"Are you over that rotten friend of yours?" Emel asked, before thrusting herself in a story. Henri listened, wide-eyed and increasingly annoyed. Who was she to talk about his Sophie anyway?

"So, Beznik returned from dropping her off in the North, and he kept waxing on and on how she was, in no disrespect, a bit too much of a hussy for him. Apparently she recounted the many men she'd bedded. Beznik is a bit inexperienced if you know what I mean. He can't handle that much woman." Emel laughed, not realizing how this story caused Henri's face to blush and heart to race.

Sophie was Sophie. She'd been with guys from the Vallee; he knew this, but none of his friends. Sophie was off limits. Sophie was his.

At least he'd thought.

He bit his lip, reconsidering the choice to come all this way. Maybe Emel wasn't the person to bring along. Maybe this was something he needed to do alone.

"So you snuck off from the bakery? Here to chat it up with the crazy gypsies?" she asked, still smiling pleasantly. She was pleasant, Henri noticed. She was fun and dramatic and silly and strong. She had put Sophie in her place, after all, forcing Beznik on her.

"I need to leave, too. I wanted to know if you'd want to come with." Henri asked her.

Emel's eyes glowed with happiness. Merde, Henri immediately thought. The impact of him asking was too big. She probably thought he thought of her like that.

The way he still, irrevocably, thought of Sophie. He was not over her, not even a little. Not even a bit.

He loved her.

"Where do you want to go?" she asked excitedly, already pulling him by his hands toward the wagons circling.

"That's the thing," he said, hesitating. "I need to find Sophie. I think she's in trouble."

Emel let go of his hands and threw hers up in the air.

"Are you serious? You want to chase after her?"

Henri nodded his head, knowing it might be foolish to try and find her, but also knowing the look on the faces of the King's Legion. They were looking for her. He knew it.

"She basically told you she thought you were pathetic and there was not a chance in the Hedge that you'd ever be with her like that!"

"But--"

"Henri. Listen. I will go with you. I mean obviously I like you. You know that, right?"

Henri looked at her blankly.

"My people don't hang out with your people. Why do you think I was okay with you coming here and visiting the first time? Or the next?"

"Because you were bored?" he tried.

She shook her head, "Why do you think I kicked Sophie out with my brother?"

"You're nice?" Henri tried.

"Oh Hedge, you're such a boy. A boy infatuated with Sophie's ridiculous good looks and haughty indifference."

Henri looked at Emel, who was exquisite in her own exotic, handspun sugar, sort of way. If Sophie was dark chocolate, Emel was meringue.

"Sophie and I have history. She's like the butter to my croissant."

Emel started laughing and didn't try to pretend she wasn't.

"I am not pathetic. Well, that croissant thing was pretty pathetic, but usually I'm pretty great. I just happen to really, really, really, care for her. She's been my everything for forever and I think she's in trouble. Can we ask Miora?"

"She's dead."

"What?" Henri asked incredulously, this was impossible. She was here, alive enough to be reading stones, terrifying him and Sophie with her omen. Now she was dead?

"I know. But she was exceptionally old, like over two hundred years old-old." Emel said this quite matter-of-factly.

"That isn't possible. It's like against the law of nature."

"See, this is why I like you. You are so scientific. Does this help you when you bake? Like, with calculated measurements?"

They were standing outside of Miora's wagon, or her old wagon. Henri didn't know what to think. His first thought was that he wanted to tell Sophie about Miora.

"She died? After talking to us? Did she ... I mean, I know Sophie was pretty mad at her for the reading...." Henri didn't want to think it was possible. Sophie was mean, but not a murderer.

"It wasn't Sophie. It was something else. Maybe old age, but I was with her when she was leaving. She kept mumbling about a Hedge and a garnet stone and blood red."

Emel shook her head, as she leaned against the peeling yellow paint of the wagon. Henri watched her, knowing how hard this must be for her.

"I don't know what the words meant. Magic affected Miora different. She liked the concreteness of stone readings; it seemed more solid than the creepy, old, dark magic of the devins-guerisseurs of Gemmes. When she died, she was on shaky ground that I didn't understand."

"I'm sorry," Henri said.

"Thanks, but it is what it is. Miora lived a long, beautiful life. That's all we can hope for," Emel spoke with eyes still bright; though she'd lost someone she loved too.

"So what happens to you? You were her apprentice, right?"

"I'm the new Miora," Emel said, giving Henri a curtsy, and then swinging open the door of the wagon.

"You're moving up in the world. No more bunking with Beznik," Henri said laughing.

"Exactly."

"You can't go with me then, you have, like, a fancy job. Duties to your people," Henri said.

Now it was Emel's turn to laugh. They walked inside the wagon, a curtained space musky and dark.

"Henri, you know nothing about anything."

"Enlighten me."

"The main benefit of being a Boheme is that you don't have to answer to anyone. I am my own person. This is my wagon. It has wheels. I go where I want."

Henri's mind flashed to Sophie again, how before Miora's reading this was all she wanted. A set of wheels.

"So if you're the new Miora, can you tell me where Sophie is?" Henri dug a jasper from his pocket, setting it on the table.

"A mere jasper will only buy a tiny hint."

Henri emptied his pockets.

Tamsin En Route to Tristan, Gemmes The beast fell.

It was the most beautiful fall she had ever seen.

Her entire body felt the echo as its unearthly composition hit the ground, followed by the Rider, stabbed in his side by one of the king's men.

The Rider and Horse dissolved in a dust born of life and death. The remaining Riders of the Hedge watched stoically. The woman partnered with the fallen Rider placed her hand to her heart, eyes closed, a stillness that gave Tamsin pause. She was too serene for such a horror. Treala gripped Victor's arm tightly, as they witnessed a loss Tamsin herself didn't quite understand. How was it possible for the Rider to experience a second death? But there was much she didn't understand, that much she was certain. She suspected the murder of one of their own was like a death in the family. Heartbreaking and requiring a pause from their pursuit of Sophie.

The Riders reached out to one another and clung to the hands of their partners, gaining strength by the circle they created. The King's Legion watched the dreamlike reaction before them that none of them understood.

Time stopped, but it wasn't from one of her spells. This was a stillness borne from the injustice requested of the king, acted on by his man. It was as though the Legion knew what transpired held more significance than a fallen horse. They had stepped in the wrinkle of time by severing the life of a Hedge Rider.

How could we? We live on this earth; we tread this soil, Tamsin thought, knowing the Hedge Riders were different from herself. Remy kept his hand on her shoulder, unable to speak, as he watched alongside Tamsin.

The single cry that came forth was her own, as she looked at Marcus. He hadn't drawn his sword. No silver blood from the Rider dripped from his blade, like the sword of the man beside him. Marcus hid, although he stood in front. He was a coward dressed as a king.

Tamsin hated him for what he'd forced her to do, hated herself even more for obliging. She wanted Marcus dead, knowing she had to leave this world within days herself. She promised herself in exchange for giving Sophie a chance. A life for a life. A swell of rage swept through her body, she wasn't interested in tit for tat.

She wanted revenge. She had lost her life because he forced her in a corner.

"Do something!" she screamed at Victor, who looked at her with sympathy.

He shook his head, "It is not my duty."

The woman next to the vanished Rider raised her voice, and spoke clearly, like crystals dripping from a cave, "He goes, yet it is not our job to make him return. We are not like you, woman. We are not from here."

When she had called upon the Hedge for help, she didn't want to bring them harm, but they didn't seem to understand. Magic was a complicated game of give and take. Choices had consequences. You can't cast a spell without costs. That isn't the way it works. That was the reason the devins-guerisseurs before her ultimately perished.

They hadn't wanted to play by any rules. They wanted to cast dark curses without repercussion. Tamsin had always felt that her family was gone, killed at the stake by Marcus's father, for this exact reason. They were eventually forced to pay for the dark magic they doled.

Nothing comes without a price, in magic or in life. She still remembered the screams from the night when the princess was born, they haunted her always.

After the chests were sealed, a lone babe's cry broke the magic and Tamsin needed only take one look at the king to know his will was done. She grabbed the swaddled babe and ran for the window, like she should have braved before. She leapt with a fervor consecrated out of fear. She leapt with the knowledge of the gravity of this night. She leapt believing her life would be lost if she didn't obey the king with complete ruthlessness. She leapt and the king's will was done.

As she ran through the dark night, Tamsin heard the screams. Screams of the midwife, a woman once her friend. Aimee now stood at death's threshold. The cost of calling upon Tamsin this night was her life.

The final sound was the unmistakable wail of a woman lost in the tragedy of losing one's child, the orphaned princess now clutched in Tamsin's hands.

Filled with hatred, she knew it was time to draw a line in the sand. A line between herself and the king she should have drawn a long time ago. If the Hedge was incapable of retribution, she would take it upon herself.

Pulling a deep, heavy breath, she inhaled the forest, the life force of the trees pulsing through her. She ripped off a necklace, and uncorked the small bottle, filled with the darkest potion she had ever created. A potion brewed in the night, had simmered in the shadowy places of her mind. She flung the potion toward the king, the air shifting as the poisonous liquid caught the sky. Now that she had made a move, he pulled out his sword. The wind rustled behind them and heavy clouds appeared over them, luminous and threatening. Cackles of lightening thundered through the sky as Tamsin steeled herself for the next part. The part where she planted herself solidly on the side of revenge. If she couldn't save Sophie, the man who stole the child's life would pay.

"Just tell me where the girl is and we will leave you be, sorciere!" he yelled at her, but she shook her head deftly, knowing that this was the end of the road for the king of Gemmes. The Hedge Riders and horses backed up, but the Legion remained in what appeared to be a daze. That was their price for willingly accepting the King's command.

She knew all things had a cost. She could accept the consequences, so long as the king took his as well. Tamsin believed you couldn't send away your child without penalty. She believed that one didn't kill a Hedge Rider without punishment.

"Stop Tamsin, it's treason to...." Remy spoke with a quiet fear. His eyes darted at the men, many of whom were still paralyzed from the visions of the Rider now murdered.

Tamsin planned on using their distraction for her benefit. She whispered words to the king as the potion she flung dissolved in the air around him, sealing the space, rustling the leaves on the trees and the dark places inside of her, A tit for a tat, a here for a there, you can't have two without a pair.

Take his soul, seal it away.

He chose this path one fateful day.

Just as the Hedge Rider ordered to die disappeared, so did the king's soul. It vanished in thin air from this world, leaving his strong body lifeless, dropping to the ground, empty of breath, void of life.

Tamsin would never believe, if anyone had asked her before, that she would murder the king, or that she would willingly take a life. His life. After all, that was the very thing haunting her for the last seventeen years.

Things changed when she was face to face, once again; with the person she claimed ruined her life.

Remy withdrew from her, in fear. The man in the King's Legion, who had drawn his sword when Marcus commanded, shook as he leaned over the body of the dead king.

No one spoke.

Tamsin was terrifying. She knew this, because she felt it.

She felt herself change.

Her hardened eyes knew everything had changed. A better person she was not. A higher road would not be hers to take.

She turned to Victor, knowing Tristan and Sophie were still missing and needed to be found.

"Tamsin, did you have a choice in that?" Victor asked as his slippery words floated over the King's Legion, as though keeping them in a trance.

"It was something I chose to do," Tamsin said, speaking in a lifeless, voice. A voice that didn't sound like her own. "A heart for a heart, a life for a life. The Hedge Riders life was taken; now the king's life is payment."

"That is where you are wrong, Tamsin. You don't have the authority to play master," Victor answered.

"Oh, and you do? Because you come from another realm, you can dole out what you want? But I can't?"

Victor offered a smile, sadly, as if she was too pitiful to understand. Anything.

Treala spoke, "We are not the creators of the earth. We dwell in the space between. We come to help when people who have the gifts to call on us ask. You, Tamsin, called on us, and we answered, but this," she pointed her long white finger toward the rumpled body of the once strong king, "this is not something we condemn or condone. It is not of us. We aren't life givers or takers. We are space. We are the Hedge."

The spell seemed to break and Tamsin realized the Legion wouldn't stay still, breathless, for much longer. When they remembered what had happened here, they would remember her potion, her incantations. Her death sentence.