“Edward,” Gran said quietly, her eyes never leaving her work. “You sit down, too.”
He sat and took some deep breaths until he felt marginally less queasy. “Jane’s an E?ian,” he whispered as he watched Gran tend to the little creature.
“So it would seem,” Gran said.
“All this time, it’s all she ever wanted, to be an E?ian. What . . . what is she, exactly?” Edward asked.
“A ferret,” Gifford answered tonelessly. “She’s a ferret.”
“She’d be better off a girl, right now,” Gran said. “If you’re hurt as a human, the wound will be less in your E?ian form—not gone, mind you, but less. If you’re in the animal form when you come to harm . . .” Her lips tightened as she stared down at ferret-Jane. “It would be better if she were human. I could see her wounds more clearly without the fur, for one thing.”
“Can’t we get her to change somehow?” Edward asked, his voice cracking.
Gran shook her head. “The body will stay in whatever shape it feels safest, which is typically the animal. There has to be a conscious decision to overcome the fear, and prompt the change. No. We must wait for her to wake up.” She drew the cloak up over the ferret’s body like she was tucking a child into bed. “We must wait,” she said again.
But what if she doesn’t wake up? thought Edward, but he didn’t say it. He couldn’t.
Gran put one hand on Edward’s shoulder and the other on Gifford’s. “It’s late. I don’t suppose I’m going to convince either of you to get some rest?”
They both shook their heads.
She sighed. “All right. You watch over her, then. Come wake me if anything happens.”
It was morning, the sun not yet visible but lighting the eastern sky, when Jane changed. Edward would not have believed it if he hadn’t seen it—the ferret one moment, his cousin the next, lying curled under the cloak. He jumped to his feet and ran to fetch Gran, but he’d only gone a few steps when he heard Jane moan a name.
“G,” she said.
Gifford. Her husband, he remembered with a pang. Gifford was her husband because Edward had asked her to marry the young lord, even though she’d begged him not to make her go through with it. She’d listened to Edward. Which was why she was lying there now in bandages.
It was all his fault. He was a terrible best friend.
He turned. Gifford was holding Jane’s hand. He brought it to his face and pressed it to his cheek, then kissed her palm. “Jane,” he whispered. “Wake up.”
Her eyes moved behind her eyelids, then fluttered open. “G,” she said again, and the corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. “I thought I might not see you again. . . .”
“You’ll have to work harder than that to be rid of me,” Gifford said.
Edward suddenly felt like he was intruding on something intimate. He took a step backward toward the exit, and his foot shuffled against the rough stone floor.
Jane looked over Gifford’s shoulder and saw him.
“Edward,” she breathed, her brown eyes widening. “EDWARD.”
She gave a choked cry and reached out. Of course he went to her. Gifford straightened and moved out of his way so that Edward could sit beside her and clasp her hand in his.
“You’re alive,” Jane said. “I kept asking to see your body, but they wouldn’t let me, and I thought that perhaps it was all a ruse and you weren’t really gone, that they were lying to me, that you were out there somewhere, and that meant that I wasn’t really the queen and I shouldn’t be there, but it felt like wishful thinking.”
All of those words seemed to exhaust her, and she whimpered and sank back on the table. He noticed, then, that there was blood seeping through the cloak. He turned to ask Gifford to go get Gran, but Gifford had already gone. Gran came hustling through the door, rolling up her sleeves.
“Gran,” Jane said. “We found you, after all.”
“Be quiet, dear,” Gran said. “Rest now.”
Jane sighed and closed her eyes. Gran smoothed the red hair back from Jane’s forehead and started to draw the cloak away from her. Then she stopped and glared at Edward.
“Out with you,” she ordered. “You, too, horse boy.”
Edward turned to see Gifford standing in the doorway, his expression tight. They went outside together, where the first rays of sun were touching the highest stones of the keep.
“I have to go,” Gifford said. “Will you . . . ?”
“I’ll stay with her,” Edward offered.
Gifford lowered his head and nodded stiffly toward his chest. “Thank you.”
Then he was moving away from Edward in long strides across the grass, shedding his clothes as he went, until a light flashed and he was no longer walking, but galloping across the field.