the hoofbeats were almost upon them. They stopped beside a small pond.

“We must keep going,” Sunday said to Trix.

“You cannot run anymore.” And he could?

“They will catch us,” she said.

“Then we will hide,” said Trix.

“How?”

“You have to believe,” he told her. “Just like when you write or Mama speaks. Just like when the wool turned to gold and when the beans grew. Tell yourself the story, Sunday. Weave the words in your mind. If you believe we can hide, we will be hidden.”

Sunday grabbed her brother’s hands, closed her eyes, and believed with all her might. She believed so hard that when the prince slowed his horse by the pond, she believed he did not see a woman in a gold and silver dress and her wild brother, only a tree with gold and silver rosebuds on it and a rock at its foot. She believed that he sat on the rock and buried his head in his hands, and that when his shoulders shook, he was not laughing. She believed that he stood up, plucked a rose from the tree where two snow-white birds cooed lazily, and rode off back toward the palace. And when he was gone, she believed that Trix stood up and cracked his sore back, and that she ran beside him, half barefoot, all the way home and into her aunt’s waiting arms.

I
T WAS VELIUS
who found him first, stumbling along the riverbed, trying to lead his horse home. Erik might have been the first to see him leave and the first to respond to the alarm, but it was Velius who talked to horses. His fey cousin had crossed the county like a rumor.

“Rumbold! Rumbold, can you hear me?” Velius’s face was right there. Violet eyes bored into the prince, but his cousin’s voice called from miles away. “Cousin!” Rumbold didn’t feel the first slap. The second one stung.

“Velius?”

“What are you doing out here? Why didn’t you get back on your horse? He would have led you home.”

His mouth was dry. It tasted like sand and salt and blood. “I can’t remember how,” he said, “and I can’t ... I can’t...” Velius pried his fingers open and pulled the reins out of them. In the other hand, the prince held a silver and gold rose, its petals smashed. There were lines of red dots where the thorns had bitten into his skin. It smelled of green and sunshine.

“What is that?” Before the last word left Velius’s mouth, the rose transformed into one perfect, dainty, silver and gold dancing slipper.

“It’s a recurring theme,” Rumbold said, and then laughed as if his heart was breaking. “Gods, Velius, it’s all I have left of her.” He thought he had prepared himself for the worst. He put a hand to his chest. It hurt if he breathed too deeply. The air he took in to scream out his tragedy, long and loud, was excruciating.

“Should we continue on after her?” asked Velius. The dogs were upon them now, with other men and other horses.

“Please,” Rumbold implored his cousin. “Ride back to the castle as quickly as you can and stop the Woodcutters from leaving. There is”—he clawed at buttons that choked him—“something I need to discuss with Sunday’s father.” He ripped his undershirt open at the neck to feel the air on his skin, never once letting go of the shoe in his hand. “He will hear me out.”

“Yes,Your Highness.” And Velius was gone.

Rumbold collapsed to his knees and let one of the men fetch him a drink from the stream. He stared at the perfect slipper in his hand, nudging his sadness over into anger. He let the madness fill him with energy, just as it had when he’d first fought Velius on the training grounds. After he guzzled one cup of water and dumped another over his head, a soldier helped him back onto his horse.

With each step of the horse, Rumbold’s anger grew. He was mad at every minstrel who had ever sung a song about love. He hated every girl who had giggled in the hallways and every simpering fool who had picked wildflowers to garner her affection. He was furious with himself for having lived these last days on a wish. On a lie. A kiss does not make the future. Love alone does not make a life.

By the time he’d reached the edge of the castle proper, he despised prying families, busybody fey, and weddings ... and he’d stayed on his horse. He’d had it with aunts and godmothers. He was sick to death of fathers, both Sunday’s and his own. Who were they to dictate in what manner his life should be lived? Why must everything he did be affected by the whims of a generation past?

He remembered now how to ride enough to kick his horse into full gallop. By the time he reached the courtyard, he hated all woodcutters, and remembered how to dismount without aid. By the time he reached the Grand Entrance, he hated Arilland and every king whod ever lived, and he remembered the way to the ballroom without a guide. By the time he marched through the library doors and right up to Jack Woodcutter, the anger that had kept him upright and flushed his cheeks spilled out over his tongue.

“She ran away because of you,” said Rumbold. Silence fell over the ballroom. He sounded like his father, and he cringed at the feeling. The demon of energy inside him swallowed the sickness. The glass beads on the tiny slipper cut into in his hand. “She ran from me because she thought she was betraying her family. What have you told her?”

Sunday’s father wiped the prince’s spittle off his own cheek with hands that could easily have ground Rumbold’s bones to make his bread. Those hands were attached to arms and a chest as big around as the trees in the Elder Wood. Woodcutter’s hard face remained unreadable. “I’ve told her nothing.”

“Then what
haven’t
you told her?”

Woodcutter looked to the doors, beyond which the festivities could be heard down the hallway. Rumbold nodded to Erik; the guard closed the doors and stood before them, in case a wandering partyer should enter unbidden. Wednesday remained in the midst of post-wedding festivities; there would have been no way for her to steal away for this meeting. But Monday was here, and the rest of the Woodcutter family, save Trix. Velius stood beside the richly upholstered wing-backed chair where Monday sat.

“We call it the Forbidden Tale,” said Woodcutter. “None of my family knows the full truth of it.”

“The Forbidden Tale is about Jack and the harem,” said Peter.

“And the Sultan’s daughter,” added Friday.

“The Sultan’s
sister,”
Saturday corrected her sister from her chair. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were flushed; her terrible injury apparently hadn’t dampened her spirits.

“No, my children. The Forbidden Tale is about Jack”—he looked to Rumbold—“and the prince.”

“What?” asked Peter.

“Why haven’t you told us?” asked Friday.

“Because it was forbidden,” said Woodcutter.

“It was forbidden to us all,” said Velius, “by your Fairy Godmother Joy.”

“Aunt
Joy,” spat Saturday, and murmured something about an ax.

“The only way to keep a secret is not to repeat it,” said Erik. “Those of us who were there still bear that burden.”

“I think it is time we stop keeping secrets,” Rumbold said. “The danger is over now, thanks to”—he could not bring himself to say her name—“your youngest daughter. There is no one left it can hurt.”

“Naught but my pride,” said Woodcutter.

“We are all family now,” said Monday. “Family shouldn’t keep secrets.”

Seven Woodcutter sat beside Friday on the sofa. She was small in stature, like her youngest daughter, but with deep lines in her face from a life well-lived and a pinched mouth from words rarely spoken. In Rumbold’s mind she belonged in the backyard of a ramshackle house on the edge of the Wood, tending to the drying laundry right before a storm. And yet here before him in her finery, she was the mother of princesses and queens, and even more of a force to be reckoned with. “Tell us” was all she said.

And because he could not deny his wife, Jack Woodcutter sat before the fire and spun the tale.

“I will tell you the story the way I lived it, so that you might better understand,” said Woodcutter. “About five years ago, a parcel came to me from the castle. In it was Jack Junior’s medallion, the nameday gift from his fairy godmother, which he’d worn all his life. The one I wear now, in his honor.” Woodcutter unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the medallion from under his cravat. “Inside the package was also a letter from the prince. He let me know the circumstances under which the medallion had come into his possession, and the details of Jack’s...”

“...death,” Rumbold finished when it seemed that Woodcutter could not. “The hunting party I was leading killed a wolf, deep in the Wood. It was the largest wolf any of us had ever seen. When I sliced it open, that medallion was in its belly.” Rumbold suddenly felt the hilt of the dagger in his hand, the beasts fur, the blood bubbling over his fingers. He wondered if every memory would revisit him in such sensate glory.

“How could Jack have been killed by a wolf?” asked Peter. “He died as a dog on the castle grounds.”

“Jack did not die here,” Rumbold answered. “I know, because the day he was cursed, I was cursed as well.” He expected to hear gasps at the announcement, but only silence answered him. Here was a family for whom strangeness was an everyday event, whose adventures could fill as many books as the library shelves around them. This family also knew about stories: how to tell them and when to listen. “As you know, my godmother cursed Jack.”

“Aunt Sorrow,” said Saturday.

“Yes. Just after that happened, Jack’s godmother appeared.”

“Aunt Joy,” said Friday.

“Indeed. Your Aunt Joy used her power to shorten Jack’s term as a dog to only a year. She then cursed me. On my eighteenth birthday, I was to spend one year as a frog.”

“Was?” Monday asked, for clearly Rumbold was no longer the youth he had been.

“In an effort to break the curse, Sorrow postponed it a year, a year that I do not remember, and one I’m not sure Id be proud to recount if I did. Finally, several months ago, the curse took hold.”