Oh dear. I wasn’t sure which thought was worse—that he relished chaos, or that I was becoming more like him. Or, stranger yet, maybe that I was always the kind of girl who didn’t belong trapped inside garden walls.
We spun away from each other, each of us grabbing a new partner in the onlooking crowd. I went for a young child—maybe twelve—and he picked an old woman with a toothless smile. We danced around the bonfire, twirling away from our partners, gathering more people into the mix, and then they went to fetch their own partners, and then they found new partners after that, until the dance floor spun like a colorful hurricane.
And then—I dared to take hold of the hand of one of the guards. She was tall, her hair cut short, a scar on her lip. She wasn’t willing at first, but then she joined in the madness. Her partner quickly followed, and soon they were both swept up.
Everyone was dancing now, and that’s when I felt someone snag my hand and whirl me around. Fox grinned as he caught my other hand and placed it on his shoulder, his on my waist.
“Well, this is chaos,” he said.
I glanced around at all the people laughing and dancing—something that we’d started, but within which we were now anonymous. Which was exactly what I’d hoped. “Good. We should leave before the guards wonder where we are.”
“Must we?” Fox asked.
Time was of the essence, but he held on to me so tightly, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt . . . seen. Like this.
“Okay,” I relented. “One more dance.”
We followed the flow of the dancers around the bonfire again. The waltzes at the castle in Aloriya were not like this. Those were stuffy and regal, and the dignitaries rarely looked to the edge of the garden, where I stood. But here I was dancing with a boy who was handsome in a way only wild things could be, as if he wanted to be bigger than his skin instead of wanting to fit inside it.
As the song ended, we held each other close. I wanted to let go—really, I did—but I couldn’t bring myself to. I didn’t want the moment to end, because at that moment, I didn’t feel like a girl who lived inside a walled garden.
There were no walls here.
And that frightened me, because this was fleeting. This was not permanent. Like a match flaring in the dark, this was only a flash, here and soon gone. I wanted to hang on to it. This feeling. He was a fox, and I was a gardener’s daughter, and there were no stories for enchantments such as us.
He leaned into me, pulling me gently against him, and I let him, my fingers falling into the curls of hair behind his ears. He was going to kiss me. I’d never been kissed before. I closed my eyes and waited for his lips to find mine.
28
The Forest of the Forgotten
Fox
“WE . . . SHOULD PROBABLY get going,” I said, pulling away from Daisy. Her eyes flew open. At first she looked confused; then something flickered in her eyes, and she looked away.
I had . . . almost kissed her.
She blinked rapidly and glanced around for the guards. They were caught up in the next song. “Right,” she agreed, but her voice was distant.
I’m sorry, I wanted to say, though I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for. That I hadn’t kissed her? She had to know that we couldn’t. That it would change everything. She was who she was, and I was . . . someone who would not last. I was a fox. Not a person.
The orchestra struck up another song, and the people around me jumped into motion again, but it was as if I didn’t remember the steps anymore. It was too loud, and the bonfire too bright. My skin tingled as if little tiny ants raced up my body—my bones jittery. I knew the feeling—it was like I was being hunted. My heart thundered in my ears.
Making sure that the guards were still occupied and that the Grandmaster remained in her wooden chair chatting with one of the brides, Daisy and I sneaked out of the night market and made our way back up the city silently. We didn’t share words, and I really wasn’t sure what we could say to each other now, anyway.
Daisy said she was sure the crown was still in the Grandmaster’s study. There would probably be some guards to take care of once we got to the castle, but I figured I could deal with them.
We underestimated how difficult it would be to climb back up the stairway we had come down earlier, though, and by the top I was practically crawling. I wanted to sink down into a puddle and not move for days. Daisy leaned against a wall, trying to catch her breath. At the top, there was a small courtyard that led to the front doors of the fortress, where we’d left from, and Daisy said she knew how to get in.
There were no guards at the front. I hoped that meant we’d just gotten lucky. Daisy must have felt the same, and we slipped through the front door and into the foyer. The layout of the fortress was rather straightforward—with a grand entry hall and stairs leading up to the Grandmaster’s offices. There were halls that branched out to the east and west, one way the kitchen, the other our own rooms. The great hall was dark, though, the candles burning low in their sconces.
Daisy and I were sneaking up the main staircase when we heard footsteps. We quickly ducked behind a pillar as a guard stepped out of the Grandmaster’s office, face shadowed, as he tucked something into his uniform and quickly pressed on down the stairs.
That was much too close for comfort. We slipped through the curtain and into the room after him.
The Grandmaster’s office was a simple large stone room with an intricate wooden desk in the middle that was covered with stacks of paper. There were bookshelves that lined the back wall and a door near the rear that led into her own private quarters. The moonlight was let in through a raven-shaped skylight above us, illuminating the desk itself. As Daisy hurried over to search it, I made sure the door was closed, and I kept an ear out for footsteps. The guard who had come out must’ve been part of a patrol. Another had to be coming by at some point soon.
Daisy riffled through the drawers. “It must be here somewhere,” she muttered, digging through the papers and objects in the drawers.
A dark shape caught my eye on the ground by my foot, and I picked it up. A lavender flower. I hadn’t seen any of those in the city since I’d been here. It reminded me of a kind that, to my knowledge, only grew on the sides of the Sundermount.
Daisy closed the last drawer and cursed. “It’s not here, Fox.”
I tucked the flower into my trouser pocket and nudged my head toward the rear doors. “Let’s look back there, then.”
“She can’t have it on her, can she?”
“No. She wouldn’t be able to carry it for that long without putting it on,” I replied.
“How do you know?”
I . . . didn’t know, honestly. “It stands to reason,” I said. “You felt the temptation before you learned better. And most creatures can hear its call.”
“Wait—does that mean you can hear it?”
I cocked my head and listened in the quiet, but since being woodcursed and Daisy curing me, I hadn’t been quite my fox self. I couldn’t see the magnetic fields north anymore, either. I was sad, but not surprised, to find that I couldn’t hear the crown. I shook my head, to her dismay. “I’m sorry.”
“It must be here,” she said, moving on so that I wouldn’t feel embarrassed.