I threw my hands up to shield my face, waiting for the bear to tear me to ribbons—but nothing happened. Fearfully, I lowered my arms to see why I wasn’t dead, and in front of me was a person. He held the bear back, paws to hands. The young man’s skin twisted and rippled, and I watched every muscle in his back heave as he threw the bear away.
The creature snarled as it stumbled backward, baring its rows and rows of deadly teeth.
“Oh, calm down, you beast. . . . We’ve had a rough night,” the young man said to the bear, massaging his shoulder. He seemed to grow taller and broader by the moment, until he was half a head above me, lean and sculpted like the guards Wen and I watched training out in the yards some summers.
And then I realized—quite suddenly—that he was naked.
I squeaked.
He must’ve heard me, because he turned around, his back to the bear. A knot formed in my throat. Oh, he was handsome. Sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw and eyes a golden amber that reminded me of autumn. His hair was long and wild, the color of orange sunrises. I’d never seen hair that color before.
I pressed my back against the abandoned cottage, anxiety tightening like a knot in my throat.
His eyebrows furrowed as he noticed how frightened I was. Then he looked down at his hands, his fingers thin, tapering off to black-tipped claws.
The color drained from his face. “Oh.”
8
Monster of a Different Kind
Fox
I WAS . . .
I was a . . .
My hand opened and closed. It was fleshy and long fingered and wrong. This wasn’t happening to me. This couldn’t be happening to me. I turned my hands the other way, and the hands in front of me turned.
The girl stared at me like I was wrong. I was wrong. This was a dream—a nightmare—some sort of terror I’d wake up from in a few minutes and . . .
I touched my mouth, the remnants of her blood sweet on my lips. I had words. I thought them. Sounds braided together like ivy inching up a wall, forming stories and meanings. Meaning I was—that I’d become . . .
Black spots danced in my vision—the world was so bright, too bright, and too colorful, and too quiet, and—
And—
9
The Silent House
Cerys
THE YOUNG MAN’S eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he fell on the ground between the bear and me. He wasn’t dead—he was still breathing, at least, but he was very much out. And he was the only thing between me and the bear, who inclined her head and sniffed the air.
There was a howl in the wood, and an unkindness of ravens took flight into the night. The bone-eater. I couldn’t let it find me again.
But where was the fox?
I spun around to the bear in alarm. “Spit him out!” I hissed, ready to cut the bear open and wrench the fox out of her. “He’s my friend! He didn’t do anything to you. He—”
The bone-eater howled. It was even closer than before. So close the sound made me tremble. In the wood beyond, something large moved through the underbrush. Big and hulking.
Stalking toward the clearing.
The bear moved around me. She took the strange boy’s foot gently in her jaw and dragged him into the cottage, making sure to hit every root and doorjamb on the way. I didn’t have time to find the fox, assuming that the bear hadn’t actually eaten him. I hoped he had gotten away and was okay somewhere.
The trees shifted, the bone-eater prowling close.
I closed the cottage door softly and locked it as the creature came into the clearing. Golden hair, the shredded pieces of Anwen’s beautiful coronation dress hanging in tatters on its bony, spiked spine.
I crawled quietly away from the door and hid underneath the window as I heard it come closer. On the other side of the abandoned cottage, away from the view of windows, were the bear and the stranger, mostly hidden in shadows. I couldn’t get over there without giving myself away. I was trapped. The creature outside sniffed at the bottom of the door—and pushed on it. The latch rattled but kept.
It circled the cottage, scraping at the walls, looking in through the windows. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled across the sky.
I don’t know how long I sat there, shivering in the cold, waiting for the bone-eater to leave, but it finally did. Whether it was ten minutes after it had come or an hour, I couldn’t say. All I knew was that the skies were still dark, the air smelled like rain, and I was cold and shivering, by the time the bear meandered out from her shadowy corner.
She grunted at me.
I dared not to move.
The bear snorted and made her way over to the other side of the cottage, where she nosed through an old chest, bringing out a moth-eaten blanket in her teeth. She dragged it over toward me. I winced away.
She dropped the blanket and went to curl up beside the hearth.
She . . . didn’t want to eat me? Then why had she made to attack me earlier? If this boy hadn’t arrived . . .
I couldn’t think about any of that now. I had to figure out what to do. I couldn’t stay here. The bone-eater might come back, and I had no protection here. But I didn’t know where to go, either. The castle was a terrible idea, but if I went back to town—I risked taking the wood with me. How far could the monsters go now, without the crown to keep them in the Wildwood? I didn’t want to put anyone in town at risk, but I couldn’t stay here.
Maybe another kingdom? Eldervale? Nor? No. They wouldn’t know what to do, either, and most of their dignitaries and rulers had been at the castle for Anwen’s coronation. If I showed up in another kingdom without their king or queen or regent—that wouldn’t bode well.
I shivered from the cold, from fear, and wrapped the blanket around me. It was warm, and at least I knew now that I was shivering because I was afraid. The blanket smelled like moths and dust, and the edge had a strange embroidery on it. A raven with a laurel in its mouth. It was an insignia I’d seen before in the Sundermount’s library. It was a crest—
Voryn’s crest.
Voryn. The magical city in the wood. Maybe . . .
No, it wasn’t real, was it? It was just a fairy tale. But I remembered the feeling of the crown on my head, and the frightening magic from it that made me so sick I didn’t want to touch it again. That was no fairy tale, and neither were the bone-eaters or the ancients.
So neither was Voryn. They’d had the crown before; they lived in the wood. But I didn’t know how to get there. No one had been there in centuries. I didn’t even know if it still existed. There was only a road, a thin string through the wood, almost completely overgrown with the forest.
But I had to do something. If I didn’t, Aloriya was as good as gone. My best friend, my father, everything that I knew—my home. It was all gone.
In the corner of the room, the unconscious stranger groaned and shivered on the floor. His hair was matted with leaves, and there were scars across his body, just slightly darker than the rest of his pale skin, one in particular around his left wrist.
I didn’t recognize him, but he looked familiar all the same. Though I couldn’t remember from where.
Quietly, I took the moth-eaten blanket and walked over to the stranger. Whether I knew him or not, he had saved me from the bear . . . who didn’t seem to be very ferocious anymore. But still, he’d saved me.
Calm down. . . . We’ve had a rough night, he had said.
What did he mean, we? Did he somehow escape the castle, too, and find his way here? I didn’t remember seeing him at the coronation. . . . I covered him up with the blanket and finally inspected the wound on my hand; the fox had bitten me much deeper than I’d imagined. I needed stitches.
My hand shook as I looked at it. What if my blood had affected the fox in some way? Turned him into a monster, too? Or . . .
A thought occurred to me, and I glanced back at the unconscious man.
“No, that’s silly,” I muttered to myself. “My blood helps grow flowers—that’s all.”
My power didn’t approach that of the crown, weighing heavily on the sash tied to my dress. The crown was so much more powerful than I’d thought. Was that what Anwen would inherit? That horrible swell of magic, pulling at you from somewhere so deep, it seemed to root you to the earth itself?
It was terrifying.
And I was the only one left who could do anything. Anwen and my father—they were woodcursed now, but if the wood was cursed, then couldn’t curses be broken? Couldn’t I save them?
It felt laughable, really. Wouldn’t the king have tried to break the curse three hundred years ago, when he razed his way to Voryn? If he couldn’t break it, then how could I be expected to? This curse stole my mother, killed the prince and his guard, and now was hungry for me.
I had no answers. I only had a destination.
Voryn.
But I wasn’t made for this quest—I was a gardener’s daughter. I did not thrive where my roots did not grow.
And what if I failed?
10
Daisy Chains
Fox
I GASPED AWAKE.
I was . . . in an abandoned cottage. That smelled like damp wood and mold. It woke me up faster than a cold splash of water. I almost gagged on the smell. At first, my more recent memories felt like a dream. Until I remembered the damn bear, and then I scrambled to sit up. And the horror came flooding back to me.
My body felt too long, taking up too much space. I was too tall, too broad, too—too everything. This was wrong.
I was a human.
Just the thought made me want to sink my claws into my skin and tear it off, all the way down to the bone, to find myself again, but as soon as I went to scratch at my arm, I heard someone behind me, and a sweet smell, of midnight rain and daisies, cut through the awful dampness of the cottage. I scrunched my nose, glancing over. . . .
And froze.
It was her. The girl. She stood in the doorway of an adjacent room in clothes different from those she’d been wearing before. They were much too big for her, the shirt tucked into trousers she had to roll up at the ankles, her wild honey-colored hair braided down her shoulder. She held her hand—the one I’d bitten—close to her chest, and I still remembered the sweetness of her blood, and how fast her heart raced as she hugged me against her, how she’d been trying to protect me, that stupid girl, when I should have—when I wanted to—when—