“What am I thinking?” I stood. No, she never asked me to come along, but she never had to. Daisy thought I was always running around by myself, but the truth was, I was never alone.
I had always had her.
“Daisy—wait!” I cried. They were shadows in the fog, but I could still see them. I took off in a run after them until I was upon their shadows. I reached out to touch her shoulder. My hand went through it.
The shadows vanished.
They were gone.
17
The Scream in the Silence
Cerys
KINGSTEETH, I HATED him. I hated him so, so much.
As the last of the daylight burned on the horizon, a knot of dread curled tightly in my stomach. The white fog that had become a suffocating constant on my and Vala’s trek upstream had darkened into a dull, stormy gray. It grew thicker the farther we traveled, and I found myself clinging to Vala’s fur as the last of the light was leaving us. The trees were so tall now, they disappeared up into the night sky. All the cracklings and stirrings in the underbrush were tenfold louder than they’d been just a few hours before, as though the night and the fog amplified them—or it might’ve just been my fear amplifying the noise. I kept my hand curled tightly into Vala’s gray fur.
I didn’t need Fox. I was the only person I could count on—I had gone into the wood before and come out. I had survived when my mother, when Lorne and Seren, had not.
And even if it was foolish, I couldn’t not try to save Wen. I couldn’t just return to the Village-in-the-Valley, and I couldn’t leave, find another land to call home, knowing for the rest of my life that I could’ve done something. I hadn’t been able to save my mother or my friends before, and I didn’t expect the fox to understand what sort of weight that left on me.
I knew we must be drawing closer to Voryn, but how close I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps Vala knew, but unlike Fox, I had no idea what her grunts and haroooms meant. If Vala and I didn’t camp tonight, if we could perhaps fashion some torches and push through once night had completely fallen, maybe we’d reach it soon. . . .
But maybe we wouldn’t.
I was a little afraid to stop in this thick fog, but I was more afraid to keep going after dark, when we could stumble into a ravine or any number of hazards beyond just the beasts that walked this wood. So, as the red-orange sky finally faded to an inky black, we set up camp by the thin spools of moonlight that broke through the dark trees. We thought it’d be safest under the shadow of a large rock, and I made a small fire that was hopefully hidden by the overhang. It would’ve been so much quicker with an extra pair of hands.
“Honestly, he was getting on your nerves, too, wasn’t he?” I asked the bear, who flopped down beside the campfire.
There had been no fish in the river today, and my stomach grumbled. I was hungry, and when I drank the water from the river, it tasted strange. The fire was small and barely gave off any warmth in this fog.
“I mean, I can’t fault him.” A knot formed in my throat, and I swallowed it down thickly. The memory of that nightmare—of my mother, woodcursed and hungry—hid under my eyelids, waiting for me to fall asleep again. Don’t cry, I told myself. Don’t cry. “Truthfully, I’m glad he turned back. Everyone I’ve ever loved died because of this wood. I was the only one who survived. I didn’t want Fox to get woodcursed, too. Like Mama, like Seren. It would be all my fault.”
Vala grunted and curled herself near me. I sank into her warm side and blotted my tears with her fur. I didn’t want to be in this terrible wood. I had lived my whole life trying to escape it. And yet here I was, lost in the Wildwood that took my mother and my best friends, and it was coming for me, too.
After a while, I finally began to drift off to sleep. But just as I closed my eyes, a scream cut through the trees, and I jerked awake.
Vala’s ears pinwheeled about, and she faced the direction of the noise, but there was only fog and trees. I sank deeper into her side, curling my knees up to my chest.
“Fox said not to listen, right?”
The bear made another noise—I hoped in agreement—as I settled back into her fur. Until I heard the scream again, and this time it sounded like—
“Cerys!”
“Wen?” I jerked to my feet, as did Vala. “That was Wen. I’d know her voice anywhere. Maybe she—maybe she broke the curse?”
The bear shifted on her feet, rocking back and forth indecisively.
“Cerys!” she cried again through the mist. “Cerys—help me!”
If the curse had somehow been lifted, and she found herself in the middle of the wood, she’d be terrified. And calling out like that . . . It wouldn’t be long before an ancient found her.
“I’m here!” I called. “It’s her—I have to go. I have to find her. I’ll be right back, I promise,” I told Vala, quickly fashioning a torch from a fallen limb and a length of cloth I ripped from my oversized shirt. I lit it, and the fog around us warmed to a pumpkin orange. It didn’t help me see much farther, but at least I had some light. Though I didn’t know how I was going to get back to camp—the fog was too thick to see anything beyond the reach of my hand, and I didn’t have any string to tie to me so that I could lead myself back, and all there was in the surrounding area were river stones and dead trees with hanging moss—
Moss.
I grabbed a tuft of moss from a nearby tree, returned, pulling my iron knife out of my pocket, and pricked the tip of my finger. A bead of red blood bloomed, and I pressed it into the moss. Almost instantly—faster than it ever had back in the Village-in-the-Valley—the magic in my blood took root, and the moss in my hand grew, curling down over my fingers, until it was as long as I was, and still it kept growing. When there were about fifty yards of it (and by then it was slowing), I took up one end of it, gave it to Vala, and made her promise not to let the end go no matter what happened. It would be my only way back to the water through the fog, since I certainly didn’t trust myself to find my way back on my own.
“Cerys!” Wen called again, closer.
I steeled myself, tied the other end to my sash with the crown, and set out into the mist.
There was no path, and the underbrush was thick, so my going was slow as I picked my way through the wood. The trees bent and swayed in the wind, the thin black leaves rustling, sounding like laughter. When I looked straight up, the branches were so thick and the fog so consuming, I couldn’t see even the moon or stars. I couldn’t see anything.
The fog was suffocating.
“Wen?” I called, holding tight to the hanging moss, the torch in my other hand. There was no answer. I wandered a little farther. I’d go as far as the string would let me, and then I’d turn back—with or without her.
“Anwen!” I called again.
“Ceeeeeeeryssss.”
I froze in my footsteps. A cold chill crawled down my spine. I spun around to try to find the owner of the voice, but there were only the shadowy trunks of ancient trees and fog.
So much fog.
My torch flickered. Something was wrong. I should never have left the campsite.
The wind tickled against my ear, and I swatted it away, ducking beneath a low-hanging limb. On the other side was a clearing where nothing grew. Trees lay bent and broken on the ground, old and rotted, while the soil itself crinkled dryly as I crept across it. There was a strange smell here, too, like smoke from Papa’s pipe and something I couldn’t quite place, so pungent I almost gagged.
“Ceeeeeeryssss,” the voice whispered again, this time closer—close enough for me to hear the honeyed edges of it. My heart panged with familiarity.
It was Wen.
I spun around toward the voice, but as soon as I turned, all I saw was that unending white fog.
There was no one.
With my free hand, I began to wind the moss tight, until I realized that I was winding too long without it going taut. Frightened, I dropped the torch as I reeled in the plant and found the end. It had been crudely cut.
“Ceeeeeerysssss,” the voice of my best friend hummed again, and the sound of footsteps, light and brisk, followed.
There was no denying that there was something in this glen with me. I felt its eyes on me now, as sure as I smelled the pipe smoke and the rot—like death. I remembered that stench now.
It came with the ancient as it breathed its hot breath on my neck.
I slipped my hand into the pocket of my trousers, my fingers curling around the iron knife there, my other hand on the crown at my side. I should’ve left it with Vala, but I hadn’t thought of it at the moment. Fox was right—I shouldn’t have kept it on my person.
“Ceeeeeeeeeeeryssssss . . .” The whisper came again, as soft as snow through the trees.
The fog was so bright and disorienting, and it clung to me like a damp towel. I searched the ground around me for my footprints, but when I looked down, I found mine—and another’s.
Large, taloned, and deep.
A tree branch snapped in front of me, and a hulking figure appeared in the mist. With a bolt of fear, I realized that I was well and truly lost, and the thing that was once Anwen had found me.
18
The Empty Promise
Fox
“DAISY!” I CALLED, but she didn’t answer.
The damned fog was everywhere. If it hadn’t been for the shadows in my eyes that picked up the magnetitic fields, I would’ve been lost ages ago. They were like dark spots at the top of my vision, always pointing in the way that I now know as north. If she and Vala had continued following the river, I couldn’t be that far behind them. Or at least, I thought not.
As I traveled, the fog continued to encroach on the path, silent and thick.
Where was that impossible girl? My throat began to constrict, even though I tried to stay calm. She was just ahead of me. She wasn’t that far—why didn’t I keep her in my sights?
The wood grew more dense, the rush of the river was muted by the fog, but there were small tracks in the earth from wild animals. Nothing too wild or beastly, but I bristled at every crinkle in the underbrush. While I wasn’t the one carrying the crown, there were still things in the wood that wouldn’t mind crunching on my bones, too.