“Fox,” she replied exasperatedly. “I feel like I could burst into tears at any moment.”
“I’d be worried if you didn’t say that. Don’t worry, we just have to be convince them that we’re planning on being here awhile.” I glanced at the guards again. They thought they were so inconspicuous, leaning against the wall in the shadows. They clearly didn’t think either of us a threat. That gave us our best chance.
“Okay.” She put her hand in mine, and I held on to it tightly as I pulled her away from the balcony and into the night market down the street.
There were vendors hawking modest but lovely items: intricate glass jewelry, roll upon roll of cloth that seemed to shimmer in the torchlight, and flowers that had such unique smells I was sure they were Wildwood grown. None of them, however, were more enticing than the smells coming from the food stalls. Worn lanterns draped from building to building, crisscrossing down the market like lacing on a bodice as music drifted from the square, bright and loud, chorused with the telltale song and dance of . . .
“It’s a wedding.” Daisy marveled.
I licked my lips. “Oh, I do love the food at weddings.”
She gave me a deadpan look. “I don’t know that you even need Seren—seems to me like you’re turning back into your old self already.”
“Well, if there’s anything that could bring it out of me, it’s this!” I stretched my hands out toward the night market and the celebration beyond, people dressed up like delectable pastries. “All the food I could want, and not a single angry townsperson in sight trying to drive me off. It’s practically begging me to plunder it.”
“Just as long as we don’t attract too much attention,” she warned.
I waved my hand. “You’re talking to a professional,” I said, and quickly stepped up to the nearest food stall, taking a skewer of sweet-smelling meat.
Daisy grabbed my arm. “You can’t just take that,” she hissed.
I blinked at her. “She didn’t ask for anything in return.”
“It can’t be free.”
“Of course it is,” said the woman, a strange look on her face. “Wait, are you the Aloiryan we’ve heard rumors of—”
“What’s down there?” I interrupted, steering Daisy toward another stall. The last thing we needed was to be recognized; we’d never lose the guards if everyone we passed knew we were outsiders. Besides, here there were fish cakes and meat skewers and crepes and— “Is that fried? Excuse me, two of those.”
Daisy followed me with a hapless sort of resignation as I dodged through the crowd, going straight for another food stall, and then another. I was having the time of my life. But at every stall I would glance behind us, and the guards were always there. Finally, after following us to our sixth stall, they must have been content that we were here for a while, as one of them went to get them mugs of beer, and then they went over to the stall with the meat skewers.
Daisy looked wistfully at the celebration. She missed her village, her father, Anwen—I could tell. The long sigh, the drooped shoulders, the way she twined the end of her braid around her fingers. Watching her even made me miss Anwen, too, though I shook off the feeling immediately.
It was so strange. I’d lived so much of my life alone, being chased out of gardens and trash cans, and yet here I was . . .
“We’ve almost got them fooled,” I noted, offering Daisy a paper bag full of sweet, round cakes.
She eyed them cautiously. “What’s wrong with them?”
“Do you really think I’d eat something that wasn’t delicious?” When she hesitated, I added, “Yeah, I know, trash. Look, just try it.”
She picked up a small potato cake and cautiously ate it. Her eyes brightened. “Oh, that is delicious!” Then she smiled at me—and her smile was bright and genuine, and I felt like I was falling even as I stood still.
She ate another one, and then gasped. “Ooh! You know what would be great with this? Warm wine—let me get some.” She hurried over to another stall, and just as she came back with two cups of mulled wine, the dance quieted. We looked toward the center of the market, where a procession had been set up in front of a bonfire. A woman with gray hair pulled back into a bun, wearing a stark white ceremonial robe, stood between two other women dressed to be wed.
Daisy bristled. “That’s the Grandmaster,” she whispered to me as the ceremony commenced. “Great, now how’re we supposed to disappear?”
“Patience,” I replied, taking a cup of wine from her. “If she’s here performing the wedding rite, she can’t be in the fortress, too, can she?”
She sipped her wine. “No, now that you mention it. But we still have to deal with the guards first.”
“Patience,” I singsonged, and we stood quietly as the wedding ceremony went on.
“. . . Even as we are surrounded by darkness, love surrounds us with light,” the Grandmaster said, and tied the ribbon around the couple’s clasped hands. “Let the other guide your way, let them be your light, for even apart you will be together, your roots always intertwined.”
Then the two women leaned in and kissed each other. The crowd around them cheered, throwing flower petals into the air. The wind swirled them high into the night sky and out into the Wilds beyond the wall. The Grandmaster went to sit in an old wooden chair, and the moment she did, the celebration commenced with cries of delight. A small band of musicians started up the songs again, and the couple took their first dance. The way they looked at each other made me feel like I was watching something intensely personal that I wasn’t supposed to see—we hadn’t been invited to this ceremony, after all.
“The wine merchant told me this wedding almost didn’t happen,” Daisy began, as dancing partners grabbed each other and swung into the circular clearing in the middle of the night market.
The wine was already making me hot, and I pulled at the collar of my shirt to loosen it. “Mmh, why’s that?”
“Because there was a rumor that a man came into the city woodcursed.”
“Ah. So, me.”
“So, you,” she agreed, and took one of the skewers from my hands. I squawked in protest, but she didn’t care.
“Remind me never to bring up the fact that I almost became a bone-eater around anyone tonight,” I muttered.
“Oh, you don’t think it’d be a great conversation starter?”
“Yeah, in ten years, maybe.”
She laughed. “Bold of you to assume you’ll be invited to parties in ten years.”
“I probably won’t be. Foxes aren’t really invited to anything.”
To that she smiled warmly. “I’d invite you . . . as my hat.”
I went to point out that in ten years, hat or not, I would probably be dead, but the words fell from my mouth because I . . . I wanted to be invited by her to a party. I wanted to watch her arrange flowers in her father’s flower shop, and I wanted to sunbathe on the windowsill while she hummed and made beautiful bouquets of lilies and goldenrod, and I wanted to sit beside her on the ride up to the castle, and I wanted to look out of the tallest spire with her and imagine following the river all the way down to Somersal-by-the-Sea, and I wanted to eat more food with her, and laugh with her, and—
And—
What was wrong with me?
It was the wine. I wasn’t thinking straight.
I shoved an entire skewer into my mouth and moved on through the night market, toward the wedding celebration, telling myself that what I wanted was idiotic. What I wanted didn’t matter.
And that I really didn’t want it at all.
Because there were no stories of foxes and gardeners with happy endings.
27
The Lady of the Wilds
Cerys
THE WINE WARMED me, inside and out.
As we wandered around the bonfire and through the wedding celebration, we kept to the edges of the dance floor. One of the vendors called to Fox, “Would your pretty partner like a bite?” He offered some sort of sugar-sprinkled fried pastry. “It’s a lover’s knot!”
Baffled, a blush ate up the sides of my face, and I tugged at the hem of my shirt in embarrassment.
“Aw, look,” teased Fox, “you made her blush!”
I wanted to kill him. Which only made him grin wider. “I think we’ll pass on the knot,” he told the merchant, and we kept moving through the crowd. He lifted his nose and sniffed the air. “Ooh, is that . . . Daisy, it’s a meat pie!”
“Oh, good, you can try proposing,” I said, and he smiled at our earlier joke. “I can’t eat another bite. Go on without me.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” he replied, handing me his warm wine and shoving the rest of a sweet pancake into his mouth as he made a beeline for the meat pie food stall. I’d never seen anyone so gluttonous in my entire life. There were boys in the guard who could put down some food, but none of them could best Fox. He was an endless chasm of hunger.
As he went to pester the stall owner, I spied a small temple-like entrance carved into the side of the mountain. Flowers adorned the exterior, and large braziers lit the entrance. Fox would be busy for a while, so I slipped inside the cave.
It must have been a shrine to the Lady of the Wilds. There was a large statue of her inside—I recognized her features from storybooks I’d read as a child. I nodded to one of the citizens leaving as I went in and found myself alone staring up at the beautiful woman. Long chains of flowers stretched throughout the temple—across the walls, over her arms, and down across the floor. Her stone hair was untamed, made of vines and moss and wildflowers, and she stood naked on the pedestal, but where I was usually embarrassed by such things, I was simply awed. The way the statue carried herself, the way she looked out to the entrance, welcoming everyone inside . . .
The smell of flowers was sweet, and my heart ached because it reminded me of the flower shop, and Papa, and how far away I was from home, and how, at the moment, my home really did not exist anymore.