Only then did he take pen to paper himself, and slowly, carefully, as was so very typical of him, begin his reply.
She watched and waited, hands clenching a handkerchief that she had somehow gotten hold of, as he wrote. Like her, page after page; like her, on both sides. Finally, he finished, folded his missive carefully, kissed it and put it in the box.
Her box glowed. She snatched it open.
She went through three more handkerchiefs, crying, as she read it. Certain things stood out more than others.
How were you to know that the woods you had crossed a hundred times held that kind of danger? I certainly didn’t know, and supposedly I have the ear of the King. It is not your fault. If it is anyone’s fault it is the fault of those who thought that secrecy meant security. And whatever happens, I will stand by you, and I will not permit my daughter to vanish as Duke Sebastian has vanished. And nevertheless, I still have faith that all will be well.
There was, of course, more, much more. There was a great deal of reassurance that she had not done anything wrong. A wry reminder that things would be entirely different if she had disobeyed him, but she had had his express permission to visit Granny whenever she wished, and that she had made her way home after darkness had fallen several times that he knew of. That she did not need forgiveness, since she had done nothing wrong.
It was everything she had hoped to hear, and had feared she never would —
It was everything she needed to hear.
And finally, the admonition that he wanted to hear what her day was like, every day, no matter how trivial it seemed, and that he would tell her the same.
And then a final postscript, after the salutation Your loving father.
It is just as well that the Godmother limits us to a single missive a day. We would be able to keep up our chess games, otherwise, and without being distracted by your clever ploys, I would finally have the chance to trounce you as completely as you deserve!
She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
So she did both.
Sapphire had insisted that she have a long hot bath before she went to sleep. The Elemental even snatched away her nightgown and pushed her toward the bathing room. When she woke in the morning, she realized why. Her legs hurt.
Of course they hurt, she scolded herself. You’ve never spent that long in a saddle before. An hour or two at most, nothing like that entire afternoon, and in the cold, as well!
She really didn’t want to move, but she knew that the only way to get her legs to stop hurting as much was to get up and start stretching. In fact, it hurt so much that she suddenly realized that her wounded foot had healed much, much faster than she had expected it would and had not been bothering her for days.
Was that a good sign, or a bad one?
She forced herself out of bed, now full of the urgent need to get to her mirror and try to speak with the Godmother. Sapphire was right there with some of the liniment that she had made yesterday, and it helped tremendously, enough so that she could lean down, and despite Sapphire trying to prevent her from doing so, she undid the bandages on the bitten foot and examined it critically.
To her intense relief, the bite marks were still there. Healing, but not unnaturally fast. So why didn’t it hurt?
Except — the moment she took the bandages off, it started to.
What on earth —
She examined the bandages closely, swatting away Sapphire’s invisible hands as she tried to reclaim them. Were there marks on them?
She narrowed her eyes and let them unfocus a little, because the marks were so faint otherwise that if she stared too hard they all but disappeared. There were marks on them. And they looked like letters and figures, the same sort of things that were written within the circles on the floor of Sebastian’s workroom.
“Are these bandages magic?” she demanded of Sapphire, allowing her to reclaim them at last.