We stopped for a little while by a river. I wrung out my hair and tried to wash the mud and dirt from my skin. My hands were still shaking, and the bite on my hand smarted whenever I flexed my fingers.
“I can go see if I can find some yarrow,” Fox said, noticing how gingerly I moved my hand.
I quickly hid it behind my back. “It’s fine.”
Even so, he tore off a part of the bottom of his shirt with his strangely sharp teeth and took my hand from behind my back. “I know you better than that,” he replied as he wrapped my wounded hand. “When we finally stop, I’ll see if I can find some.”
“Thanks—and, um, that was quick thinking back there. With my old bandage.”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug as he tucked in the excess strip of cloth. “I just didn’t want to die, Daisy. Simple as that. You could’ve done it, too.”
“I’m just a gardener’s daughter—”
“With weird magic in your blood,” he interrupted me, as if he needed to remind me. Which, I guessed, in the moment, he did. “Magic that, it seems, has only gotten stronger since we entered the wood.”
I looked away, properly embarrassed. I hadn’t noticed, but now that he mentioned it—it was stronger here. “. . . Right.”
“The bear told us to follow her up the river.” He nodded to the bear, who was bending for a drink. “She knows how to get to Voryn.”
“I thought you said you knew.”
“Well, I will. Once I ask her.”
“So you can understand her?”
To that, he flashed a smile, all white canines and charm. “I am an animal.”
Well, I wasn’t about to point out that he wasn’t quite an animal anymore, but that would’ve rubbed salt in an already salty wound. So instead I asked, “What’s her name, then?”
He cocked his head, as if listening. “Vala,” he finally said, and so we followed Vala up the twisting river, deep into the wood that had already taken so much from me.
12
An Ancient Burden
Fox
I STUCK OUT my tongue, but it did nothing to cool me down.
The sun beat down from directly overhead like an oven. The few animals we did see were deer and rabbits—out to drink by the river. Which was a good sign. When they disappear, it means something worse is about. Though I couldn’t think any self-respecting monster would be out in this sort of heat. It was hot and muggy, and I kept tugging at the collar of my shirt to try to get cooler. The shirt stuck to me, and my trousers were uncomfortable, and I had abandoned my boots miles back. Human bodies were weird. I was sweating—that I did not like one bit. It was wet and gross, and I hardly ever allowed myself to get wet. Or gross. I couldn’t remember the last time I actually bathed, and I felt every particle of dirt on me, and I hated it.
I hated all of it.
Daisy had pinned her hair up behind her head, wisps of curly hair falling against the back of her neck, and there was a small, dark patch of skin I had never noticed before—almost like a birthmark or a scar.
“When did you get that?” I asked.
She glanced back at me, the water rushing around her feet. She had taken off her shoes, too, but she kept hers in her hands as she waded in the shallows of the river. She touched the spot on the back of her neck with her free hand, knowing what I was talking about without having to ask. “It was where my woodcurse started,” she said after a moment.
“You . . . were woodcursed?”
“Yes, but for some reason it didn’t take. I don’t know why.” She looked down uncomfortably, then nudged her head up the river. “Are you sure we’re still heading the right way? Voryn is north, but this river keeps inching east, I think?”
I glanced up in the direction the river came from. One of the few things that hadn’t changed was my eyesight—at least, the important bits. There was a shadow, soft and subtle, at the edge of my line of sight, and the shadow darkened as I looked toward where the river came. “Yeah, it’s the right way.”
She gave me a peculiar look. “How do you know?”
“Magic,” I replied, wiggling my fingers.
Her curiosity turned to misery. “Ha. Ha.”
“I thought it was funny.” I shrugged and pointed the way we were going. “I can see the magnetic pull of the world pointing north, which is this way.”
The bear meandered into the shallows beside Daisy, pawing at the minnows intently swimming upstream. The river was swift and cold, and the pebbles, from what I could see, unnaturally smooth. Daisy stooped down and took one, and skipped it along the slow-moving surface of the river. The sun glinted in the golden leaves of the crown she’d tied to her sash.
They enraptured me, the colors. All the colors did. The way the sun spiked off the lapping waves of the river, the deep blue of the water, the yellow-green of the trees. It was strange the way the light danced through them, and when I looked straight up, there was only clear blue sky between the twisting trees, never meeting in their crown shyness, veins of blue between emerald leaves.
I found myself pausing more often than I liked, my eyes catching a flower that I knew before, but never that color. It was around midday, while I was watching—somewhat hungrily—a group of trout swim upstream, the sun catching on their silver scales, that I noticed that when they passed Cerys on the river, they circled back and kept time with her. The bear was having a lovely time catching them.
We had picked up a few bees, too, and they hummed in the air as we walked.
That was . . . a rather terrible sign.
They could sense the crown. Like I could, before. It was this singsongy pull, a rapture I had never heard before but somehow knew innately. It was how I found Daisy at the castle, because after she put it on, the song became so loud, it screeched.
If the fish and bees could sense the crown, there were much bigger things in this wood that most certainly could, too. Were they also following? I darted my gaze around, but these stupid human eyes could find colors in everything but the shade, and that was where the monsters liked to hide.
I thought it best not say anything—at least not yet. Best to not jinx anything. I’d gotten a good look at those ghoulies back at the castle and the cottage, and I had no interest in seeing them a third time.
I tugged at my collar again, muttering about the heat.
“The water’s cool,” she said, bending down and taking another rock. She skipped it along the river’s surface.
“I’m not very keen on water.”
“Well, then you’ll start smelling really lovely soon.”
I sighed. “I’ll work up to it, if I must.” I didn’t want to think about all the injustices I’d have to endure in this stupid, ugly body. “We should start traveling at night, I think, and sleep during the day. There are fewer predators then.”
She waved me off. “We should travel as long as we can and put as much distance between us and Seren as possible. Reaching Voryn is the only chance you’ve got of getting back to being a fox and my only chance to break the curse on Anwen and return to the castle.”
“But I’m so tired,” I complained, and could hear the whine in my voice. I kicked a pebble, and it skittered into the shallows. “We’ve traveled all night, and this body is so heavy. My feet hurt, my back hurts, and I think I’m getting what you call a sunburn.”