Azalea’s nails dug into her palms, clenching so hard they broke the skin. She paced up and down the aisle between the stalls, scattering straw with each step. Her skirts snapped as she turned. Her cheeks blazed, hot and feverish. Dickens grew skittish at Azalea’s sudden movements.
“How dare you!” said Azalea, fists shaking. “My sisters will have a choice! Sir, you’ve got to get that contract back!”
“I will not—”
“Mother never would have allowed you to do such a thing!”
“Don’t tell me what your mother would do or would not do!” The King yanked Dickens to the mounting block. “I am already aware I am not her. You shall have to accept me and my decisions, painful as that is!”
The rage snapped.
In quick, sharp movements, Azalea yanked the reins from the King with her own stinging hands. With a sleek, almost dancelike leap, Azalea maneuvered past the King and jumped from the block onto Dickens. Her black skirts settled over his sides and tail.
“I’ll take the sword to the silversmith,” she said. “I broke it, didn’t I?”
“Come now, Azalea, don’t use that tone,” said the King, holding out his hand.
Azalea kicked it away with the flat of her boot, and dug her heels into Dickens’s flank, just as a gentleman would. Dickens leaped forward. The jolt nearly threw her off. In a moment she was galloping off through the stable door.
“You haven’t a coat!” the King yelled. “You are going to fall off!”
The King would saddle Thackeray and be after her in a heartbeat, but Azalea pushed Dickens hard through the cobblestone streets of snow and ice. Holiday market people clogged the roads, with rattling carriages, everyone bustling about before the storm came. Azalea searched fervently for the chestnut the steward had ridden away on. She would find him and make him see reason.
The crowds thinned as the cold wind began to bite, and in a moment of luck, Azalea spotted the chestnut and the steward’s emerald green overcoat. She kicked Dickens into a gallop, gripping tightly to his mane to keep from jostling off.
Snow began to whisk in the wind, and it seemed all at once the streets were deserted. By the time she reached the Courtroad bridge, snow had formed over the carriage ruts, making everything icy and slick. Dickens shied.
“Dickens, please,” said Azalea. “Just through the bridge!”
Dickens shied again. Her fingers burning, Azalea dug her boots hard into his flank. He leaped forward with a jolt.
In a heart-stopping moment, the scrabbling of hooves on ice, and a hard clang, Azalea was falling.
Her stomach realized it before she did. Dickens had lost his footing, and together—Azalea’s hand tangled in the reins, so tightly it numbed—they slid down the rock-crabbed, muddy embankment. Her hand slipped free, and she tumbled off, skirts and crinolines twisting in the air.
She slapped into the water. It enveloped her, frigid. Breaking to the surface, she wheezed for air and had to fight the current as she crawled to the bank. Her clothes clung to her skin like a heavy sheet of ice.
Dickens, dripping, had righted himself. Mud matted his fine coat. Coughing and sputtering, Azalea used the reins to pull herself up.
What was she doing? The cold water had slapped the heat from her temper. Had she run mad? Galloping off in the middle of a blizzard? She had nearly killed both of them!
Home. Azalea had to get back, or she would freeze to death. The storm whipped through her frozen wet clothes. She had to change and get to a fire. Shivering hard, Azalea tried to grasp Dickens’s saddle. She missed, her hands frozen blocks; they knocked against the leather casing of the sword.
The sword! Azalea fumbled at the top metal ring and felt as though she had fallen into the icy water again. Except this time, it drenched her inside, coating her stomach.
The sword was gone.
CHAPTER 25
Shivering violently, Azalea sludged through the icy water for any glint of silver or flash of light. She searched through the blizzard, up and down the bank, the wind so cold she couldn’t feel it.
The sword was gone. She knew it. She had known it the moment she heard the hard clang of it against the rocks when they fell, and had had the same choking, empty feeling she felt when the King had unmagicked the sugar teeth. Except this was a thousand times worse. Azalea fell against Dickens. She had to find the King.
Azalea didn’t know how she managed to mount, or how Dickens picked his way up the rocks and muddy embankment and through the thick foggy snow to the palace. She let him steer his own way back. When he trotted into the stable, Azalea hadn’t the strength to hang on anymore, and she fell.
She was awkwardly caught just before she hit the dirt floor.
“There now, Miss! You’re frozen up!”
“Mr. P-P-Pudding,” she chattered. She had to blink several times to see him and a partly saddled Milton clearly.
“Where have you been, then, Miss? The household is in a right state of worry for you, and the King has been out and about for you, Miss! You’re soaked through—come along, we’ll get you warm then, I’ll send for Sir John. You’re burning up and up!”