And one of them decided to pay me a visit.
“Where did your flower girl go, fox-boy?”
I jumped, tripping on a root as I spun toward the voice, and fell backward into a hollowed-out tree.
The monster faded out of the dark wood—a shadow made flesh. He propped his hand up on the side of the tree and leaned in toward me. “Frightened you, did I?”
Shit. It was that guy—what had Daisy said his name was? Seren? I hadn’t even heard him sneaking up on me.
I pushed myself back into the hollow of the tree even more, but there was nowhere for me to go. I was too big for the tree; my shoulders jammed into the sides, brushing against the dry moss.
He cocked his head. Black rot had crept up the right side of his face, disorienting because his left shoulder was full of blooms: a bouquet of wildflowers blossoming across his chest and down his arm. The branch I had thrown at him was still embedded in his shoulder, though it looked like he’d been trying to dig it out to no avail.
Daisy’s power really was terrifying.
His black eyes settled on my face. “Look at you, cowering like some poor little creature. Is that why she left you?” His voice—it wasn’t like before. Back at the cottage, he had sounded like a thousand crows in unison, but now he just sounded like a man. “Did she kick you out of her adventuring party?”
I clenched my teeth together. Every piece of me wanted to sink into the shadows of the tree and hide. Get away from this corpse. The wrongness came off him in waves.
He cocked his head to the other side, like a raven assessing something shiny. I fisted my hands so he couldn’t see them shake.
I can take him, I thought, though I wasn’t very sure.
He was slightly taller than I was, wiry and thin. He carried no weapon, but he wore the remnants of what looked like armor. It was dirt covered, the leather peeling and the metal bits orange with rust, but I noticed Aloriya’s sigil on his chest. I recalled Daisy saying he’d been the prince’s bodyguard before he’d been lost in the wood.
But then he pushed himself off the tree and gave me space to wrench myself out of the hollowed-out insides. I darted my eyes toward the shadows of the trees, wondering if I could hide, slip away, disappear—
He said in a bored tone, “I would like to call a truce—a deal, you could say. All you have to do is lead me to her.”
I turned my attention back to him, eyebrows raised. Was he joking? No, he seemed perfectly serious.
“Listen, Fox.” He said my name like it was beneath him and began to circle around me, like carrion birds over a carcass. “Have you thought about what you’ll do if she fails? Look at you—you aren’t fit to be human. You’re cowering in your boots. You’re scared. You want to run—”
“Any self-respecting creature would wanna run away from you,” I interrupted. My voice shook. “Have you smelled yourself? You smell like decade-old rotted meat.”
“Well, that’s because I am,” he replied simply, and reached toward me. I flinched as he picked a bug out of my hair and flicked it away. “Just think, if she fails, you’ll be trapped in this body forever.”
“But let me guess, you can turn me back?”
He flashed a toothy, delicate smile. “With the crown, of course—”
An earsplitting shriek startled an unkindness of ravens in the trees above me. Daisy.
“Well,” said the corpse, “what fortunate timing.”
I spun back to the corpse. “Call it off! Call your stupid beasts off!”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t?” I echoed, and my shaking fingers grabbed at the collar of his jerkin. I pulled him close to me, realizing that we were about the same height, really. I was bulkier than he was. Stronger, too.
Not a fox against a human.
I tightened my grip and growled, “Call. It. Off.”
“I can’t. Can a puppet call off its master? That’s why I need the crown, you idiot,” he snapped in reply. “And if you don’t find her, she’s as good as dead and the wood will have the crown and everything will be over. I can’t find my way in this ridiculous fog, but you can.”
“So you were literally lost in the wood and just happened to find me?” I asked, astonished.
The edges of his lips twitched, as if my realizing that bothered him. “Most fortunate for me, isn’t it? This interminable fog is as much a hindrance to me as it is to anyone else roaming the wood. It’s a protective barrier for Voryn, you could say. To keep beasts such as me outside their walls.”
So Daisy was close—we were so close to that stupid city, and we didn’t even know it.
“But you,” he went on, shifting beneath my grip. I could smell the wildflowers blooming from his shoulder. “You are not quite all human yet, are you? I’m sure you can follow her scent even now. Let me have the crown, and I’ll turn you back. I’ll make you what you want to be. What loyalty do you have to her? She made you this way—”
Somewhere in the distance, Cerys screamed again—and then came the sound of a shrill, toneless cry. A bone-eater . . . or an ancient?
Startled, I glanced toward the sound of her.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t lead this corpse to her, but if I stayed here, she would be wood food.
But the bear is with her, I told myself. The bear’ll protect her.
But . . . what if they’d gotten separated?
What if—
“She’s in danger, fox-boy,” the corpse murmured.
Suddenly, thorns struck out through his jerkin, piercing my hand, and I hissed in pain, releasing him.
“Stop thinking and go!” he snapped. “I doubt you want to abandon someone else in the wood.”
Someone . . . else?
The thought scratched at the edge of my mind. Had I abandoned someone else before?
I took a step back, holding my hand. It throbbed from where his thorns had pricked me.
This time, it wasn’t Daisy who screamed. It was a creature—familiar, loud, like a death cry.
A bone-eater.
My heart beat in my throat, and all I wanted to do was run in the opposite direction. I wanted to get out of this fog. I wanted to run away. I wanted—
I wanted to save Daisy.
My legs acted before I did. I left the riverside, running headlong into the wood. As I ran away, toward the sound of the screams, I heard him laughing behind me, far back in the distant fog, but never far enough.
19
The Evil of the Heart
Cerys
SHE WAS WEN, but not.
She still looked something like herself, golden hair now littered with leaves and moss, the flesh on her face cracked and torn to accommodate a too-wide mouth filled with too-sharp teeth, grinning and hissing. Antlers twined with upturned roots and dried flowers had burst from her forehead, and the black emptiness of her eye sockets was inset with pinpoints of red light. When she spoke, a black tongue clicked against the roof of her bloody mouth. Her arms were too long, and her fingernails too sharp, her skin eaten by scales and feathers. The seed that had been planted on her neck throbbed, its roots thick as they curled into her skin and wound themselves down her body. With a scream, I backpedaled to the edge of the small clearing, where tall firs towered over me with spindly branches. She reached out with sprawled, grasping fingers.
“Ccccccerys,” she hissed again. “Crown.”
“Wen—Wen, it’s me.” My voice was tight and trembling. She advanced, and I fell back against a tree trunk. Her hot breath stank of carcasses and rot. I shuddered.
I curled my fingers tighter around my iron knife.
My hand shook.
I was going to die.
“Wen, please, this isn’t you,” I begged, and I remembered it too well—my mother’s figure in the doorway, the woodcurse spreading across her skin in rotting threads. I couldn’t do anything then. I couldn’t now.
“Crown,” she repeated, and one of her claws caught the tip of a golden leaf on the crown and began to pull. All I had was my iron knife, but I couldn’t draw it and slice my hand open again. My blood could surely stop her, but what if it killed her, like it had the ancient? I couldn’t do that.
Whatever the wood had done to her, Wen was still my friend. She was all I had left.
“The crown doesn’t belong to you, gardener.”
I felt Wen’s fingers tug at the crown on my waist to free it. I tightened my grip on the blade but couldn’t move otherwise. I held my breath—
That’s when something darted out of the fog and slammed into Wen’s side with enough force to send her stumbling away.
“It doesn’t belong to you, either,” said Fox, standing where Wen had been a moment before, massaging the shoulder he had used to ram into the side of the creature. He turned his attention to me, and his eyes flashed like mirrors in the torchlight. His chest heaved as if he’d run miles to get here. “Now, what’s a pretty flower like you doing in a wood like this?” I could tell that his attack on the creature had dislocated something on his shoulder. He grinned through the pain.
I wanted to cry; I was so happy to see him. “What are you doing here?”
“Something very stupid!” he replied, and his voice was tight. He was frightened. His eyes were wide, and he was shaking, but he was here.
He’d come back for me.
Wen growled, righting herself. Fox and I both fell backward in fear. “Crown! Crown!” she raged, her eyes flaring a bright red. Once they’d been cerulean, but I was beginning to wonder if my Wen was truly gone.
Was there was no one left inside?
She launched herself at us, but I grabbed Fox by the arm and rolled us both out of the way. Wen shot past us through the fog, and there was a loud crack, like a tree snapping.
“Daisy—run,” Fox told me frantically. “You can’t fight her.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t know! I’ll try to distract her, buy you some time, and then I’ll get away and hide somewhere.”