“But now the queen has asked to learn to ride, so we’re bringing her some fine mares,” Jilly embroidered.
Anthea almost made another hissing noise, wanting her cousin to quit before she dug in too deep. But she didn’t want to upset the horses, or the man, so instead she pasted on a bright smile.
“Now, now, I’m sure the good gentleman is quite busy,” Anthea said. “But, we are on the road to Bellair, are we not?” She let out a tinkling laugh. “I must confess: I’m dreadful with maps!”
“Are you … are you Rose Candidates?” The man had looked at Anthea, and his eyes had snagged on the silver pendant she wore prominently pinned to the lapel of her jacket.
“I attended Miss Miniver’s Rose Academy in Travertine,” Anthea said, relieved that she didn’t have to make up a lie.
“Are there are a lot of horses in … Leana?” the man asked.
“There are some,” Anthea said vaguely.
“I didn’t know that,” the man said. “Or that it was still called Leana.” He edged a little closer to Buttercup.
“There are, and it is,” Jilly said winningly.
“This is the right road, by the way,” the man said, looking Buttercup up and down with wondering eyes. “Well, it’s one of them. I think the Blackham Road would take you there more straightly. This is just an old country road, it’s going to swing you wide around the forest.”
“Ah, yes,” Anthea said, ignoring Jilly’s pointed look. “That’s what we thought. Better for the horses to avoid running afoul of motorcars, though.” She directed this last at Jilly, who knew very well why they were taking the “boring” road through the forest.
“Don’t know too many farmers that can afford a motorcar,” the man agreed. “This is oxcart country.”
Then, greatly daring, he held out a hand. Buttercup put her soft nose into his palm, then shook her head in disgust when it turned out that the man didn’t have any sugar or apples to offer her. The man leaped back at her quick motion, but then he laughed.
“Well, now!” he said. “There was a thing to tell the kiddies when I get home!”
“Where are you going?” Anthea asked. She wondered if they ought to offer him a ride, or at least to walk alongside them, for the sake of more good public relations.
“Tillbury,” he said, and pointed back the way they had come. Then he jerked a thumb at the little side lane he had just come from. “There’s a few farms down thataway. I go twice a month to see if anyone needs doctoring. I’m the only physician hereabouts,” he added by way of explanation.
He reached out a hand toward Leonidas, who condescended to lip at his fingers. The man chuckled at the way it tickled.
“We had best be off,” Jilly said. “Mustn’t keep Her Majesty waiting!”
Anthea cringed, but the man didn’t notice. Anthea and Jilly turned the horses to start back along the road, and the man stepped back. Before they rode away, however, Anthea had to ask one question.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Afraid?” He looked along the road. “There’s blessed few bandits in these parts, miss.”
“No,” Anthea said. “I meant, aren’t you afraid of the horses?”
He shook his head. “Like I said, I’m a physician.” He looked Anthea squarely in the eyes. “I know all about disease and plagues.” He patted Bluebell’s neck and then waved to Jilly.
Once they were out of earshot Jilly began her ballad again, but Anthea didn’t join this time. Her cousin started another, one Anthea didn’t know, and she listened with half an ear as she thought about the man. He was the first honest-to-goodness Coronami who had seen a horse, and he hadn’t cared one whit. In fact, he had seemed excited by the horses. But would everyone be as excited? And what if their fears about the king came true, and he declared them all traitors?
What if this mission failed?
Sensing her pensiveness, Florian moved in close and bumped her foot with his shoulder again. Thoughts of warm oat mash and love blanketed her, and she gave a little laugh, feeling some of the tension between her shoulders unwind. They had been seen by a regular citizen, and it had all turned out all right.
“My love, my love, do not forsake me,” Jilly sang.
“So dramatic,” Anthea whispered to Bluebell’s mane, rolling her eyes. She reached over and tweaked Florian’s ear. “My love, my love, do not forsake me.”
Florian nodded his head.
23
FASTER AND FASTER …
“I have excellent news,” Anthea announced two days later. She was holding a map up as though reading a newspaper, the pencil that she had used to trace their route tucked behind her ear.
“You’re going to bank the fire?” Jilly said.
She was just wiping off their frying pan after making them breakfast, and stowing their tin plates and mugs in her saddlebags. She had been camping before, with her father, and knew how to cook over a fire, much to Anthea’s surprise. The only thing that Anthea could make without burning it was toast, and even that was sometimes a dodgy prospect.
She did enjoy making fires, and putting them out, however.
“Yes, I will,” Anthea said absently. “But I have better news.”
She laid the map flat on the fallen log they had used as a bench, and made an X with her pencil.
“We are here,” she said grandly. Then she pointed to a mark a few inches away. “And that is Bell Hyde.” She put a lopsided circle around it.
“And that’s Bellair,” Jilly said, looking over her shoulder and sighing. “Even farther down the road.”
“But we’re not actually going to Bellair,” Anthea told her. “We’re going to Bell Hyde.”
“Wait, we are? Why?”
“Because Bell Hyde is the name of the queen’s favorite estate, and where she spends every summer with the princesses and her Favored Rose Maidens,” Anthea said. “If the court is on schedule, and they have not changed the schedule in decades, then they have been in residence there for two weeks.”
“That’s why we’re going toward Bellair, not Travertine,” Jilly said. She mimed hitting herself on the head with the heavy pan.
“Yes,” Anthea said, then she frowned. “If you didn’t know why we were going this way, why didn’t you ask before?”
“I was afraid of looking stupid,” Jilly said with a shrug.
Anthea shook her head over that. “Anyway,” she continued. “We should be able to reach Bell Hyde in two days, three at the most.” She folded up the map. “The only trouble will be people,” she said quietly.
“What was that?” Jilly had been fussing with her saddlebags, and now she turned around, flushed from yanking on them to make sure they were hanging evenly.
“I said we have to watch out for people now,” Anthea said. “We’re still in the countryside, but we’re in the part of the countryside with all the estates, and motorcars.”
“And the Coronami?” Jilly asked.
“And the Coronami,” Anthea said.
Jilly looked like she was going to say something else, but she changed her mind and finished packing. Anthea was glad. She didn’t know when she had started to think of the Coronami as … the Coronami. Or when, in her head, she had started to call herself a Leanan, but she did know she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.
“And my father,” Jilly said, grimacing.
“I hate asking someone to lie,” Anthea said, “but in this case—”
“We just have to hope that Finn lied his face off,” Jilly agreed.
“Yes,” Anthea said with a sigh. “I feel so guilty sending your father to Travertine to look for us, but it gives us more time!”
“Finn is good at … well, not so much lying as not saying the whole truth,” Jilly said. “I’ve always thought it made him seem very royal.”
“We can only hope,” Anthea said. “But let’s not dawdle, all the same!”
She shoveled dirt over their fire and tied her small hand shovel to Leonidas’s baggage.
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“On to the queen!” Jilly cheered as she mounted.
Anthea wished she could feel so excited. Instead she just felt gritty. Sleeping on the ground, washing up in streams, eating over a smoky fire … It was hardly glamorous. It was, in fact, merely hard. Every part of Anthea was sore, from the rocks on the ground and the long days in the saddle. Even her brain was sore, from wrestling with the horses.
Florian, naturally, kept her buoyed up with his thoughts of love. And Bluebell was also being refreshingly obedient, though Anthea’s nervousness made her nervous as well. But Anthea felt like she was being worn thin, like a linen shirt that had been laundered too many times. By the time they got to Bell Hyde, filthy and exhausted, she wondered if she would simply fall in a faint at the queen’s feet.
If they managed to get an audience with the queen at all.
“What were we thinking?” Anthea said aloud as they started down the road. “Why are we doing this alone?”
Jilly, her mouth open to begin yet another ballad, closed it. But then she shrugged and opened her mouth again to answer.
“It was your idea,” she reminded Anthea, but not in an accusatory way. “And it was a good idea.”
“Was it?”
“Yes,” Jilly said decisively. “Even if your hunch about the queen is wrong, from her letter she seems much more kindly and sensible than her husband. Surely she will see reason.”
Anthea just nodded, more in hope than in agreement. She hauled on the lead line tied to the left side of her saddle. Leonidas was on that line, with two mares, Holly and Juniper, tied to him. On her right she kept Florian, and after the encounter with the physician from Tillbury, she had Florian’s lead on a slipknot. Jilly had Caesar tied to her saddle, with Campanula trailing him.
“I feel like this is going to turn bad,” Anthea muttered. “Soon.”
“Don’t look for rain clouds, if there’s no rain,” Jilly sang.
Anthea squinted at the sky. And now she was worried about the weather turning bad, as well as a myriad of other things. Running out of feed. The horses being spooked by a motorcar. Soldiers cropping up out of a hedgerow and mistaking them for enemy invaders.
There were, she realized, hedgerows now. They had come out of the seemingly endless forest and were starting to see fields bordered by low stone fences or tall hedges, though there were only distant signs of people. Anthea felt all her sore muscles clench.
Bluebell moved into a trot, and the others followed. Florian whinnied, and bumped his shoulder against Anthea’s boot a few times. Jilly gave a small whoop and let Buttercup have her head. They hadn’t had a gallop yet that day, anyway, so Anthea went along with it. She hated to admit, even to herself, that it was just her own nerves causing her horses to speed up.
She did love the feeling of the wind in her hair. They had been plodding for too long. The ribbon holding her hair back started to come loose, and she reached around and grabbed it, stuffing it into a pocket as she gave Bluebell her head. The horses went faster and faster. The horses were also happy to gallop; their feelings of freedom and joy rushed to Anthea’s heart as they picked up the pace.
Assuming that Finn had managed to send any search party toward Travertine, they would make it to Bell Hyde long before her uncle found out they were not with the king. But still, they weren’t sure if Andrew had gotten the truth out of Finn. So they had either a three-day head start, or a two-hour head start. She dug her heels into Bluebell and chirruped to the other horses.
And faster and faster.
Anthea thought of her first riding lesson. She remembered Bluebell going round and round and not stopping when she was told. Leonidas had just passed Bluebell and was straining at the end of his lead a length ahead of her.
And faster and faster.
All Anthea could hear was the clatter of their hooves on the hard road. All she could see was the high hedgerow on either side. She only noticed the break in the hedgerow right as Leonidas and Buttercup reached it, and she felt their feelings shift from complete joy to utter fear.
A tractor, belching black smoke and ridden by a large farmer, came rumbling out of the field. Jilly managed to swerve Buttercup, letting out a curse, but Caesar ran afoul of its front end. He screamed and reared and then fell heavily onto his side, his tightly tied lead dragging Jilly’s saddle awry so that she crashed down atop him.
All the horses screamed and panicked. Florian slipped his lead free and turned on the tractor, rearing back and letting out a war cry. The farmer, face white beneath his tan and eyes wild, bailed sideways off his seat and let the tractor keep rolling down the road. It ran into another hedge and stopped with a crunch: there was a stone fence on the other side of the greenery.
Anthea sat back hard and told Bluebell whoa in her mind, making the word lash like a whip. Bluebell almost landed on her haunches, she stopped so fast, but Anthea was ready for it and didn’t fly out of the saddle this time.
She did leap, safely, off Bluebell’s back once the horse had stopped and went at once to Jilly. Her cousin had rolled free of the thrashing legs of the horses, her hands tucked around her head as they had had been taught. Anthea grabbed her arm and helped her up and then immediately grabbed Caesar’s bridle.
The big red stallion was still on his side, screaming and thrashing. He had a gash on his shoulder and scrapes on his legs, but to Anthea’s relief she could not see any broken bones. She was shaking with fear, but all the same she looked him in the eye and firmly told him to calm down and get up.
Caesar just lay there, trembling.
“Listen to me, you silly creature,” Anthea snapped, trying to cover her fear with anger. “I told them to get that sponge out of your throat. Now I’m telling you to get up.”
Caesar got up.
Jilly had sensibly grabbed the reins of Buttercup and Bluebell, though she herself was standing with one foot barely touching the ground. Bluebell’s saddle was hanging around her belly, and her saddlebags were almost touching the ground. The mares were whinnying and stamping, tugging at their leads.
Florian, however, was standing very still in the middle of it all. He whickered softly and touched the mares within his reach on the neck with his nose, calming them. Anthea’s heart filled with love for him, and she turned a little of that toward Caesar to help soothe him.
“Are you hurt?” Anthea asked her cousin.
“Just bruised,” Jilly said. “Maybe twisted my knee. How’s Caesar?”
Anthea looked at his shoulder. It wasn’t as bad as she had thought. She relaxed even more and rubbed his face, trying to radiate calm.
“Those are horses,” the farmer said. He was absently dusting off the seat of his canvas trousers over and over again. “Those are horses,” he said again, as though Jilly and Anthea were unaware.
“Yes, they are,” Jilly said, with considerably less graciousness than she had shown to the last man they had met on the road.
“Are you hurt, sir?” Anthea asked, remembering her manners.
Her eyes, however, were on Caesar’s shoulder. His wound wasn’t deep, but it would need to be stitched.
“I’m not, but my tractor—” He broke off as he saw his tractor across the lane, still whirring and grinding as it tried to plow through the stone wall. “My tractor!”
He ran over to turn off the engine.
Anthea continued to calm Caesar, wondering if the farmer could help them find a surgeon who might stitch up a horse. She had to push Florian and Bluebell away, gently, as they kept nudging her with their noses. She didn’t look up until Jilly said her name, very loudly, with a swear word coming right after.
“What’s wrong?” Anthea said.
The farmer was heading back to them, having apparently given up his tractor as a loss, at least for now. He was giving the horses a bemused but not hostile look, and they in turn—
“Jilly!” Anthea said sharply, looking over their charges. “Where are Leonidas and Holly and Juniper?”
“I’ve
been trying to tell you,” Jilly said. “I don’t know! They’re just gone!”
24
HUNTING PARTY
“They must have bolted,” Jilly said.
“Correction,” Anthea said grimly, “Leonidas bolted, and he took the mares with him.”
“They went that way,” the farmer said, pointing into the field he had just come from on his tractor. “While I was lyin’ there one of ’em almost stepped on me.”
“I’m sorry,” Anthea said, feeling numb. “I’m sorry. But you’re all right? You’re all right.”
“What should we do?” Jilly said. She reached out a hand and let Caesar nuzzle her palm. She couldn’t see his injury from the side she was on. “Is he all right?”
Anthea turned him so that Jilly and the farmer could see. The man let out a low whistle and Jilly gasped.
“He needs a surgeon,” Anthea said. She gave the reins to Jilly. “You need to get Buttercup’s saddle right, and find a place to rest.”
“You are welcome to bring them to my barn,” the farmer said. Then he stopped and his brow wrinkled. “Are they … sickly?”
“No,” Anthea said. “They don’t have any diseases.”
The farmer nodded. “Could a man used to doctoring oxen and cattle take care of that one?” He pointed to Caesar.
“Yes!” Jilly almost shouted in excitement, making the man jump and Buttercup flinch.
“Good,” Anthea said.
She took Bluebell’s reins from Jilly, who got a better grip on Caesar. Anthea unclipped the lead line from Florian and stuck it in a saddlebag. He wore a saddle, with heavy panniers on each side that were now half-empty of food and fodder. She took those off and left them sitting in the road, then made sure that the reins knotted at his neck wouldn’t come loose and tangle in his front legs.
“What are you doing?” Jilly asked as Anthea swung into Bluebell’s saddle.
“I need you to take the others,” Anthea said. She wished that she had more time to celebrate the fact that she had just gotten so gracefully into the saddle without a mounting block, but unfortunately she didn’t. “Take care of Caesar, rest.”