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spider in her shoes. So when the dreams about the Kingdom Under Stone had started to come more regularly, she thought that it was just memories combining with other fears. But by last year they had become a nightly event and not just for Petunia, but for all twelve sisters.
    Jonquil suffered the most. She had to take a potion that their oldest brother-in-law, Galen, prepared for her every night, otherwise she was too frightened to even close her eyes. Although the potion was supposed to bring dreamless sleep, she still woke more often than not, screaming and drenched in sweat. Always willowy, Jonquil was becoming gaunt, pickingat her food and not paying half as much attention to her appearance as she once had, which worried them all.
    Petunia heartlessly wished that Jonquil had been the one who had been kidnapped.
She
wouldn’t have slept at all. Petunia had awakened herself shouting abuse at Kestilan, the youngest son of the King Under Stone, who came to her every night and told her that she belonged to him, and only him, forever. She was fairly certain that some of the words she used were of the sort that princesses weren’t even supposed to know, let alone shout in their sleep. At least Oliver wouldn’t be speaking to anyone who knew her, like the grand duchess, and couldn’t carry tales about her behavior.
    “If you would just tell me how to get to the grand duchess’s estate,” Petunia said after a long period in which their feet crunching the cold, dead leaves was the only sound, “I can get there by myself.”
    “I wish I believed that,” Oliver began.
    “Excuse me?” Petunia bristled. “I think I am perfectly capable of finding a large estate that is only a stone’s throw from the main road, thank you!”
    She hated being condescended to. Her older sisters still treated her like a child because she was the youngest, and her father was little better. In his eyes, she was perpetually six and needed to be led by the hand all the time. Yet he trusted her to work in his hothouses. Perhaps he didn’t think flowers required much maturity, just intuition. Reiner Orm, the gardener, certainly didn’t think that she belonged there, now orever. But then, Herr Orm would never forgive her for once using a rosebush as kindling for a campfire nearly eight years before.
    “I’m sorry,” Oliver said, surprised at her reaction. “I didn’t mean anything like that. I just meant that it’s easy to get lost in the forest. We’re cutting straight across the thickest part, using the deer paths. We won’t reach the road until we’re nearly there, and then you can go it alone if you like. But there’s wolves in the forest—”
    “I’m well aware of that,” Petunia said. He had his gray leather wolf mask dangling from the hood of the cloak he wore over his more practical coat, in case he needed to disguise himself, she supposed.
    “I meant real wolves,” he said, his cheeks red. He brandished the rifle he was carrying.
    Petunia didn’t answer that, either. He was right, though. When her father had first heard the reports about the wolves in the woods a few years ago, he had sent out hunters to find them, assuming that the first garbled report of a coach being attacked had meant that four-legged wolves were growing bolder with the coming winter. The clarification that it was men in wolf masks attacking the coaches had meant only that a different kind of hunter was sent out. Their lack of success, Petunia realized, was probably in part due to Oliver and his men making their home in what was now Analousia.
    She supposed she should be grateful that he was willing to guard her all the way to the grand duchess’s. He could havesimply turned her loose in the forest to make her own way. But she was too tired to be grateful, or gracious, and merely trudged alongside him.
    She didn’t remember being tired all the time as a child, though her sisters spoke with horror of the long days and even longer nights that they had