She would pay.

"We need to get the children," Remy spoke in fear, he spoke in vain. Tamsin nodded her head, agreeing. Yes. The princess. Tristan. They needed to go.

"So will you help us, save the girl?" she asked.

"No. Your heart is not fit for her any longer, as we suspected before. You cannot trade your heart for hers, and so she will die." Victor said this calmly, as though she would accept it as fate. "Before we go, however, we will return you to your cottage, for we have promised you safety while in our care. Then we must return to the Hedge to await the fate of our fallen Rider."

All their eyes moved to the king's body, and with trembling hands, Tamsin nodded yes.

She had no choice. She had ruined everything.

"Then let us go, before the soldiers put me on the stake, before they remember what has happened here this day," she answered him.

Victor nodded solemnly, and pulled Remy up on his beast, and Tamsin rode with Treala.

They burned through the forest, Tamsin's chest pounding, knowing she broke so much with her single spell. Would she never learn? She stole a glance at Remy, who rode beside her. She wanted to reach out, take his hand in hers, like the Riders who galloped with hands held, finding strength in the ones beside them.

Remy looked straight ahead, as though too scared to look in her eyes, see her soul.

She understood. She wouldn't want to look at herself either. Not anymore.

Tristan En Route to Tamsin, Gemmes "So this old woman," Tristan said.

"Miora."

"Yes, so Miora gave you a stone reading telling you your devastating future and you ran away?"

"More or less." Sophie was slightly drunk. They both were. She passed the carafe back to Tristan. They had walked for hours sipping as they made their way through the woods.

Tristan smiled as he took the red vin from her hand. They had shared an intoxicating morning tryst, each kiss better than the last. Although they didn't go all the way, they had done most everything else. He flushed thinking about her perfect skin, her body pressed against his in the grass. She was this uninhibited creature, the likes of whom he had never come across before. She pushed his boundaries.

She pushed every boundary.

As she explained the stone reading, with exaggerated annoyance which is how she told every story he was pulled to her so deeply he nearly cried.

"What? You don't like my story? Let me get to the good part. The part where Miora explained what the five stones actually mean. Quick summary, I'm an ego-maniac who doesn't know her parents, abandoned, blah blah blah. Then I'll run away to figure it out ... all of those things are fini ...by the way. Then I'll die. As in death!"

Tristan watched as she took a deep breath, preparing to launch into more explanation. He had to look away and brush a tear from his eye. What is wrong with me?

"Are you crying?" she asked incredulously.

"I don't know what's wrong with me, Sophie. I just. I'm so into you. Like, I've never felt this way before. I want every part of you. It's not love; at least I don't think it is. It's deeper than that. More real."

He pushed his fingers through his hair, in agony. He was scared to actually sleep with her. He was afraid he'd take all of her if he had a chance. Like a creature from a fairy tale, he would eat her flesh if it meant being closer to her.

She electrified him. She terrified him. She was everything.

"Okay...." Sophie bit her lip in a way he found utterly arousing, but he knew enough to know she was not trying to be suggestive.

"Look." She did that circle thing again between them with her finger. "Love is not my thing. Like, at all. I'm not interested. I am interested in finding my mother. In finding the tresor remember the tresor? Focus on that, instead of me! Or, focus on how you want to spend the tresor! Anything, at all, besides what you want from us. This is not going to end in a happily-ever after. That is not my style. At all."

She puffed her cheeks like this happened to be the most obnoxious conversation she'd ever endured in her life. Her views changed the way Tristan saw himself. Everyone always loved him. Like, loved him, loved him. He was charming and smart and a flirt.

He was not rejected. In fact, he was un-rejectable on every account he had ever observed.

Sophie paused, raising her eyebrows suggestively. "Although, I suppose I am not entirely opposed to exploring things besides our hearts. Like, your body and mine."

"Bijou, you are absolutely killing me here. If this is the place you're at right now," he did the circle thing too, "then I can't be intimate with you, for a bit. Until I can get over the love thing. Because it hurts."

"It hurts? Did you actually say that?" she teased, laughing at him. "Okay, Tristan. Try to stay away from this, then."

Sophie pursed her lips seductively, and pushed him in the tree on the wooded path.

"You don't want this?" she probed, pressing her red lips against his. Her kisses were insanity. They were wanton and warm and filled with lust.

Tristan whimpered. Actually whimpered from under her.

"Or this," she tested, pressing her hips squarely against his. "You don't want this?"

Tristan moaned. He couldn't not. She kept kissing him, aggressive in all the right ways, but he couldn't stop thinking how much he cared for her, desired her in a more visceral way than touch, than hands groping the places that wanted to be groped.

He pulled back, finding strength deep within.

"Bijou. Don't do this. It will hurt so much when you toss me aside."

"Fine," she pushed off him, and stood, hips at an angle, arms crossed against her chest. She turned ice cold in her stare down. "Fine, Tristan. Let's get to this sorciere's house and figure out where your stupid gem is."

"Don't be like this," Tristan said, pulling at her arm, wanting to lace his fingers in hers, affectionately. Wanting to dream about how they would spend the tresor together, forever.

Tristan couldn't seem to remember that she had no interest in a future with him, though she'd made that as clear as the blue sky above them.

"Tristan, umm, what is that?" she asked, pointing behind the tree his body pressed against.

He looked at her, thinking she would utter another ill-mannered thing, but she didn't. She looked scared. The same wide-eyes she had when she saw the ghost rider people at the Auberge.

He turned and saw, before he heard. The king's flags waved along the road that was behind them.

"Merde."

"It is the king?" Sophie asked, disbelievingly.

"I bet. However, he doesn't like me. Well, not him personally, see Bijou, his people are after my gems. We must go. They want me."

"Can't we just see them, watch them ride past, hide in the trees? I've never seen the Legion."

"He's an ass on every account I've ever heard, we should hide before they see us." Fear rushed through him as he grabbed her hand, wanting to push her in the bushes so the riders wouldn't catch sight of them. Of him.

"Fine, okay!" Sophie followed him in the thick forest growth. The hem of her skirt caught on a thorny branch, and she tried to yank it off.

"Get down!" he whispered.

"I'm trying, Tristan." She glowered at him. "Hedge," she tugged roughly at the skirt again, finally getting it free. The quick movement, however, caused the strap on her pack to break apart and fling open. The pouch holding her creme caramels fell to the ground, pouring open. They rolled, seemingly in slow motion, across the road. One after another.

Sophie and Tristan stopped moving and watched as the tiny rounds of sugar spun to a stop on the dirt ground.

They stopped as a soldier in the King's Legion shouted loudly, "Halt! Who goes there?"

Tristan knew they were caught the moment he heard the booming voice, heard the soldiers as they dropped to their feet, in search of this not-so-discreet pair.

Queen Cozette Palace Royale, Gemmes "My queen...." Drake wrung his gloves nervously in his hands.

"What is it Drake?" Her heart started to beat faster. Where was the king? Why was he not with this returning company?

"The king was ... is...."

And then she knew.

Drake didn't have to finish. He was gone. She looked in the courtyard and saw guards carrying a covered body.

Her hand flew to her mouth.

The king, her husband, was dead.

Cozette realized, in that instant, falling was not a motion, not an action that occurred to a person or a thing. No, she realized falling was a feeling, deep inside, that was continuous and unending. The falling contained all the things she wanted to keep in the air. Things no longer capable of suspension.

Cozette saw that falling was the moment when nothing is in the place it should be. It was everywhere and nowhere. Falling was nothingness. It reminded her of the stories she'd heard as a child, make-believe stories of the Hedge, the place between.

That was the figurative place she went when she learned from Drake that her husband was dead.

She didn't believe him at first. She floated down the now seemingly sterile halls of her grand palace toward the body Drake said was her husband. The man who held so much, yet delivered so little. The man who was here, throughout, regardless.

She saw his body. Not a scrap or a bruise. Not a cut or a slash. No burn, no bleed. His body was wholly there, just not in spirit.

His soul was the part that was floating; perhaps it had already landed somewhere. Cozette realized, with deep, tender longing within her chest, as she ached for the things that were never to be.

She ached for the man because she knew, more than anyone else, in ways no one else ever would, the severe suffering Marcus felt so many days of his life.

She thought it right that he suffered not in death, as well.

"How did it...?"

Happen? Start? End?

Cozette didn't know what to ask Drake. There was no right way to ask how one's husband was murdered, no way to put words to the longing that would never, ever, be filled again.

No way to put words to the fall.

Drake's wife, Nicolette, was there in her chamber. A more faithful friend Cozette never had. Scarlet, her chambermaid watched solemnly in the corner. Drake stood in the room, too, the bearer of the news. Now bound to stay until dismissed by the queen.

The sole ruler of Gemmes.

"It seems the Tresor de L'espoir was not the only legend that has come true. Hedge Riders rode there as well," Drake said, to the hushed shock from the women around him.

Cozette smiled in disbelief. Because that was what everything would be from now on. Disbelief. How could she ever believe that as soon as she heard she had a child near her death, she would lose the man who sentenced her so?

Disbelief.

"That can't be true, Drake," Nicolette said with reproach.

"They were looking for my girl, weren't they? The Hedge Riders?" Cozette asked with a shaky voice, realizing the Hedge was real. She had spent her childhood imagining the unearthly Riders, depicted in fairy tales and storybooks. Like anyone else, she wanted the place the Hedge came from to exist. If it did, then there was life after death. She wanted them to be real.

And they were.

They were looking for the girl who was living because of a dark spell. Her girl.

Maybe she wouldn't be forced to live a life of disbelief after all. If she found her girl, maybe there would be the possibility of belief. Marcus might not rise from the dead, but stranger things were happening, weren't they? Her once dead daughter was nearly found.

"Your daughter." Nicolette trembled as she knelt next to Cozette. She'd faithfully stayed by her side for so many years of mourning.

Cozette had already explained to Nicolette, her oldest confidant, what Marcus had told her before he left to look for her girl. Drake explained to them how search parties scoured the country for any girl who might be the one. They awaited word from her as to when they should leave their posts to honor His Majesty.

Cozette didn't have to fight to blink back any tears. There were none. She didn't have time to cry when there was so much on the line. She had to find her daughter, before she died.

Losing them both in one fell swoop was too much to imagine. So she didn't.

"Scarlet, you need to pack a trunk. Drake, gather a traveling party for me, I'll meet the Legion in the Montagne and find my girl. I'll know her when I see her."

She turned to Nicolette. "You must plan the ball, in my absence. It will be the largest fte of the century. It will no longer be a party to celebrate trade routes no. It will be to celebrate the return of the Princess of Gemmes."

"But she might...." Nicolette whispered, tears in her eyes.

"Die? That is the word you are scared to use? Do not use it. My girl will be found. We'll find a way to make her live, if it is the last thing I do."

"Of course, Cozette. I will work on all the preparations. But the King...." Nicolette's voice always trailed off. She wasn't the sort of woman strong enough to say what she thought.

Cozette, however, was. A part of her, that buried part that was once tough, seemed to emerge as Marcus's grip was suddenly loosened. She made a quick decision; she needed to lie to rest the past, so she might begin her future. It wasn't callous; it was what Marcus would have wanted her to do.

Grieving would come later. After.

"We must have the funeral, it's only right. Time is of the essence. Drake, have the people been notified of his death?"

"We have scribes working on letters to send with the carrier doves as we speak. If you want to hold off until after you find the girl ... perhaps we can keep the news of his death to rumors. Until we can properly grieve as a nation."

Cozette took in his suggestion. She always believed one of Marcus's most redeeming qualities, as a leader, was that he had Drake as his right hand man.

"I don't want to pretend it never happened. As queen, I will not ignore the truth. Our king is dead. Send the letters. Royally pronounce his death. The funeral will be tomorrow. Then I will go find my daughter. Later we can mourn."

Nicolette ran to her friend's arms, embracing Cozette's narrow shoulders and kissing her cheeks. "You are so brave, so strong. You will find your girl. Your beating hearts will find each other."