Daisy rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “Give me a few minutes.”
“Oh, sure, I’ll just ask the ancients if they can wait until we’ve had our morning coffee before they try to kill us again.”
She clenched her jaw and glared at me. “Why do you care? You’ll probably just run away again, anyway.”
I winced. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Sure,” she said, and forced herself to her feet. She went over to the river to wash her face, and I followed to toss the bones of the fish Daisy had eaten into the current, so it would be harder to notice that we’d camped here.
The bear gave a lazy yawn. Can’t we sleep a little longer?
“Daisy had a nightmare,” I told her.
Daisy spun around, bristling. “It was a good dream!”
The edges of her voice sounded thin. I cocked my head. “Oh? Then what was it about?”
“I was—I was dreaming that you were a nice fur hat,” she said weakly, drying off her face with the end of her shirt. Ah, the fur hat again. Honestly, I’d make better mittens, but I digress. “And I was the talk of the town in Voryn.”
“Assuming the city hasn’t been overrun by ancients for centuries.”
“Of course not. They’re magical—they know how to live in the wood. That’s why they gave King Sunder the crown. And when we get there, all of this mess will be fixed. They’ll know what to do—right, Vala?”
The bear gave a grunt of affirmation—which was all Daisy could hear—but what she said was It will be there.
I kicked dirt into the fire to snuff out the remaining embers. “Fine.”
Daisy began to brush her hair out, and with the brushing came those small white flowers that had bloomed in it overnight. She seemed not to have noticed. “Haven’t any of the animals talked about it? A hidden city in the wood? I mean, surely you must’ve heard something.”
“Daisy, I eat rabbits, I don’t converse with them,” I replied.
Be truthful. You probably talk them to death, the bear said, and I shot her a glowering look.
Daisy wilted a little. “Oh.”
“And to be fair,” I added, because I didn’t like seeing her wilt, and she wasn’t like a flower I could water to make better again, “I’ve spent more time in your garden than I have here in the wood, but yes—I’ve heard rumors. About the city. But what if they can’t help us?”
“They will,” she replied softly.
I rubbed the back of my neck doubtfully and decided to change the subject. “C’mon, if we stay here much longer, we’ll both be food for the carrion birds, and you won’t get your nice hat.”
“You’re right,” she agreed softly, following the bear and me up the river again. She tugged another flower out of her curls and frowned. “Why did you put flowers in my hair?”
I glanced back at her, surprised. “What?”
She rolled her eyes. “I get the irony, you calling me Daisy, but isn’t this a bit much? Even for you?”
I opened my mouth, closed it again. They grew in your hair, I wanted to say, but it sounded as farfetched as a secretive city in the forest. “I thought it was funny.”
Tugging the last flower out of her curls, she sectioned off her hair and began braiding, a morning ritual of hers. I remembered from when I was a fox—she would often come out to the gardens in the morning to do it, her thin, graceful fingers weaving the strands together delicately, as entrancing as a soft wind through the sunlight-sprinkled trees. I could have watched her for hours.
“Well, next time you decide to be funny, why don’t you gather a bouquet of different ones? We could use them. Goldenrod’s good for teas if you’re feeling anxious,” she said, and again my chest began to feel weird, like there were bees knocking against my rib cage, buzzing. “Dandelion roots for upset stomachs.”
“Aren’t daisies good, too?”
“For a variety of things, sure. Coughs, inflammations, disorders of the liver and kidneys, purifying the blood . . . They’re weeds, but they’re still good. Still important.” She glanced over to me then. “Why’re you looking at me like that?”
I quickly trained my eyes at the ground again. I didn’t want to tell her that my reason for calling her Daisy had nothing to do with the fact that it was a weed. Instead, I said, “You talk too much.”
She didn’t take offense, though; she simply smiled. “Prince Lorne used to say that, too.”
A pang of something unfamiliar shot through me, and a word—jealousy? The bees inside my chest buzzed louder. I pushed the feeling away before Daisy could see, but she wasn’t paying attention to me anymore. She had a soft look on her face. The rush of freckles across her cheeks reminded me of nighttime constellations, and her eyes were the shade of gray just before a spring rainstorm. My gaze settled on her mouth.
What was happening to me?
Once she finished braiding her hair, she flipped her braid behind her shoulder. “Anyway, we should hurry and find Voryn. It can’t be that much farther.”
“After you,” I replied.
As we traveled, the trees stretched taller and became harsh and jagged. Their needles coated the ground, which grew uneven, with craggy rocks and ridges. The Lavender Mountains towered over us, the snow at their peaks visible between the branches and looking like dollops of frosting. It wasn’t until midday that a thin white fog began to settle between the trees once again. I ground my teeth. What little I could smell didn’t help anymore, and my hearing didn’t make up for it. The bear kept stopping to sniff the air, growing wearier the deeper we traveled. She smelled something I couldn’t, but when I asked, she’d just grunt and amble on.
Soon, as the afternoon wore on and the sky began to turn a dark orange, the fog became so thick, Daisy slowed her pace and took hold of the bear’s fur. She was frightened—her eyes were wide and kept flicking to every sound in the wood.
I drew close to her, and she eyed me. “This can’t be good if you’re sticking so close to us,” she remarked dryly.
I inclined my chin indignantly. “I simply don’t want to lose you in the fog.”
“Oh? And I thought you’d want to be as far away as possible so you could run at the first sign of trouble.”
To that, I flashed her a grin. “Ah, but why would I run when I could just hide behind you?”
She bit the inside of her cheek, and then she turned on her heels to face me. “Is this just a game to you?”
“What? No—”
“My best friend and my papa are both monsters, and the only way for me to save them is to break a three-hundred-year-old curse—and you’re just joking around.”
“Daisy, I didn’t mean to—”
“You’re a coward.”
As if I didn’t already know that. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw those bone-eaters, or the baker’s son coming after me with a shotgun, or the hunters’ traps in their gardens, or the wolves and coyotes and snakes. As if I weren’t afraid of all those things, and helpless against them, and . . .
“I’m a fox,” I replied. “What do you suppose foxes do? We run, and we hide, and we steal. That’s it. If you wanted someone loyal or brave, maybe you should’ve befriended a dog.”
Then I started ahead of them up the river. I didn’t want to have this conversation.
“You’re not a fox anymore!” she shouted behind me. “You’re a person, and people are . . . they are . . .”
I knew very well what people were. I knew it even better than her. She was scraping for words like loyal and brave, but I knew that humans could also be cruel and petty, and they could hurt you with words and deeds just as quickly as with blades or bows. If that was what being a human was about, I couldn’t get back to being a fox fast enough.
“Courage gets you killed, Daisy. I’m in the business of staying alive.”
I expected her to yell at me, and I braced myself for it, but all she said was “Of course.”
It was the first time I ever heard her sound disheartened—not the disappointment of running out of your favorite food, or waking up to a rainy day, or getting your tail wet, but a different, deeper sort of disenchantment. I didn’t understand why, but thinking back on it, I probably should have. Hindsight and all that.
Because she said softly, “Then you shouldn’t be with me.”
“Wait—no. Daisy, I—”
“It’s fine. I didn’t even ask you if you wanted to come along, anyway.” She wasn’t looking at me anymore, and I felt my heart begin to sink, sink, sink, down into my toes. “I just assumed. I’m sorry for that. You don’t have to come any farther. I’ll go and find Voryn. I’ll find a way to break the curse, and to change you back, too. It’s my fault you were transformed anyway. None of this is your responsibility.”
“That’s not what I meant, Daisy. Tell her that’s not what I meant,” I pleaded to the bear, but Vala didn’t come to my rescue at all. She simply stood beside Daisy, leaning toward her, as if to protect her from me.
“Then why did you run when the ancient came?” Daisy asked. “What’ll happen next time?”
I ground my teeth and looked away. That was all the answer she needed.
“Go find a hole somewhere and hide. I’ll find you when this is all over. I’ll be fine, Fox. Trust me.”
Then she turned into the mist with the bear. The last expression on her face stuck with me—that look that told me that she would fix everything herself, even if it killed her. I bent into a crouch and put my head in my hands. What was I supposed to do? What could I do? If I told her how afraid I was of that ancient, she would think less of me than she already did.
She was right. I should just stay here. Just wait until I could return to myself, until I become a fox again, however that happened. Then, I was certain, I’d forget this whole ordeal. It would feel like a dream. I just needed to wait. I just needed to—