“Well, of course we can! You can! Put a spell on him! Make him forget he saw us here—make him believe there’s something urgent awaiting him back home. Do something.”
Darius rubbed the back of his hand against his cheek and looked apologetic. “I don’t really do those kinds of spells,” he said.
Dannette touched me on the arm. Now she was openly smiling. “I forgot to mention one of Darius’s other faults,” she said. “He never does what you tell him to.”
I stared at her helplessly. “But—we can’t have Harwin traveling with us! I mean, how very odd! Not to mention I don’t want him coming along!”
She moved past me to sit down at the table where Harwin had been waiting. “Nonetheless, I think he’s coming with us,” she said. “So let’s all have breakfast and then be on our way.”
I fumed throughout the meal, refusing to speak to any of them, not that any of them seemed to care. Harwin sat very stiffly, eating his meal with his usual formal manners. Dannette made some effort to draw him out, asking him about his estates and his family, to the point where I almost wanted to make a comment about how she should marry him if she found his assets so desirable. Darius chatted amiably, not seeming to notice that Harwin’s replies were as terse as civility would allow.
Once the dreadful meal was over, we were finally on our way through more of the gently rolling countryside, all green melting into gold. I sat beside Darius on the seat of the wagon, while Dannette settled in back. Harwin, who had undertaken the journey on a very fine bay gelding, didn’t seem certain about the best way to proceed. At times he ranged ahead of us, but not too far, and he always came back to make sure we hadn’t tried to elude him by turning off on some minor road. At times he rode beside the wagon and attempted to talk with me, but I gave him only the briefest and most unencouraging replies. I could tell that, like me, he was finding our slow pace to be maddening—but, like me, he was more interested in the actual trip than the destination, so he managed to keep his impatience in check.
I was a having a harder time maintaining a good-natured attitude, though I doggedly pursued my goal of getting to know Darius. Tell me about some of your adventures. When did you realize you had magical ability? What is your favorite kind of spell? He answered readily enough, but he was too preoccupied with the horses to go into great detail, so his stories were sketchy and a little flat. I tried to think of amusing anecdotes about my own life to share with him, but even to myself my tales of hunts and balls and celebrations sounded shallow and vain. Was it possible I was such a useless, uninformed creature that I couldn’t even come up with an hour’s worth of decent conversation?
When we stopped for lunch at a small-town inn, Harwin made a point of sitting next to me and trying to draw me out, but I just sat at the table and brooded. If I was going to be a successful queen, not to mention an interesting wife, I would need to widen my experiences and broaden my mind.
I wasn’t entirely sure how a person went about doing that, but I supposed that traveling around the kingdom was not a bad place to start.
Shortly after we set out again after lunch, it started to rain.
“Shouldn’t we pull over somewhere?” I asked Darius.
He squinted at the sky and shook his head. “Looks like it’ll continue on like this for a few hours, so no point in trying to wait it out.”
“We could stop at an inn somewhere,” I suggested.
“Oh, I think we can make another ten miles or so today,” he said.
“But I’m getting wet!”
“Climb in back with Dannette,” he said. “If there’s room.”
I swallowed a growl of exasperation and, when it was clear Darius was not going to stop the wagon for this maneuver, clambered over the bench with the bar est minimum of grace. The back of the wagon was a welter of boxes and bags and pillows and things—black kettles and dried plants and glass globes and loose shoes and walking sticks and what appeared to be a large collection of desiccated insects. The heavy tarp overhead, loosely stretched over curved wooden ribs, somewhat kept the rain at bay, but even as I pitched to my knees and felt around for an open space to sit, I could feel a few drops of rainwater seep through and fall into my hair.
Dannette was scrunched down toward the back of the wagon, near enough to the half-open back flap to be able to read by weak sunlight. “There’s a little space there between the table and the black trunk,” she said helpfully, pointing. “You have to put your feet up on the bag of goose feathers, though.”
I situated myself with a little difficulty, eventually deciding to sit on the goose feathers to protect myself from the jostling of the ride, even more pronounced back here than up on the bench. “It’s raining,” I said unnecessarily. “Darius doesn’t want to stop.”
“Yes,” she said absently. “That’s fairly typical.”
“I don’t think I like traveling in the rain,” I added.
She laughed. “I find it’s just not worth fussing about.”
I sighed. I usually found everything to be worth fussing about. I squirmed in my spot, found a pillow to wedge behind my head, and finally leaned back against a crate of unidentifiable items that chimed together in time with the jouncing. It wasn’t more than another ten minutes before I fell asleep.
The cessation of motion woke me and I guessed we had stopped for the night. The rain had ended, but the air had that cold, sodden feeling that reminded you how very unpleasant wet weather could be. Climbing out through the back of the wagon, I found myself standing in the cluttered yard of an inn appreciably bigger than the one we’d patronized the night before. I allowed myself to hope it would have more amenities and better food.
Once grooms had come for our horses, our whole group filtered inside. I noticed that Harwin was limping, but I turned my head away without asking him why. Dannette was the first to arrive at the proprietor’s desk, and I heard her ask for two rooms.
Two! I thought with excitement, before realizing that Harwin could easily afford his own and I still would be sharing a space with the others.
The innkeeper, a very tall, very thin man with lank gray hair and overlarge spectacles, looked down at her over the rims and shook his head. “We only have one room left,” he said. “A great number of people were caught in the rain earlier today and checked in instead of traveling on.”
Dannette glanced over her shoulder, her eyebrow raised in a silent question. Darius shrugged. “I don’t mind four to a room,” he said.
Harwin appeared shocked. “Four! You don’t mean that you plan to sleep in the same room as the princess!”
Darius shrugged again. “I did last night.”
Harwin was even more shocked, so much so all he could do was stare at Darius. Dannette touched him lightly on the arm. “I played chaperone and lay beside Olivia in the bed, while my brother curled up on the floor,” she said. “You need not worry. I take my responsibilities seriously.”
Harwin had recovered the power of speech. “Well, you will not share a room with the princess while I travel with you. You and I shall sleep in the stables in your own wagon.”
“There’s not much room in the wagon,” Dannette began, but Darius spoke over her.
“You may sleep there if you like, but I will sleep in the bedchamber. I see no reason to camp in a barn when there’s a room available.”
“I cannot allow you to compromise Olivia’s virtue in such a fashion.”