“But when Sir Eckhart couldn’t find the prince anywhere, she ran back in – all the way in – and she was gone for hours. The guests had all been helped home before she came back out, shaky as a new foal, and she wouldn’t say anything about what she’d seen. No one has been able to get in since, but sometimes – at sundown – you can see the shadow of the beast as he walks past the windows.”

“He goes inside, though.” The younger child’s voice had dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, but Petra heard all the same, kept his head bent low over the last of his planting. “He’s never scared.”

“Yes, well, he doesn’t really count.”

“Why not?”

“He’s a witch.” As if, at last, concerned about being overheard, the older sibling had softened her voice, but not nearly enough.  “Witches aren’t scared of anything.”

Blossoms and leaves filled the basket to the point of overflowing, and the weight of them staggered Petra as he struggled to his feet. A borrowed chair creaked under his weight as he hefted the basket up and up and onto the hook in the alcove adjacent to the front door. Its mirror, the product of the morning’s work, hung in the opposite alcove; bees already swirled around the new flowers, curious in their clumsy, rambling way.

Petra had long since given up trying to scratch the dirt out from beneath his fingernails, but he dusted his hands on his apron and brushed the worst of the scattered soil from his trousers. He also made a great deal of extra noise in stomping the dirt from his boots, but even so, as he rounded the corner of the house to step into the high-walled garden behind, the sisters looked up, startled, from where they sat on the lip of the fountain. The eldest curled her bare toes in the water and Petra thought she looked paler than usual beneath her riot of freckles.

“Asa?”

She flinched, and a blush flooded her face from ear to ear.

“Would you tell your mother when she comes home that I’ve finished planting her flowers?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

The younger of the two, darker than her sister, was small enough yet that she stared at Petra without a shred of self-conscious embarrassment, but Petra kept his chin tilted now without prompting, and whatever the girl could see of his face, it was not what she was looking for.

“Thank you, Asa. I’ll be going now.”

“Good-bye, sir. Thank you, sir.”

He turned and retrieved his now-empty basket of supplies, walking fast enough to outdistance the new rustle of whispers behind him. But the words were repeated so often in so many voices that Petra did not need to hear them again in order to feel their sting.

Is that why he can go in the manor? Because he’s beastly, too?

Maybe the prince is afraid of him.