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We left the greenhaven shortly after. We’d lost our belongings to the brigands, but I saddled Aric with the piebald mare’s tack, and the greenwitch supplied us with a satchel of provisions, including a tincture to prevent conception. By the Virtues’ mercy, I still had the dagger I’d worn strapped to my wrist. My rapier was lost somewhere on the road—not that it had done me much good against the outlaws. All my training, and yet I had proved myself as useful as a dessert fork in a naval battle. Still, I felt better having a blade, even if I’d lost confidence in my ability to use it.

As we prepared to depart, our host held me back at the threshold. She handed me a waxed cloth bag full of what felt like pebbles. “Here. For when your stomach troubles you.”

I took the bag from her warily. Its contents smelled strongly of peppermint. “What do you mean?”

She waved a hand, encompassing my entire body with the gesture. “Your aches. The abdominal pain. I’ve seen those symptoms before.”

I barely prevented myself from taking a step back. I hadn’t told her about my condition. Moreover, it had never occurred to me that it might not be unique to me. I’d always thought myself alone in my affliction. Was it possible that there were others like me—each of us hiding our symptoms, not realizing there were others just as afraid of being seen and judged?

“You’re poisoning yourself,” the greenwitch said. “That’s the root of it.”

I shook my head, recovering my composure. “I have an excellent apothecary. She would never—”

“I don’t mean deliberately.” The greenwitch cut me off. She studied me as if I were an interesting weed in her garden. “There’s something afflicting your body. Figure out what’s poisoning you and your symptoms will eventually stop. It won’t cure you. But you won’t have to live in pain.”

It was such a mirror of my earlier conversation with Aric that the world seemed to double, as if time had repeated itself. I glanced at my equine husband, who was waiting near the stables, saddled and shifting his weight impatiently. He tossed his head, snorting, as a fly circled his hindquarters.

“Do you know what it is? The thing that’s poisoning me?”

“No. There can be different causes for different people.” She nodded at Aric, following my gaze. “But that husband of yours is clever, even if he was foolish enough to get himself horsified. He can help you figure it out.”

I remembered all the questions Aric asked me when he learned of my condition. Not what was wrong with me. Not what I couldn’t do. No, he wanted to understand the shape of my pain—studying it as an abstract problem, not the personal failing I’d always understood it to be. He was already seeking the answer, and he didn’t even have a greenwitch’s magical intuition. It was suddenly hard to breathe, and not because of my healing rib.

I turned back to the greenwitch. She was watching me with arms crossed, her eyes knowing. The tattoos were hidden again, folded beneath her sleeves.

“The peppermints should help,” she said. “Use them sparingly. I put a little power into them.”

I tucked the bag into the pocket of my coat.

“I don’t know why you’re helping us,” I said. “But thank you.”

The greenwitch smiled, sharp as a scalpel. “The Lady of the Wilds has her plans,” she said. “Occasionally they involve we who serve her. Take care of the king. Be careful with your blood.”

“What do you—”

My words cut short: she’d closed the door in my face.

A shiver ran down my spine like a cold drop of water. We’d never told her Aric was royal. I might have spoken his name in her presence—I wasn’t certain now—but it was a common one in Gildenheim. It shouldn’t have been enough to betray us. Or… had she recognized the blood magic scars on my hands and realized what they meant?

I forced myself to turn away from the door. The greenwitch had proved herself no threat to us, and we had many miles to cover. We needed to make up for lost time if we had any chance of returning to Arnhelm before the coronation.

I went to Aric and got up on his back with the help of a mounting stool.

“How far are we from the border?” I asked him. I’d lost any sense I had of Gilden geography, disoriented by the twists our route had taken.

He flicked his tail, considering. - If we ride hard, I think we can make it to the inn by sunset.-

I gripped the pommel and settled myself in the saddle, ensuring our satchel of provisions was secured.

“Then let’s ride hard.” Tatiana would be waiting for us by now, and she wouldn’t let me down—she never had, no matter how often we fought or how deeply we disagreed. The sooner we reached her, the sooner we could repair everything I’d broken. The more chance we had to build something better in its stead.

I just hoped we weren’t too late.

We rode hard. From the greenhaven, we emerged onto the main road earlier than I expected and were soon flying south. Aric’s hooves tattooed a steady drumbeat on the thoroughfare. After the brigands, I tensed at every village we passed, fear needling an anxious line down my back.

But no one looked twice at us. In my common clothes, I was just an ordinary traveler on horseback. I had shed the bright trappings of my life, sloughed them away like a bird’s molted feathers, and without them I was anonymous. It was surprisingly freeing to not be recognized for who I was. Not a duchess. Not an heir. Not anybody, except what I made of myself.

We passed through the village without incident and continued on. As we rejoined the main road, mist curled around the trees and obscured the mountaintops, slimming the world down to only Aric, and me, and the way forwards. As the day wore on and our elevation increased, the fog broke, surrendering to the clearest day I’d seen in Gildenheim—the sky as blue as ice.

But I was in little state to enjoy the day’s beauty. As Aric’s hooves ate away the miles, every one of my fears spoke up, each trying to make itself heard over the rest: My guilt over abandoning my retinue. Aric’s curse. The impending coronation. The fear that now that I had gained Aric for my own, I was about to lose him for good.

All my life I’d hidden my heart, guarded myself with meaningless words and empty smiles, pretending that concealing my pain was the same as never feeling it. Under my parents’ tutelage, I’d even learned to hide my condition—in their eyes, the worst of my flaws: a weakness I couldn’t carve away through training or prac tice or sheer force of will. My parents had been forced to acknowledge, eventually, that my flares were unavoidable, but that didn’t mean they were acceptable. And they’d made it clear: I wasn’t allowed failure in any other aspect. I had to be flawless. I had to be a weapon, wielded for the advancement of my House and country.

Riding towards the border astride the husband I’d accidentally cursed, I felt the farthest thing from flawless. I wasn’t a weapon. I was a hairpin, easily bent and readily discarded.

Yet Aric hadn’t discarded me when he saw my flaws. Instead, he’d seen a different sort of strength in me, one I’d never realized I possessed. And his acceptance disarmed me more than any opposition could. He’d reached past my defenses, and I had let him, welcomed him, against the logic of everything I’d been taught. I knew that wanting him was a blade that could be turned against me. To love someone was to throw down your shields, lay your heart bare, and watch as it was cut in two.

Love. The word stopped my thoughts short.

I hadn’t allowed myself to consider whether I was falling in love with Aric—but the possibility alone was dizzying. I had been walking blithely along a trail I thought was certain, only to come abruptly to a precipice. Now the drop plunged at my feet. Another step and I would fall.

But… surely this was different from what had happened with Catalina. Aric was my husband. I’d married him out of duty; I wasn’t acting on a selfish impulse. I was strengthening our countries’ ties, not jeopardizing Damaria’s future.

Surely, in this case, it was all right to let myself want him. To allow myself to memorize the sensation of his hand against my palm, my neck, my hip. To lose myself momentarily in the warmth of his lips and the depths of his eyes. Duty had bound us together, and duty was safe.

There was no reason to feel this inkling of doubt. No reason to be afraid of what was happening between us. I wouldn’t fall. I wouldn’t drown.

But though I tried, I couldn’t cast that feeling off. Not entirely. It spiraled through my core, a dark thread winding tighter and tighter around my all-too-open heart.

Meanwhile, oblivious to the bleak turn of my thoughts, the road unwound beneath us like a spool of pale ribbon. I’d expected we would need to rest frequently, but Aric, stronger and more confident now that he’d had time to adjust to his equine form, was determined to eke the use out of every moment of daylight. Halfway through the afternoon, my stomach began to cramp. I dug out one of the greenwitch’s peppermints and ate it without saying anything to Aric; we couldn’t afford to stop. The cool, sweet taste carried the bite of something more powerful, and to my relief, my nausea abated—though it didn’t vanish entirely.

The land blurred by, town after forest after mountain pass. As we approached afternoon, I realized something subtle had shifted in the landscape: evergreen forests giving way to newly budding leaves, the land sloping gently downwards, the fresh taste of spring in the air. We’d crossed the bulk of the mountains and were rapidly approaching the border of Damaria.

As the sun brushed the horizon, the road rose upwards again towards a final mountain pass. In the valley before its crest, a well-maintained two-story inn waited by the roadside. A flagpole jutted from its eaves, bearing two crisp banners: the blue ninefold star of Damaria and the winged white horse of Gildenheim.

I swung down from the saddle, my legs trembling with fatigue, my stomach in knots.

We had made it. We had reached the border, and—assuming Tatiana was here—the answer to my husband’s curse.