Eli sighed again, louder this time, but Nico didn’t look back. Shaking his head, he jogged after her, stopping a moment to say good morning to Gin, who was still growling, before joining the others in the hut.
“You know this is a terrible plan,” Gin growled.
“Yes,” Miranda said, pulling the long tunic dress over her head. “You’ve told me so every ten minutes since sunrise.”
They were in the tiny space behind the forester’s hut, wedged between the trees and the crumbling stone. Gin was slouched by the hut’s corner, his body blocking the opening to the clearing so Miranda could have some privacy while she changed into the costume Josef had shoved into her hands a few minutes ago, when he and Nico had finally returned from wherever they’d been. She’d never been so happy to see them. A whole morning alone with the king and Eli had almost been more than she could stand.
“Disguise yourselves and sneak into the castle?” Gin snorted, making the low-hanging branches dance. “How are you going to get through the doors with no spirits? Wait for the thief to charm them all? And he didn’t say a thing about what you’d do when you actually got in. I’m telling you, it’s never going to work.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Miranda said, finding the opening for her head at last. “Eli’s terrible plans have an interesting habit of working out.”
Gin rolled his eyes. “Because his kidnapping plan went so well.”
“Up until us, yes it did,” Miranda said, giving him a sharp look. “I don’t like this any more than you do, mutt, but we’re in deep now, so we might as well do our best.”
Gin kept grumbling, but Miranda ignored him. She smoothed the bulky dress over her shift with a final wiggle, and then, reaching awkwardly behind her, tied it with the strings sewn into the back. Next, she reached up and pulled her hair as tight as she could, knotting it in place at the base of her neck with a bit of twine. She grabbed the thick veil from a waiting branch and draped it over her forehead, letting the rest hang down her back so that her red hair was completely covered. Last of all, she fixed the small cap at the crown of her head with a long stickpin that held the whole affair in place. She gave her head an experimental shake to make sure the veil wouldn’t slide off. When it stayed put to her satisfaction, she turned around.
“There,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “How do I look?”
Gin eyed her up and down. “Like a librarian.”
“Such flattery!” Miranda folded her hands over her chest dramatically. “Be still, my trembling heart!”
“What? That’s the point, right?” Gin said, getting up.
Miranda grinned at his confusion and tucked her discarded clothes under her arm before pushing her way through the giggling trees. Gin padded after her, muttering under his breath.
The tiny clearing outside the hut that served as Eli’s hideout had become quite crowded since Nico and Josef had returned. Most of the space, however, was taken up by the new additions. Laid out on a ratty blanket, two men and a woman, dressed only in their underclothes, were sleeping peacefully in the tree-dappled sunlight—castle servants, the sources of the costumes. King Henrith was crouched beside them, his hands moving in worried circles on his knees. He had traded out his filthy silk clothes for what looked like a set of Josef’s spares, though it was hard to tell without the knives. The bad fit and the king’s dour expression as he hovered over the unconscious servants made him look like a refugee from a tragedy play.
“I don’t see why you had to knock them out like this,” he muttered.
“It was the simplest way to get the sizes correct,” Josef said in a bored voice. He was lounging beside the hut, with his back propped against the ever-present camouflage thatch of branches provided by Eli’s arboreal admirers. His enormous sword was stabbed into the ground beside him and a pile of throwing knives was spread out in the grass at his feet. His normal array of cross-belted sheaths was gone, and in their place he wore the chain and blue surcoat of a House Allaze royal guard, which, judging from the gaps at the shoulders, had recently belonged to the narrower of the sleeping men. “They’ll wake up soon enough, no worse for wear.”
“And you’ll be here, sire,” Eli chimed in, fastening the cuffs of his valet’s coat. “A free evening off work and a touching reunion with their monarch. I’d say we’re doing them a favor.”
“What I don’t understand,” Miranda said, kneeling beside the distressed king, “is why we’re stealing costumes to sneak into the castle when Josef and Nico already snuck into the castle to grab these three.”