“Magic,” I replied, wiggling my fingers.
Her curiosity turned to misery. “Ha. Ha.”
“I thought it was funny.” I shrugged and pointed the way we were going. “I can see the magnetic pull of the world pointing north, which is this way.”
The bear meandered into the shallows beside Daisy, pawing at the minnows intently swimming upstream. The river was swift and cold, and the pebbles, from what I could see, unnaturally smooth. Daisy stooped down and took one, and skipped it along the slow-moving surface of the river. The sun glinted in the golden leaves of the crown she’d tied to her sash.
They enraptured me, the colors. All the colors did. The way the sun spiked off the lapping waves of the river, the deep blue of the water, the yellow-green of the trees. It was strange the way the light danced through them, and when I looked straight up, there was only clear blue sky between the twisting trees, never meeting in their crown shyness, veins of blue between emerald leaves.
I found myself pausing more often than I liked, my eyes catching a flower that I knew before, but never that color. It was around midday, while I was watching—somewhat hungrily—a group of trout swim upstream, the sun catching on their silver scales, that I noticed that when they passed Cerys on the river, they circled back and kept time with her. The bear was having a lovely time catching them.
We had picked up a few bees, too, and they hummed in the air as we walked.
That was . . . a rather terrible sign.
They could sense the crown. Like I could, before. It was this singsongy pull, a rapture I had never heard before but somehow knew innately. It was how I found Daisy at the castle, because after she put it on, the song became so loud, it screeched.
If the fish and bees could sense the crown, there were much bigger things in this wood that most certainly could, too. Were they also following? I darted my gaze around, but these stupid human eyes could find colors in everything but the shade, and that was where the monsters liked to hide.
I thought it best not say anything—at least not yet. Best to not jinx anything. I’d gotten a good look at those ghoulies back at the castle and the cottage, and I had no interest in seeing them a third time.
I tugged at my collar again, muttering about the heat.
“The water’s cool,” she said, bending down and taking another rock. She skipped it along the river’s surface.
“I’m not very keen on water.”
“Well, then you’ll start smelling really lovely soon.”
I sighed. “I’ll work up to it, if I must.” I didn’t want to think about all the injustices I’d have to endure in this stupid, ugly body. “We should start traveling at night, I think, and sleep during the day. There are fewer predators then.”
She waved me off. “We should travel as long as we can and put as much distance between us and Seren as possible. Reaching Voryn is the only chance you’ve got of getting back to being a fox and my only chance to break the curse on Anwen and return to the castle.”
“But I’m so tired,” I complained, and could hear the whine in my voice. I kicked a pebble, and it skittered into the shallows. “We’ve traveled all night, and this body is so heavy. My feet hurt, my back hurts, and I think I’m getting what you call a sunburn.”
“I know,” she replied, sounding equally as whiny. “But I’m scared that if we stop, then they’ll catch up. And I don’t know how much my magic can actually hold them off without me putting on the crown again—”
“Which you will not do.”
She pursed her lips. “If I have to—”
“No. You won’t.”
“Fox—”
“No.” The word was sharper than I’d meant it, but I didn’t take it back. “It’s a bad idea.”
“And how do you know?”
“Because you’re good at two things, Daisy.” I held up two fingers. “Gardening and getting in trouble.”
Her face began to turn red. “I do not get into trouble!”
“Mmh, how about last week with the blacksmith’s son?”
“I honestly thought it was you stealing bites of my meat pies from the windowsill, not him,” she replied pointedly. “If I’d known it was him, I’d have put something in them that would have given him something much worse than a good bowel movement.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “And the week before—at the tavern?”
“Lord O’Hare was cheating! If Papa wasn’t going to call him out, then I had to do something.”
“Last I saw, he still had the ace of hearts glued to his fingers.”
She couldn’t stifle a laugh even though she most earnestly tried to. “Like you’re one to talk. You do nothing but laze about and steal strawberries out of the garden and chicken bones out of the compost!”
I gave a morose sigh. “Ah, those were the days! And if you put on that crown and attract attention, you’ll be the one being eaten.”
“Hi, you’re human, too, now.”
“I doubt I’d taste as sweet as you.”
“The sarcasm in your voice is astounding,” she commented dryly, and I grinned at her. She rolled her eyes and pulled me toward the river. I narrowly missed tripping into it and hopped onto one of the rocks instead.
The bear grunted, Stop flirting, children.
I gave a start. “We are not.”
Daisy blinked, confused. “Not what?”
“Flirting. The bear said we were flirting.”
“With you?” This time, she actually did laugh. “Not a chance. Besides, I have standards.”
“And I’m a fox,” I pointed out.
“And you’re a fox,” she agreed.
The bear gave a grunt—probably in denial—and caught another fish in her mouth. I found a long, sturdy limb in the underbrush along the riverbank and took the fish from her, spearing it on the limb. We didn’t have any food, clean water—nothing to survive in the wood. Might as well start collecting food. We would need something to eat tonight.
The deeper we went into the Wildwood, the darker the pines grew, until they were almost black, their needles thin and sharp. That meant more shadows for predators to hide in, and more places for me to hide, too. We stopped to rest at an outcropping of rocks, and I stuck the limb deep into the ground. We had five fish by then. Enough for a decent meal.
Spires of sunlight fell through the leaves like spools of yellow string, and absently I tried to paw at one, but my hand slipped through the light—and I remembered.
Right—human.
“Do you remember anything?” Daisy asked, startling me from my thoughts. She was sitting on a rock on the sun, the light catching her honey-colored hair, turning it bronze and red and gold. It was a color I’d never seen before, iridescent and soft all at once. I stared—I couldn’t help it.
When she finished lacing up her boots, she must’ve felt me staring, because she glanced up—and for a moment she wasn’t sitting there, but a child was, with honey-bronze hair and wide hazel eyes and dirt on her cheek—
I cleared my throat. “Remember what?”
“From when you were a fox,” she said.
“Everything,” I replied. All the times she cried in the gardens, wishing she’d never gone into the wood on the day her mother and her friends were lost, and all the times she’d felt guilty at how much she loved her magic, and the mornings she would bloom wildflowers in the gardens just to make a chain of flowers, and sometimes wrap them around me, and the first time we met, when I’d caught my foot in that bear trap.
It was a question that was so simple and so complex all at once. Yes, but I was a fox. Yes, but it was different. Yes, but I couldn’t ever stop you, tell you that you were not broken, that you were not alone, that it was never your fault.
But . . . they were words I had now.
And there was just so much to her now that I noticed, it was ridiculously hard to ignore, but more than her hair, or the slight pout of her lips, or the crown that hummed at her waist, there was—
“But I especially remember your scent.”
I froze. Had I just said that out loud?
She stared at me, quickly growing mortified. “My . . . scent?”
Not as mortified as me, however. Shit. I clamored for some explanation, but everything sounded even more mortifying. Why had I opened my mouth? I hated words. I hated them about as much as I hated—
“You—you stink,” I lied.
Her cheeks flushed red. She hopped to her feet, ready to fight me or, I don’t know, something equally embarrassing. “Says the guy who refuses to bathe!”
“I shall be a fox again soon,” I replied. Or I shall die of embarrassment.
“Oh, you’ll make a fine hat,” she threatened. “I’ll wear it every day—even in the summer.”
“You’re kidding,” I scoffed, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’d make a better muffler, and you know it.”
She glared at me, her hazel eyes dark and stormy, but then she sighed and said, “Let’s not fight. I know I’m grumpy, and you are, too. Let’s keep going?”
Then she started up the river again, the bear ambling on behind her, giving me a knowing look as she went.
I wanted to die.
For a while, Daisy led the trek up the riverside, and ambling behind her was Vala, the bear, grunting to herself like a tired old nanny. Grunting about me, but I was the only one who understood her, and for a satisfying moment I envisioned her as a nice throw rug, before I relinquished the idea that she was right.
Telling a girl she stinks . . . what charm, the bear grumbled sarcastically.
Which . . . okay, yeah. Fair.
We walked quietly for a mile or so, trekking up the river as the smooth riverbed stones turned jagged and toothlike, and the trees darkened and grew bare. The shadows, as always, lengthened again, like night beginning to bare its fangs. The temperature had dropped considerably as the day wore on and as we neared the Lavender Mountains, with snow on their peaks. I hated snow, and I shivered just thinking about it.