“You’re leaving the decision to me?” she whispers.
“Always,” I tell her. “All I want is to be with you.”
“But your throne…”
“All I want,” I say again, in case it wasn’t clear, “is you.”
She nods. “If we go… can we visit here sometimes?”
“It might be dangerous,” I warn her. “But we can and now that I have my magic back, I can protect you.”
“Then take me with you,” she says and rises on tiptoe to kiss me.
I kiss her back, groaning as I revel in her taste, her trust, her love. I haul her against me, wrap my arms around her, losing track of space and time.
But she draws back. “We should really get going,” she whispers and nods at where the guards are getting to their feet and her bastard of a fiancé is talking to them. “They could still attack us.”
Reluctantly I pull back. “Let’s go,” I say and help her up into the carriage, then climb up on the open seat in the front and take the reins. I cluck my tongue and the horses shoot forward. I let them guide us out of the palace yard and into the town, then over the bridge and out into the world.
At some point, Selina knocks on the window and I turn around to open it. “My lady.”
“Where are we going?” she shouts to be heard over the wind and the thunder of the horses’ hooves.
“To find a gate!” I tell her. “Have you changed your mind?”
“I’d go anywhere with you,” she says, “a hovel or a palace.”
“I’ll choose my palace, then. It has better beds to make love on than a hovel.”
“You’ve convinced me,” she says with a laugh and closes the window again.
Grinning, I straighten in the seat and snap the reins.
The future stretches ahead of us. A future I had given up on, a future she gave me back, and I’m not going to squander it. No killing. No pain. Only justice, and we will go from there.
A home. A family.
Selina.
Above all, Selina.
Everything I need in the world.
17
SELINA
The carriage trundles over the rough patches in the road as we roll through sparse woods and shrubland. We have left the cultivated fields and farms far behind. A hamlet gleams on a hillside in the distance. The next town is far and we’re not heading toward it.
I never thought that reading so many stories might prove useful. I know of several spots on the map marked as Gates to Faerie, and since the Silver Mirror Lake is still closed, we’re heading for the next one.
The Cursed Frogs Pond.
I wonder if there is another tale there, connected to the pond. Cursed frogs? Frogs turning into Kings, like this merman did?
The gates always seem to be ponds and lakes and wells, never streams or rivers, never running water. They are still, deep places, the water acting as a medium to soften the transition from one world to the next. Like a birth. A rebirth.
It still hasn’t hit me properly, that I’m leaving my family and my cousins behind, leaving the palace I grew up in and my world to cross over to a world I know so little about—only what fairytales and legends say.