“I’m fine—don’t worry about me,” I replied.
The bear pulled her nose out from underneath her paw. You are crying.
I rubbed at one of my eyes again. “Am not. I just—I just got something in my eye.”
You hurt.
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “It was just . . . a lot. I don’t like it. You’re lucky you don’t have these emotions. You don’t cry. This this wet stuff on my face? Tears! Actual tears! Because I’m—I’m . . .” My lip wobbled.
Because the stupid bear was right. I wasn’t okay.
I sucked in a stilted breath. “I just need . . . to stop being human. I need to go back to my old life. I need to stop feeling this, whatever this is.”
I was done with being a human. With these adventures. If I was a fox, then none of this would’ve happened. I would never have become woodcursed. I wouldn’t have that vision in my head. My heart wouldn’t burn every time I saw Daisy. I needed to get out of this form.
The bear gave me an unreadable look. You aren’t alone, fox. Burdens are meant to be shared.
I gritted my teeth and looked away, clawing at the skin over my heart. Why was it burning so badly? “Foxes don’t have burdens,” I replied roughly. “Not a one.”
And they certainly didn’t share them with girls who smelled like wildflowers and had blood like honey.
25
Fox Tales
Cerys
THE NEXT FEW days came and went in both a blink and eternity. Briath and some of the other caretakers tried to keep me in bed, but I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing while Anwen prowled the wood as a bone-eater. I refused to believe that there weren’t answers to the curse in this city. Someone had to know something, or perhaps there was a book on the history of the wood or a tapestry detailing King Sunder’s meeting with the Lady of the Wood, or—or . . . I didn’t know. There was something the Grandmaster wasn’t telling me about the crown and the Lady. I could feel it.
I had reveled in the Somersal parades for seventeen years, enjoying golden fields and peace and safety, without ever knowing—without caring about—what was happening in this city. I never questioned the legends. And the more I saw of Voryn, the more of a fool I felt.
The few times I came to see Fox, he was either sleeping or pretending to be asleep; either way, I could tell he didn’t want to see me. So I wandered the halls, the pain in my ribs growing lesser by the day. I didn’t know what kind of herbal concoction the Voryns made me drink, but whatever it was seemed to heal me a lot faster than any medicines in Aloriya. It was strange how much alike Voryn and Aloriya were—we believed in the same old gods, the same ancients, the same bone-eaters and curses, and yet—how strikingly different. They didn’t seem to have a bloodline hierarchy. They bartered instead of exchanging coin. Women were everywhere—brandishing their swords in the barracks and debating policies in the streets. There were bakers’ daughters, sure, and gardeners’ daughters, and blacksmiths’ daughters, but here they weren’t defined by that.
What was that like? I wondered.
How did they know what they could be if no one told them what they couldn’t?
Wandering through the fortress—there was very little else to call it, since it reminded me of the garrisons in some of Anwen’s tactical books—gave me some reprieve from the anxiety that kept building and building, and sometimes I felt like I would explode if I stood still. The walls of the city were so high, and the wood beyond it was dark and vast and held everything I’d ever loved in its cursed roots.
The more I thought about it, the more I began to hate myself for surviving. For thinking I could save anyone. For—
“Stop it,” I muttered to myself, following a stairwell down into another dark level of the fortress. I was exploring again, trying to stay a step ahead of my thoughts. But they kept catching up to me.
I reached the bottom of the stairs and found myself in a smoky and sweet-smelling kitchen. The staff must’ve been on their break, or serving the Grandmaster and other Voryn lawmakers in her meeting room, so I helped myself to a few plates that were still left out from dinner and placed them on a tray.
He was always a glutton as a fox. Even though he hadn’t eaten in the wood, I thought I could at least try to get something into his stomach.
I was so focused on trying not to drop anything as I ascended the first flight of stairs to the infirmary that I didn’t notice the person standing in my way until I almost ran into him. The man sidestepped and put his foot out. I tripped over it, barely saving myself and the food.
“Thieving trash,” he sneered, and disappeared down the steps.
Thieving . . . ?
Was that what I was to the people of Voryn? They saw me as an outsider—an Aloriyan who’d lived in safety her entire life while these people here warred with the wood. But my own people would call me a traitor, too, wouldn’t they? I had abandoned my queen. I had run—I couldn’t have done anything to save her, or anyone else, but I ran all the same.
I had decided to find Voryn, because I thought that Voryn could fix our problems—but perhaps that was wishful thinking. Perhaps I just tricked myself into running away. Into coming here. Instead of facing the horrors of the coronation and the nightmare that followed.
I didn’t want to think that was the case, but it was a thought I had been having since my meeting with the Grandmaster. The curse had been part of the trees for centuries, and I was just a gardener’s daughter. Whatever power my blood held, even if I bled myself dry, I wouldn’t be able to save the whole forest, all the people of Aloriya who had turned the night of the coronation. I was only one girl.
And now I had well and truly failed.
I tilted my head back and blinked the tears out of my eyes. Crying won’t do any good, Cerys, I reminded myself. I waited until I had collected myself and moved the rest of the way down the winding stone corridors toward the room Fox had been in since being moved out of the infirmary. The room was connected to the bathroom I had bathed in earlier, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to really look at the room itself. It was small, with lit candles flickering in sconces on the walls, giving off a soft orange glow. Through the balcony door, I saw the sun slowly ease beneath the tree-lined horizon like a sinking ship.
Fox was sitting on the bed, his back to me, watching the sunset with the stillness of stones. He was awake. I was so relieved I wanted to cry. His orange hair caught the color of the sky, shimmering like fire. I tried to creep quietly inside, but the plates on the tray clinked together.
“You’re terrible at sneaking,” he said dryly, not even turning around.
I winced. “I’m not that bad.”
“Who told you that lie?”
Sighing, I set the tray on the edge of his bed. “I brought you some food.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said dismissively, only a moment before his stomach grumbled.
“Well, I am hungry,” I replied, and pulled a chair from the desk up to the bedside. I lifted the cover off the nearest plate. The smell made my mouth water. “Let’s see, this looks like some sort of meat—”
“Duck.”
“Duck,” I repeated, “in some sort of sweet sauce, and roasted carrots and potatoes . . . Hey, didn’t you steal a roast duck from the baker’s windowsill once?”
He glanced rudely at me, the first time he’d looked at me since I’d entered. He was bare chested except for the bandage around his wound. He was trying really hard to make me feel like I was unwanted, I’d give him that, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t given him the same look a hundred times when he was a fox.
It was strange, but I think I missed him.
“C’mon, here’s a fork. You need to eat,” I said, offering him the utensil.
Finally, begrudgingly, he took the fork.
I ate a bit of duck and tried the roasted carrots. “It’s good to see you awake. Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah. Briath said you came to visit me a few times while I was asleep.”
“I didn’t want to wake you, so I left.” And when you weren’t asleep, I know you pretended to be, I thought, spearing another carrot. His hands looked strange without claws, and he kept running his tongue over his teeth, as if he expected to find sharp canines, but they weren’t there anymore.
“I’m sorry,” I found myself saying.
He poked at the duck with the prongs of his fork. “For what?”
“For not being able to protect myself in the wood. If I’d just fought back against Wen, you probably wouldn’t have gotten cursed. I just . . . froze.” I bowed my head. “I’m sorry, Fox.”
I waited for him to agree that it was my fault, that I was weak and stupid, that all the trouble he’d been in was because of me, but . . . those words never came. Instead, he sighed and put his hand on my head, like my father used to when I was younger, a soft touch of affection. He said softly, “I would do it again to save you, Daisy.”
I pursed my lips tightly, trying not to cry. Again.
I ate the rest of the plate in silence.
Later that night, I came back Fox’s room to find him leaning against the window. He was looking out to something in the city. The sun had already set, bringing with it blue-and-black skies. He didn’t notice I was there until I almost tripped over my own feet, and then he turned around and smiled at me.
“Fancy seeing you again,” he greeted me. He was dressed in a simple dark shirt and trousers that were a little too big for him. His hair was tied back into a ponytail with a ribbon—one that I’d seen Briath wearing around earlier.
Oh, I’m glad he’s made a friend, I thought as I set down a tray full of food from the kitchens again—some sort of vegetable concoction that looked much less appetizing than the duck we’d eaten earlier.
Fox was clearly not interested. He made a face as soon as he bit into a leek. “Oh, that’s gross.”
“Not a fan?”