Then I started ahead of them up the river. I didn’t want to have this conversation.
“You’re not a fox anymore!” she shouted behind me. “You’re a person, and people are . . . they are . . .”
I knew very well what people were. I knew it even better than her. She was scraping for words like loyal and brave, but I knew that humans could also be cruel and petty, and they could hurt you with words and deeds just as quickly as with blades or bows. If that was what being a human was about, I couldn’t get back to being a fox fast enough.
“Courage gets you killed, Daisy. I’m in the business of staying alive.”
I expected her to yell at me, and I braced myself for it, but all she said was “Of course.”
It was the first time I ever heard her sound disheartened—not the disappointment of running out of your favorite food, or waking up to a rainy day, or getting your tail wet, but a different, deeper sort of disenchantment. I didn’t understand why, but thinking back on it, I probably should have. Hindsight and all that.
Because she said softly, “Then you shouldn’t be with me.”
“Wait—no. Daisy, I—”
“It’s fine. I didn’t even ask you if you wanted to come along, anyway.” She wasn’t looking at me anymore, and I felt my heart begin to sink, sink, sink, down into my toes. “I just assumed. I’m sorry for that. You don’t have to come any farther. I’ll go and find Voryn. I’ll find a way to break the curse, and to change you back, too. It’s my fault you were transformed anyway. None of this is your responsibility.”
“That’s not what I meant, Daisy. Tell her that’s not what I meant,” I pleaded to the bear, but Vala didn’t come to my rescue at all. She simply stood beside Daisy, leaning toward her, as if to protect her from me.
“Then why did you run when the ancient came?” Daisy asked. “What’ll happen next time?”
I ground my teeth and looked away. That was all the answer she needed.
“Go find a hole somewhere and hide. I’ll find you when this is all over. I’ll be fine, Fox. Trust me.”
Then she turned into the mist with the bear. The last expression on her face stuck with me—that look that told me that she would fix everything herself, even if it killed her. I bent into a crouch and put my head in my hands. What was I supposed to do? What could I do? If I told her how afraid I was of that ancient, she would think less of me than she already did.
She was right. I should just stay here. Just wait until I could return to myself, until I become a fox again, however that happened. Then, I was certain, I’d forget this whole ordeal. It would feel like a dream. I just needed to wait. I just needed to—
“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!”