Page 24 of The Iron Hex

“And if all of this is true,” Eira continued as she tried to exhale some of the stress out of her body, “which I am still struggling to believe it is, you’re going to need to do a good job of filling in the gaps in my knowledge until we can find a witch that can reverse this.”

He held out his good hand.

Eira took it, her hand eclipsed in his massive calloused one as he squeezed it and shook.

“You have a deal, your ladyship,” Hugo said, hand lingering.

“One more thing,” Eira said, letting go of Hugo’s hand despite the desire she felt to keep holding it. “Just call me Eira, okay?”

Hugo chuckled and nodded. “Okay.”

Eira quickly scooped up the rest of her belongings, as well as Hugo’s pack, before urging Pennyroyal into her bag and heading out the door.

Arthur greeted them with a whinny as they arrived at the dimly lit stables where he’d been kept for the day as Hugo slept. He sniffed at Hugo’s shoulder, huffing as he smelled the blood and herbs.

“I can’t lift myself. I need help.” Hugo turned to Eira, quickly glancing at her and then away. “Get on and then help pull me up.”

Was he... ashamed that he couldn’t get himself onto his horse?

“I also—” Eira started to say that she didn’t know how to get on a horse but felt something she could only describe as muscle memory take over as she gripped the saddle. There was no memory in her head of her ever mounting a horse, and yet instinctively she knew that if she swung her leg a particular way, she could lever herself onto Arthur’s saddle. So she tried, and succeeded in mounting Arthur nearly flawlessly.

“I told you,” Hugo said with a pained grin as he held his good arm up so Eira could help him into the saddle behind her.

With significant huffing and heaving, and only minimal impact to Hugo’s shoulder, the two managed to get him seated behind Eira, her bag carrying Pennyroyal and her herb stash strapped around him.

“Okay... now what?” Eira said, holding Arthur’s reins and feeling him shiver beneath her in his excitement to get going.

“We ride,” Hugo grunted.

“How?” Eira said.

“You just flawlessly jumped on the saddle—you know how.”

“I... I—” Eira stuttered before realizing it. Muscle memory. That’s how she was going to access physical memories she didn’t have. If she just stopped thinking so hard and let her body do the work it apparently remembered, maybe they could get out of here. Eira closed her eyes and loosely held the reins, willing her body to move.

They sat for a long moment of stillness, Hugo planting his hand on her waist to steady himself. She fought back a gasp at that. Finally, she felt the urge to dig her heels into the horse, and once she did it felt like the pieces all fell into place.

Once Arthur started moving, Eira knew how to steer and started instinctively holding the reins wrapped around her left hand. The familiarity of it felt stranger than anything else. If Eira hadn’t believed before that something was deeply wrong with her memory, she couldn’t refute it now. She could feel knowledge buried in her brain trying to force its way out, but unable to. It made her feel sick; she knew that somewhere in that locked-off part of her brain was the whereabouts of a missing woman. Eira glanced at Hugo behind her as they trotted out of town, a single question nagging at her. Hugo wanted to find the princess, but was Hugo the right person to find out where the princess was?

15

Hugo

Two nights in a row of riding through the night was grueling, but Hugo knew they needed to get as far as they could from where Sir Saoirse had been. The two of them were already a target, and when Saoirse’s body was found it would only get worse, although part of him wondered if the Iron Empire would try to sweep that under the rug because of... whatever she had been turned into.

They rode for hours, Hugo guiding Eira through forested areas that were shortcuts to get them farther south, his arm wrapped around her ample and soft waist. She’d taken the news about who she really was remarkably well, although Hugo wondered if she was in shock, at least to some degree. All of his pent-up frustration with her weighed on him. He’d assumed she was pretending not to know him out of some petty sense of anger or malice, and so he’d been crueler to her than she had deserved. If a witch had truly wiped her memory, he couldn’t fathom how confusing all of this must be to her.

More importantly, he had noticed in the last half hour thatshe’d started to loosen her grip on the reins, a telltale sign that she was starting to feel drowsy.

“Arthur,” he said, grabbing the reins with his good hand, which was snaked around Eira’s waist, and pulled back. “Stop, buddy.”

The horse slowed to a stop and stomped his hooves.

“You want to run, I know. Soon.” Hugo patted the gelding’s side with his good hand.

“Why are you stopping us in the middle of the forest?” Eira said with a yawn.

“We’re setting up camp,”