And then the castle.
“White as heaven itself,” he choked out.
A refuge from the forest, with gates that swung open before he even thought to enter them. He called out for the owner, but there was no answer, not even from a servant. Only food laid at a table and bandages for his bleeding hands and face.
“You should have run!” Astra said.
He told her he would not have survived the storm, but she was unsatisfied with the feeble excuse.
When he did work up the courage—or the fear—to leave, he did not make it out.
Because the path to the gate wound through a rose garden.
“Stunning,” he whispered, gazing right through his gathered children as if he could still see the rose bushes beyond. “Filled the air with every ... every color imaginable.”
Apparently the color he’d chosen to pluck was pure gold.
I turned the rose in my hands, every petal exquisitely formed and gleaming, the heft of it like a lead weight against my fingers. It was impossible to imagine it had come from a living bush, but no more impossible than a fairy in the woods.
Father hadn’t returned from the forest with meat, but what he had returned with would buy food enough to last the winter and beyond. Surely there had never been a more successful hunt.
I smiled.
But the pit of my stomach burned.
And in my father’s shadow, I saw Stephan’s curls.
Chapter
8
This time, I didn’t take Honey to the fence. I walked on my own, and I brought the book of folklore. I sat by the fence as I sat by the fire in the library, and I read aloud the story of the woodcutter.
When the fairy appeared, I saw the sprinkle of blue sparks out of the corner of my eye, but I kept reading without pause.
“You have to trap a fairy first,” Callista had said as she was explaining to me every reason our land couldn’t possibly have been cleared by a fairy. “Once captured, they have to grant a wish. That’s the only way to get magic. Otherwise, all they’ll do is talk about themselves.”
The fairy had offered me a wish without capture, so there was no guarantee Callista’s analysis was correct in any other aspect. Yet in my brief conversation with the fairy at the fence, the only straight answer I’d received had been about her own desires, so the hypothesis was worth a test.
And sure enough—
“Preposterous,” she spat, stomping a blue foot as I read about the woodcutter’s second wish. “If he wished for his wife to be the most beautiful woman, he would receive the most beautiful woman. Not a transformation of his current wife.”
“Interesting.” I directed my thoughts to the air, not letting my gaze confront her directly. “Both are valid interpretations.”
Yet fairies were notorious for trickery.
She sparked like a tiny flash of lightning and stepped closer as if to confront me. “Acceptance is acceptance. A wish is a wish.”
She said it as if it made perfect sense, but I imagined even my instructor would have had difficulty parsing her meaning.
“If he wished to have never met his wife”—I struggled to maintain a tone of intellectual curiosity—“would he return to an empty house or to one where his wife greeted him at the door and he had no memory of her?”
“Both are nonsense. There would be no house.”
Her circling riddles were maddening. While the heated knife inside threatened to fillet my skin from bone, I forced a slow breath.
Even if I could draw a straight answer, a hurdle still remained.
