“I know, Your Highness.” Joff bowed his head. “I’m sorry I failed.”
“Get out,” Apollo said, “before I run you through with my sword.”
“There’s just one more thing, Your Highness.” A bead of sweat dripped down Joff’s brow. “The princess asked me to tell you not to join the Hunt until she found you.”
“Did she say why?”
Joff shook his head. “No, but she seemed very determined.”
“She’s always determined.”
“Your Highness!” cried a breathless, high-pitched voice as a small child burst into the tent.
“Stop, runt!” screamed a guard, but the child was quick.
“The princess, she’s in trouble!” said the child. “I just saw a man trying to murder her. Now she’s run into the Cursed Forest!”
Chapter 25
Evangeline
Evangeline tore through the fog. She thought she’d headed back the way she’d come, toward the tents belonging to the Guild of Heroes. Only she saw no tents, just endless fog and night.
She might have turned around, but she could still hear Byron yelling foul names. Ones that made her wonder just what he thought she’d done and who Petra was.
It wasn’t until she outran his voice that she finally allowed her legs to slow enough so that she could catch her breath and wipe the tears from her eyes.
Poor Hale. He hadn’t deserved to die like that, or at all.
Evangeline knew it wasn’t her fault—she hadn’t thrown the knife at his throat—and yet it felt like her fault. With so many people who kept trying to kill her, she couldn’t help wondering what she had done to bring all of this about.
Was it merely because she’d married a prince—or was it because of another event in her past that she’d forgotten?
It became harder to breathe as she jogged deeper into the dark fog. She hated this not knowing and this fear that she might never know.
Mud splattered her boots and the hem of her green velvet cloak until the ground turned hard. She stumbled briefly as the road underfoot changed abruptly to cobbled stones.
Then, as if a curtain had been parted, the fog was gone, along with the pitch-dark night. It disappeared entirely to reveal a street full of shops as bright as sweets in a jar. They all had cheery striped awnings, shiny bells, and doors painted in every color of the rainbow.
Evangeline’s skin prickled as she passed the storefronts with their perky window displays. She knew she couldn’t stop—she shouldn’t stop. She was still running for her life, and she needed to find Apollo to tell him about Jacks.
But this wasn’t just a pretty street. Evangeline knew this street. She knew the crooked lamppost at the end of it, the reason that it smelled of sweet fresh-baked cookies. And she knew that in the middle of the street, situated between Crystal’s Candy Haven and Mabel’s Baked Delights, she would find the one place in the world that she loved more than anyplace else, her father’s shop: Maximillian’s Curiosities, Whimsies & Other Oddities.
Her chest tightened painfully as she reached the front door. Suddenly nothing else mattered but this.
The shop was different than she remembered. Like the rest of the storefronts, it was fresher, shinier, younger. The paint was a shade of green so brilliant it appeared wet. The glass of the window was so clear, it looked as if there might not be any glass at all—Evangeline imagined she could simply reach through the window and snatch one of the curious items spilling out from the toppled-over purple top hat. A hat that, like the shop, Evangeline had thought she would never see again.
She might have believed this was all an illusion. There should have been no possible way that she could have run all the way home to Valenda—she wasn’t even sure how to return to Valenda from the North, but she was fairly certain one had to take a boat.
And yet when Evangeline reached out her fingers toward the shop, she could feel the door, solid and wooden and sun-warmed underneath her hand. It was real. All of it was real. She could still smell the cookies from the bakery down the street. And then she heard a voice in the distance. “Get your lemonade! Fresh lemonade!”
The cry was followed by the appearance of bubbles at the end of the street and a perfect moment of euphoria.
When Evangeline had entered the edge of the Cursed Forest, the sign had read: Welcome to the Best Day of Your Life!
She’d thought the words were frivolous, but now it seemed that’s exactly where—or when—she was.
This particular day had occurred the day before her twelfth birthday.
Evangeline had always had a love affair with anticipation. One of her favorite pastimes was to dream and to imagine. What could be? What would happen? What if? She particularly loved the rush of anticipation before special occasions, and her parents always made her birthdays extra-special.
On her ninth birthday, she’d woken up to find every tree in her mother’s garden had branches full of lollipops tied to them with polka-dot strings. There were also gumdrops sitting in the center of the flowers, and overlarge pieces of rock candy laid among the blades of grass to make it seem as if the garden stones had turned to candy in the night.
“We didn’t do this,” her father had said.
“Oh no,” her mother had agreed. “This was definitely magic.”
Evangeline knew it wasn’t—or she mostly knew. Her parents had such a way of doing things that there was always just a bit of wonder that lingered around the perimeter and made her ask if maybe it was magic after all.
And so on this day just before her twelfth birthday, Evangeline was full of hope for what magic her parents might make for her this year.
Evangeline had unshakable faith that her mother and father had planned something marvelous. She could hardly wait for it, and yet it was the waiting that made the day so wonderful.
Evangeline’s anticipation for what was about to be bubbled over. It touched everyone who entered her father’s curiosity shop that day, turning each person’s mouth to a smile and filling the store with laughter. Although no one even knew what they were laughing about. The happiness was simply contagious.
And maybe there was just a little bit of magic in the air, for by happenstance the baker down the street tried out a new recipe for stained-glass cookies that he decided to bring into the curiosity shop. He wanted to see what everyone would think, and the shop was clearly the place to be that afternoon.
The cookies were of course delicious, and they were made even better by the lemonade cart that had stopped in front of the shop. It was all yellow and white and had some mysterious mechanism underneath that blew out a constant stream of bubbles shaped like hearts.
Evangeline had seen lemonade carts before, but never one like this. It had four flavors that, according to the sign, changed every other day. That day’s choices were:
Blueberry Lemonade
Lavender Lemonade with Honey Ice
Crushed Strawberry Lemonade with Basil Leaves
And then the most delicious of all,
Whipped Lemonade!
It was made of cream, lemons, and sugar, and topped off with a glittering dollop of vanilla cream.
Evangeline tried to savor the drink, but she also wanted to share it with her mother and father, who’d made the mistake of simply ordering the blueberry.