woman’s mouth opened and she brandished the rolling pin over her head like a Highland warrior. “PERVERRRRRRRT!” she screamed, and then she ran at him, clubbing him wherever she could reach.
Edward tried to run. His ankle didn’t cooperate, and he was out of breath within a few steps, so he didn’t get away as quickly as he would have liked, but the woman wasn’t in the best of shape, herself. After she’d beat him about the head with her rolling pin a few times, she seemed satisfied to fall back, screaming “Pervert!” after him as Edward stumbled on nakedly through the night.
He tried to steal some clothes that were hanging to dry outside of a farmer’s house, farther down the road, but the farmer had a dog, who wound up giving him a nasty bite on his right leg—the uninjured one, of course. Finally he ended up at another farm in the hayloft of a large barn, hiding under a horse blanket in a pile of prickly hay.
I’m better off as a bird, he thought miserably. He tried to turn himself back—to imagine himself with wings again, but nothing happened. The hay made him sneeze, and then cough, and then cough some more. The poison was still inside of him, working its evil. He was so weak. And now his ankle throbbed. His calf burned from where the dog had bit him. There was a goose egg rising near his temple where the woman had beaned him with the blasted rolling pin, and bruises forming up and down his thin, shivering arms, which bore scabbing cuts from Master Boubou’s bloodletting.
Plus he was cold. And hungry. And horribly, horribly lost.
He buried his face in the blanket and blinked back bitter tears. What he wouldn’t give for his dog right now, her warmth and her protection, even though the thought of Pet as a girl continued to unsettle him. Now Pet was lost to him, too. Everything was lost. Jane. Bess. His crown. The kingdom.
What was he going to do?
Then, because he was exhausted on top of being poisoned and injured and starving, the king—or we suppose that Edward was technically no longer the king at this point, because the carriage he’d seen earlier had contained Jane and Gifford on their way to the castle, and Jane had, only moments before, been crowned the official Queen of England—the boy who had been king, then, dropped off into a fitful sleep.
He woke up with a lantern burning bright next to his head, and a knife at his throat. Because this was the kind of night he was having.
“Hello,” said the owner of the knife.
A girl.
A girl about his age—no older than eighteen, surely, although it was hard to tell in this light—a girl with startling green eyes.
He didn’t dare to move. Because knife.
“Well,” she said after a long moment, “what do you have to say for yourself, then?”
Only Edward didn’t understand what she said, because what he heard was, “Wull, whadja hev to see fer yeself, thun?”
“You’re Scottish,” he murmured. “Am I in Scotland?”
She snorted.
“I’ll take that as a no,” he said.
The green eyes narrowed. The knife didn’t leave his throat.
“Who are you?” she demanded, and he caught her meaning this time. “What are you doing here?”
He didn’t know how to answer her questions. If he told her who he really was, chances were that a) she wouldn’t believe him, and she’d cut his throat, or b) she’d believe him, and because he was the ruler of England and she was Scottish and this was the year 1553, she’d get even more pleasure out of cutting his throat. Neither option ended well for him.
She was looking at him expectantly, and the knife against his neck was cold and decidedly unpleasant, so he decided he’d better start talking, and he’d better make it good.
“My name’s Dennis,” he burst out.
“Dennis,” she repeated. Still with the knife. “Is that your first or last name?”
“I’m an apprentice for the blacksmith in the village,” he said quickly, to cover that he didn’t actually know whether Dennis was his first or last name. “And I was set upon by thieves on the road.”
At this, the girl’s mouth turned up in a charming—or Edward would have found it charming, if she hadn’t been threatening his life at the moment—little smile. She was pretty, and the green eyes were the least of it. A riot of headstrong black curls cascaded all around her face, which was pale and heart shaped with