Page 49 of The Iron Hex

Princess Evangeline De Clare was standing in front of him, looking just as she had years ago when he had last seen her. Long, dark brown curls framed an olive-skinned woman dressed in simple skirts and a bodice, a silver locket around her neck glinting in the firelight.

“Please stop kneeling,” she said, motioning for him to stand.

“Hugo?” Eira said. “What’s going on?”

Eira didn’t know who this was. She truly didn’t recognize her best friend. Just another drop in the bucket to prove this memory-magic theory they had.

“Eira.” He quickly turned to her as he stood and grabbed her hands, the tension from his identity being exposed momentarily forgotten. “This is Evangeline.”

“Oh!” she said, eyes taking on a wide stare, just like when she’d discovered her elemental magic.

“What are you doing here?” Hugo asked, stepping away from Eira. “And how did you find us, when I couldn’t find you?”

The princess smiled—devilish, as it always had been.

“Eira,” she said, ignoring Hugo. “Are you okay?”

The princess motioned for Eira to sit with her at the firepit and Eira followed, sitting across from her.

Hugo did the same, leaning over the pit and starting a quick fire, despite pointedly not being invited.Glad to see the princess still doesn’t like me—feels like old times, he thought.

She glared daggers at him as he sat next to Eira.

They all waited for the other to speak, an awkward circle of silence enveloping them.

“Evangeline,” Eira finally said. “How did you find us?”

The princess took a deep breath and let it out before speaking. The silence led to a palpable increase in tension around the fire.

“I’m the fucking rabbit,” she said.

Hugo barked out a laugh. “What?” he almost yelled. He would have kept laughing if Eira’s panicked face searching for Pennyroyal hadn’t stopped him dead in his tracks.

“Eira cast a spell that allows me to turn into a rabbit before she lost her memory.”

“That’s absurd,” Hugo dismissed the notion, shaking his head in disbelief.

“We needed a way for me to get away from the Iron Retinue, and I was pretty recognizable back then.” Evangeline held her hands out before pointing at Hugo. “It was a way for me to be able to safely get from town to town with Eira. It worked well enough to foolyou, didn’t it?”

She had a point there; Hugo hadn’t liked the rabbit per se, but he wasn’t much of an animal lover anyways. He’d assumed his dislike was because he didn’t like small rodents, not because it was literally the princess he’d been searching for.

“You mean to tell us you’ve been traveling in a bag with Eira this whole time? How is that even possible?” He didn’t want it to be true; all of this running around, and she’d been here thewholetime?

“Precisely,” she said. “And believe me, it’s both possibleandmiserable.”

Hugo watched as the princess flicked her gaze back and forth between him and Eira. Eira was figuring something out, her brow crinkled in thought as she watched the fire and then looked to Evangeline.

“I have memories of Pennyroyal going back to my first days in Cilirien,” Eira said, eyes focused on the burgeoning fire as she thought.

“Yes,” Evangeline answered, holding her hands out to the fire and warming them against the chill in the night air.

“Which means you were there when I lost my memory,” Eira continued.

“I was,” Evangeline said concisely.

Hugo knew where Eira was going with this. If Evangeline could tell her who cast the spell, then they would have their first clue to getting Eira’s memory back... but something was stumping him. Why would the princess have remained a rabbit all this time?

“Who cast the spell on me?” Eira asked. “And how do we find them? I need my memories back.”