Chapter 12: Not Her

He carried me into the hunting lodge in his arms, in front of the Queen's whole party.

Nobody said a word.

I had tried to walk, and he had said, "No," and that was the end of that.

He took me up a plain wooden stair to a plain room.

It held a bed, a washstand and a fire.

He shut the door.

He stood with his back to it for a moment, breathing.

Then he knelt, took my torn boots off one at a time, and began to pick the thorns out of my sleeve.

"You said I'm not her," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"What did you mean?" I asked.

"I meant what I said," he said.

His fingers were careful and slow.

"I knew in the garden," he said. "The afternoon of the luncheon. You put the jug down."

"I put the jug down," I said.

"She would never have put it down," he said. "She'd have thrown it at the Prince, then at me."

"Then she'd have found a table and stood on it."

I stared at him.

"She never apologized in her life," he said. "She never took a second cake. She never said thank you to a footman."

"And she never, once, in six years, looked at me and saw what I was."

"What were you?"

"A man who wanted her," Bastian said. "She was blunt, and proud, and loud."

"She was not kind to people who hadn't earned it. She was the only person in the capital who told me the truth."

"I loved that. I told no one. I stood outside her father's house some nights, in the rain, for no reason at all."

"I'm not her," I said. My voice had gone thin.

"I know," he said.

"I'm not from here."

"I know that too," he said.

He put down the thorn.

"I don't know where you came from," he said. "I don't know what happened to her."

"I know that between the night before that luncheon and the morning of it, the woman I wanted went away."

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