My Lady Jane(48)

There’d be stew—maybe rabbit stew, so tender it almost melted in your mouth, with onion and a bit of carrot and potato, something that would warm his empty belly, at last.

There might even be blackberries.

Edward fell out of the tree. Since he was in the highest branches, his crash down made a spectacular amount of noise, branches breaking and Edward cursing and then thumping hard onto the ground. He landed on his left ankle all wrong, which alerted him to the fact that he had ankles again. He had done it somehow. He had wished to be a human eating human food, and here he was.

The door to the nearest cottage was flung open, and a large, red-faced woman wearing an apron stepped out. She was holding a rolling pin. From behind her wafted the smell of baking bread, which instantly made Edward’s stomach grumble and his mouth began to water.

Lord, he was hungry.

He struggled to his feet. His ankle hurt so much his eyes watered.

“Madam,” he wheezed.

The woman looked him up and down, which is when Edward realized a second important bit of news about himself.

He was, apparently, naked.

Edward tried to respond to this humiliating situation in as kingly a way as possible. Kings didn’t cower down holding their hands in front of their private parts like simpletons. He stood up straight. Tried to look her in the eye.

“Er . . . madam, I know this looks . . . less than ideal, but I can explain. I’m—”

“Pervert!” she screamed.

“No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.”

“You’re one of those filthy E?ians, aren’t you?” she yelled, her face growing even redder in hue.

Or maybe she didn’t have it all wrong.

“This was a decent village, you know, before your kind came around spoiling it. Thieves and murderers, the lot of you. Like those dogs that watch me get dressed through the window and then run away. Perverts!”

“No, I can assure you, I never—”

The woman’s mouth opened and she brandished the rolling pin over her head like a Highland warrior. “PERVERRRRRRRT!” she screamed, and then she ran at him, clubbing him wherever she could reach.

Edward tried to run. His ankle didn’t cooperate, and he was out of breath within a few steps, so he didn’t get away as quickly as he would have liked, but the woman wasn’t in the best of shape, herself. After she’d beat him about the head with her rolling pin a few times, she seemed satisfied to fall back, screaming “Pervert!” after him as Edward stumbled on nakedly through the night.

He tried to steal some clothes that were hanging to dry outside of a farmer’s house, farther down the road, but the farmer had a dog, who wound up giving him a nasty bite on his right leg—the uninjured one, of course. Finally he ended up at another farm in the hayloft of a large barn, hiding under a horse blanket in a pile of prickly hay.

I’m better off as a bird, he thought miserably. He tried to turn himself back—to imagine himself with wings again, but nothing happened. The hay made him sneeze, and then cough, and then cough some more. The poison was still inside of him, working its evil. He was so weak. And now his ankle throbbed. His calf burned from where the dog had bit him. There was a goose egg rising near his temple where the woman had beaned him with the blasted rolling pin, and bruises forming up and down his thin, shivering arms, which bore scabbing cuts from Master Boubou’s bloodletting.

Plus he was cold. And hungry. And horribly, horribly lost.

He buried his face in the blanket and blinked back bitter tears. What he wouldn’t give for his dog right now, her warmth and her protection, even though the thought of Pet as a girl continued to unsettle him. Now Pet was lost to him, too. Everything was lost. Jane. Bess. His crown. The kingdom.

What was he going to do?

Then, because he was exhausted on top of being poisoned and injured and starving, the king—or we suppose that Edward was technically no longer the king at this point, because the carriage he’d seen earlier had contained Jane and Gifford on their way to the castle, and Jane had, only moments before, been crowned the official Queen of England—the boy who had been king, then, dropped off into a fitful sleep.

He woke up with a lantern burning bright next to his head, and a knife at his throat. Because this was the kind of night he was having.

“Hello,” said the owner of the knife.

A girl.

A girl about his age—no older than eighteen, surely, although it was hard to tell in this light—a girl with startling green eyes.

He didn’t dare to move. Because knife.

“Well,” she said after a long moment, “what do you have to say for yourself, then?”

Only Edward didn’t understand what she said, because what he heard was, “Wull, whadja hev to see fer yeself, thun?”

“You’re Scottish,” he murmured. “Am I in Scotland?”

She snorted.

“I’ll take that as a no,” he said.

The green eyes narrowed. The knife didn’t leave his throat.

“Who are you?” she demanded, and he caught her meaning this time. “What are you doing here?”

He didn’t know how to answer her questions. If he told her who he really was, chances were that a) she wouldn’t believe him, and she’d cut his throat, or b) she’d believe him, and because he was the ruler of England and she was Scottish and this was the year 1553, she’d get even more pleasure out of cutting his throat. Neither option ended well for him.