Princess of the Silver Woods (Twelve Dancing Princesses) (2 page)

Petunia tried to stick her head out of the window to see what had become of the guard, but she was thrown sideways, landing on top of Maria. The horses screamed, the coachman cursed, and they came to a halt with the coach tilted so far to the right that Petunia would have fallen out the window had it not been filled with earth and grass from a roadside bank, upon which they had apparently stuck fast.

She extracted herself from Maria, braced herself against the sloping seats, and tried to get the door open. She was short, but surely not too short to reach up and just—

“Allow me, Your Highness,” said the coachman, flinging open the door from the outside and making Petunia shriek in surprise. “Sorry,” he said, abashed.

“It’s all right,” she told him, when she had taken a deep breath.

She grabbed his forearm and allowed herself to be pulled up and out of the door, to sit on the upward side of the coach. The coachman stretched back through the door to pull out Maria, who stopped having hysterics long enough to clamber out with much groaning and panting.

From her vantage point, Petunia could see exactly what had happened: the road curved sharply to the left on its way through the forest. The panicked horses, going much too fast with a heavy coach behind them, had failed to make the turn and smashed into the high bank.

The other outrider was with the horses, soothing them. Petunia could see that one horse was severely injured, and another looked to be favoring a foreleg. She looked back up the road but couldn’t see any sign of the two-legged wolves or the injured man.

Petunia did not know what to do. She was not good with blood, preferring to spend her days gardening in the calm of her father’s hothouses. And as the youngest, she rarely had to make any decisions, her father having very strong ideas about what his daughters could and could not do, and her eleven sisters nosing in on anything that their father didn’t. The most drastic thing Petunia had done in recent memory was to
have one of her oldest sister Rose’s old gowns remade into this cloak.

But now what to do? She was supposed to be at the Grand Duchess Volenskaya’s estate by nightfall, but the coach was broken, a man was hurt, and the horses were in no state to continue. Should she and Maria walk back to Bruch? Or should they wait for someone to find them? A shiver ran down her spine. The bandits had surely seen what had happened.

“Are there any estates close by?” she asked the coachman.

“None until we reach the grand duchess’s, Your Highness,” he said uneasily.

“What about an inn?”

“I’m afraid not, Your Highness.”

He, too, was scanning the forest for the bandits. He climbed down from the coach and went to confer with a guard who was removing the harness of one of the horses. The men talked in low voices for a moment, and then the coachman ran back along the road to the injured man.

“Should I go and help him?” Petunia called to the guard with the horses.

“No, no, Your Highness!” The man took an anxious step toward her. “You stay right where you are!”

Uneasy, Petunia clung to the side of the coach and looked inside for her pistol. It was there at the bottom among the tangle of her knitting basket. She felt an itching between her shoulder blades and
knew
the bandits were watching her from the trees.

“Allow me, Your Highness.”

One of the guards climbed inside and fetched the entire mess out, and Petunia distracted Maria from her fits by having the maid help her untangle the yarn and put everything neatly away, the pistol on top within easy reach.

“Now, just sit here and let the menfolk take care of matters,” Maria chided her.

Petunia tried. But sitting still, she was confronted with a more urgent question than whether to walk on or wait for help. She tried to ignore it, but by the time the coachman had helped the half-fainting guard back to the coach, she could no longer sit still.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, sliding down off the coach.

“Princess Petunia! Where are you going?” Maria squawked.

“Into the bushes,” Petunia said as casually as she could, while the coachman and the guards all opened their mouths to protest. “I’ll be right back, and I’m armed,” she assured them, tilting her basket to display the pistol resting atop her red wool, and then she climbed up the bank and into the underbrush before anyone could accompany her.

She did not need an audience to watch her relieve herself!

Kidnapper

Oliver sent his men back to the old hall by various routes, leaving only himself and his brother Simon to peer at the wreckage of the coach they had almost robbed. They took cover high up in one of the trees, on a platform concealed by branches and a few dead winter leaves.

“Does this happen a lot?” Simon leaned farther over the edge of the platform, and Oliver pulled him back before he fell.

“You mean, do we often cause people to crash their coaches?” Oliver couldn’t keep the irritation out of his voice. “No, we don’t!”

“I mean, one person points a gun at you and you back off,” Simon said.

Oliver spluttered for a moment, insulted. “That crazy little girl had a pistol one inch from my right eye, Simon!”

“She was a little girl?” Simon looked like he was going to make a smart remark, but the expression on Oliver’s face stopped him.

“I don’t know how old she was,” Oliver snapped. “But she wasn’t very big, all right?”

“So was she small
young
or small
little
?” Simon pressed.

“Shush,” Oliver said.

The truth was, Oliver really didn’t know how old the girl was. Judging by the cut of her gown and her high-piled dark hair, she was in her late teens, but she was barely tall enough to look back at him through the high windows of the coach, and the hands holding the pistol had been just large enough to grip it. She also had the bluest eyes Oliver had ever seen, but that told him nothing.

Nor did he know why he had been so offended at her dismissing her father as being “a lowly earl.” Earls often held a great deal of land and wealth and enjoyed prime places at court. There was no need for her to be insulting about it, and toward her own father.

But there’d been a flicker in her eyes when she’d said it. Perhaps she was downplaying her family’s wealth and position in order to get away from him. The coach had been of good quality and so had the horses, before the crash, and she had a maid and three guards, plus the coachman. Of course, anyone traveling through the woods now had at least two guards with them, not that it stopped Oliver and his men from taking what they liked. Usually.

The combination of the pistol leveled at his eye and the girl’s insistence that she was only an earl’s daughter—though a friend of the royal court—had made Oliver hesitate. They
had enough for now; they didn’t really need whatever the girl was hiding in her trunks. There was no harm in letting her go.

But then the horses had startled, and his men had barely had time to get out of the way of the stampede. A stray bullet had narrowly missed Simon, and then the idiot atop the coach had fallen onto the road. It rubbed Oliver’s conscience raw not to help, but Oliver had to remember that he was the villain and it was not his place to assist someone he had almost robbed.

Simon, he was sure, had been hoping to see some grisly injuries, but Oliver had been praying that the girl and her maid wouldn’t come to any harm. He would have stepped forward to help, then; he hadn’t sunk so low as to refuse an injured woman aid.

Not yet, anyway.

“What’s she doing?” Simon’s voice was hushed.

“What now?”

Oliver leaned in close to his brother, peering over the edge of the platform. The girl had gotten off the coach and was saying something. Her people didn’t look pleased, but she turned her back on them and went into the woods anyway.

“What is she doing?” Simon asked again. “Is she mad?”

As the girl stepped behind a large clump of juniper and flipped her heavy cloak up around her shoulders, Oliver felt the heat rise in his cheeks. He knew exactly what the girl was doing. He clapped a hand over Simon’s eyes.

“Hey!”

“Shush, you,” Oliver hissed.

“Get off!” Simon tried to pry off his brother’s hand.

“You don’t need to watch her … taking a …” He suddenly couldn’t think of a polite way to say it.

Simon went still, but he started laughing, and not quietly. “Are you serious? I guess sometimes even the high and mighty have to pee in the bushes!”

“Simon, be quiet!”

Oliver had been trying not to watch, but now he checked to make sure that the girl couldn’t hear them. He regretted taking Simon with them. The boy was barely fourteen and completely incapable of staying quiet for more than a pair of minutes. Oliver had started robbing coaches under the guidance of Karl and his father’s other men when he was twelve, but their mother had coddled Simon.

The girl was looking around, but it wasn’t stopping her from doing … what it was she needed to do. Oliver quickly looked away.

When he peeked again, she was gone. He let go of Simon’s face.

“I’m not five; you don’t have to cover my eyes like that,” Simon griped.

Oliver couldn’t see the girl anywhere. She hadn’t gone back to the coach. The other guards were busy splinting the injured man’s arm, but Oliver could see that the maid was watching the underbrush nervously, beginning to worry about her charge.

“Where did she go?” Simon strained the upper half of his
body over the edge of the platform. “Uh-oh,” he began, and then he fell.

“Simon!”

Oliver grabbed the edge of the platform and leaned over to see where his brother had fallen. Simon had landed badly and was clutching one ankle and moaning. Standing over him, holding a pistol, was the girl. The gleaming blackness of her hair and pistol made a dramatic picture with her red cloak, Oliver noted. Then he drew his own weapon and leaped lightly down to her side.

“Give me the pistol, Your Ladyship,” he said coolly, holding out his free hand.

“Why should I?”

She had courage, Oliver would give her that. Her voice didn’t waver at all, and she barely flinched when he cocked his pistol in her ear.

“Because one of us is a dangerous criminal, and one of us is not,” Oliver said, praying silently that she would give in. “And which do you think is more likely to shoot?”

With a sigh, the girl released the hammer of her pistol and handed it to Oliver, who stuck it in his belt. He tried not to show his relief, and heartily wished that he and Simon were still wearing their masks.

“I’ve faced worse than you,” she announced.

“I’m sure you have,” Oliver said, startled. She certainly didn’t seem afraid of him, which he found flattering and insulting at the same time.

“Oliver, my ankle is broken,” Simon whimpered.

“Your name is Oliver?” The princess raised her eyebrows. “Not a very wolfish name.”

Oliver felt ice sliding through his gut. She had seen their faces and now she knew his name. He was holding a gun to her head, Simon was starting to cry from pain, and he could hear the voice of her coachman, who was starting to wonder where she had gone. This was not how his day was supposed to go.

“Move,” he said. He pointed with the gun toward the deer path that led back to the old hall. “Now.”

“I beg your pardon?”

It had clearly never occurred to her that he would abduct her. That made two of them. Three, actually: Simon had stopped crying and looked equally flabbergasted.

Oliver already regretted it, but he didn’t know what else to do. Let her go? And then what? They couldn’t move very fast, not if Simon’s ankle really was broken. She would have ample time to summon her coachman and the uninjured guards. Oliver could not afford to be captured. Too many people were relying on him.

“Go,” he snarled.

The girl went, stumbling a little over a tree root before she reached the path. When she was a few paces ahead, Oliver stooped down and grabbed Simon’s elbow with his free hand, pulling his brother upright. He got Simon’s arm around his shoulders, and they hobbled after the girl.

They were safely concealed by trees before the maid and the coachman started to look for their charge in earnest,
much to Oliver’s relief. Oliver could hear them crashing around in the bushes behind them, but he had Simon and the girl well on their way. Once they got across the stream their tracks would be lost as well.

It was slowgoing with Simon injured and having to keep the pistol in one hand, threatening the girl. And with every step Oliver knew that he had done something terribly wrong. Robbing coaches that looked like they could spare the gold was vastly different from kidnapping. And how old
was
she? She seemed very confident, and he had to admit she was quick with her pistol, but the top of her head probably wouldn’t reach to his collarbone.

“I’m going to hang,” Oliver muttered under his breath.

“What?” Simon gasped. His face was gray and sweaty.

When they came to the stream, Oliver stepped down into the water so that Simon could use the bank to climb onto his brother’s back. Now Oliver had both hands free, but Simon had his arms wrapped around Oliver’s neck strangle-tight. Standing on the bank next to them, the girl gave Simon a concerned look.