Daisy was unusually quiet the rest of the afternoon.
The bear ambled between Daisy and me, but after a while she slowed down to lumber on beside me. I knitted another flower into the crown I’d begun to weave a while back, full of different wildflowers I’d picked up along the riverbed. “What is it, bear?”
She is worried.
“I know,” I replied quietly, glancing to her to make sure it was soft enough for Daisy not to hear, but she didn’t seem to be paying attention at all. “Aren’t you, too? There are bone-eaters after us, and we’re tired and hungry. She’s going to pass out soon if we don’t stop.”
The bear wagged her head back and forth. Then tell her.
“She won’t listen to me. She never did.”
You never had words before.
I opened my mouth to argue, but then I closed it again and frowned. The bear gave me a knowing look. I sighed and tossed the flower crown onto her head. It sat prettily over one ear. “Fine. Daisy,” I called a little louder, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think we should stop for the night.”
The bear’s nostril’s flared. That is your idea?
“Trust me,” I hissed out of the side of my mouth.
Except Daisy decided to ignore me. Though I knew she couldn’t do so forever. I knew her one weakness. I went on, “What can I do to honey you up? Sweeten the pot? This is as fur as I can go.”
Her shoulders stiffened. Aha!
My lips twitched up. “I can bearly take another step!”
She turned about-face to me. “You are the worst.”
I grinned and leaned against the bear, flicking her flower crown so it righted on her head.
“I’ll beary the jokes if you let us stop for the night—hey, hey now—I was just—” I ducked as she came to strangle me. I laughed, and finally she managed to crack a smile, just as she grabbed me by the shoulders. “Oh, come on, now! Those were quality puns.”
She shook me one good time. “No! They were terrible, and you should feel terrible!”
For a moment, I thought she was actually mad at me, but then she cracked a smile. A giggle bubbled up from her throat. She pressed her face into my shoulder, laughing. Howling, in fact.
I—I didn’t know what to do.
Had I broken her?
But then her laughs . . . changed. The way her shoulders shook, the way her breath caught in her throat—and suddenly she was sobbing into my chest, and I definitely didn’t know what to do now. If she cried louder, she might attract unwanted attention, and I wasn’t in a position to defend myself. But I couldn’t leave her like this, either. I didn’t know where to put my hands or what to say—humans didn’t lick each other, did they? No—think, think—
Hug her, you stupid fox, the bear growled.
Oh. Right.
But how did that work? Did I do one arm first and then the other? Where did I hug her? What should I do with my fingers?
Before I could figure out my plan of action, she began to steadily slide to the ground, and I— mostly because she had a fistful of my shirt—followed her. Kingsteeth, just do it, I told myself, and pulled my arms around her tightly. It . . . only made her cry harder. No, I wanted the opposite. I wanted her to stop crying. Because my eyes were beginning to burn, too, and it made my chest ache.
“I’m so scared,” she whispered between sobs. “I’ve been scared all day, and it’s just getting worse. I don’t know if I can do this. Wh-what if Voryn doesn’t exist? Wh-what if there’s n-no way to break this curse? I’m j-just a gardener’s d-daughter. I’m not built for th-this.”
Oh, Daisy. I held her tightly. “Doesn’t that seem silly? Just because you are born a gardener’s daughter doesn’t make you any less worthy than someone born into royalty.”
“You’re a fox; you don’t understand.”
“Maybe, but I’m not a fox anymore, and you have the crown.” I finally unraveled from her and sat back. She wiped her eyes with the palm of her uninjured hand. “There’s no one else who can do this, Daisy. Whether or not you can, you have to. And I’m here.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah,” I replied without thinking. I just wanted her to stop crying. “Let’s camp here, okay? We’re all tired, and we need to sleep. We’ll take turns keeping watch, and at the first sign of trouble we’ll run.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
Though the idea of setting up camp outside sounded dreadful. I was still terrified by the idea of those bone-eaters and whatever other creatures lurked out here. And after so many years of having a warm place to sleep in the flower shop, the idea of sleeping on the cold hard ground had me wishing for Voryn. I never in my life wanted a hot bath more than I did just then—and I hated baths. Ugh, I was turning into someone I didn’t even recognize.
We settled down near a set of rapids, where a short cliff, and a waterfall, shielded us from most of the weather. Daisy found a small alcove by the rocks to make a bed of dry grass. I just wanted to curl up on it and sleep, but I didn’t have a tail anymore, and I didn’t want to think about how I was going to sleep in this body. How would I keep my nose warm?
Daisy and I gathered some dried branches and twigs and built a small fire on a dry spot on the river’s edge. As she prepped the fire, I shimmied the fish off the spear.
“Oh, use this,” she said, digging something out of her pocket. An iron knife. She handed it to me.
“Where did you get it?”
“I found it in the cottage with these clothes. They were all in an old chest.” She shrugged and went back to stoking the fire.
I looked at the knife, then at the fish on the stick. “Um. What do I . . . ?”
“Run the knife against the scales. Then we have to cook them.”
“Can’t we just eat them raw?”
She gave a grin. “The prince once did—on a dare from Seren. He had parasites in his intestines for weeks. Just about shit himself to death.”
I blinked at her. “Well, then.”
“Yeah. That was before . . . you know. Before.”
I did know. It was hard not to, really. I did as she instructed, and the scales began to pop off the trout like heated corn. “You addressed that woodcursed man—the dead one—as Seren.”
She nodded. “Seren Penderghast. He was the prince’s personal guard, and one of the best squires on the Sundermount. I think the wood did something to him. The curse . . . it didn’t turn him into a bone-eater, but it’s inside him. I think it’s taken over his body. It’s using him as some sort of puppet or something.”
The wood is cunning like that. The ancients want the crown very badly, the bear said, nibbling on one of the raw fish.
The word ancients made me shiver. I’d seen them in the wood before, prowling in the shadows, long antlers and bony fingers and moss curling through their skeletal rib cages. “Well, I don’t have any reservations about putting a sword through Seren’s skull,” I assured Daisy, and finished scaling the fish.
We cooked them until they were crispy. Daisy tried to take a bite, but burned her tongue.
I stared forlornly down at my fish. How did humans eat?
I watched her nibble at the belly of the fish again, and gently I drew the fish to my mouth. It smelled so good; my mouth was already watering. The taste took me by surprise. It was something I couldn’t describe, like a color I had never seen before, and I’d begun to take another bite when I realized—I shouldn’t.
If I liked it, then I liked it as a human, and I didn’t need to like anything about this body. And it would only be something I missed when I turned back, and food was the one thing I did not want to miss.
I didn’t want to miss anything about being human.
I quickly offered the fish to the bear. She sniffed at it before she ate it.
“Is it not good?” Daisy asked.
“I’m just not hungry” was my reply—until my treacherous stomach grumbled and gave me away. I folded my arms over my chest, feeling the tips of my ears heat up with embarrassment. “And I don’t think I like fish.”
“You’ve eaten out of the garbage, Fox.”
Only because there weren’t any rabbits nearby, and the pigeons were too fast to catch, and my paw never quite—I grabbed ahold of my wrist, feeling the scar over it, annoyed. “I’m just too tired to eat—”
A scream tore through the wood, so shrill it sent shivers up my spine.
Daisy spun toward the sound, beginning to rise to her feet, but I grabbed her by the arm before she could. My claws sank into her skin so tightly, she winced. “Ignore it,” I advised, scanning the shadows of the trees.
“But what if someone’s in trouble?” Daisy asked.
“Then we definitely need to ignore it.”
“You can’t be serious, Fox.”
I glanced over to the bear, who was looking off into the direction of the shriek but wasn’t moving to go investigate, so that was answer enough for me. “Look, the wood is scary, and it’s almost dark. You’re a human in the Wildwood. You’d taste very good to a lot of creatures here, and I’m sure that crown is attracting a whole host of terrible things.”
She glared at me. “That’s no excuse. I’m going.”
“No,” I said a little more forcefully, and then to my own regret I added, “I’ll go. Just . . . just stay here.”
Where it was safe.
Then I forced myself to stand, against everything my instincts told me, and went into the trees, toward the sound. Even though I was positive that it wasn’t anyone in need of help, I could find whatever was hunting us and maybe we could get a head start before they found us.
I didn’t like how quiet the wood was. Where there had been all sorts of noise before—birds or insects or the rustling of rabbits in the underbrush—there was . . . absolutely nothing anymore. It was silent.