Rude, brittle-bone!
Itumbled through the door, leaving death in my wake.
Zora’s screams chased me down the street, and a pair of footsteps did too, but I was quick and I felt no pain in this state. I felt no cold either and no strain from the run, but I felt the crawl of terror like ants in my bones. I felt the sharp and keen ache to slip from this skin of mine.
I could not linger in Wildemire. The hounds would be prowling the forest soon. There was nothing I could do to save Zora now—but I could still keep the hounds from laying waste to the town.
I found myself in the forest, deep within, where dusk-shrouded firs concealed me between feathered branches and the thicket tore with spindly fingers at my coat. It was quiet, as it often was in the winter. Quiet, save for the low whisper of my steps in the snow.
I noticed late that a wrongness had followed me here. That the snow between the trees had been disturbed to the soil, the soil disturbed to the roots. The tracks of a hundred beasts and theirprey had joined here in the clearing and turned into a stampede. I stumbled over strewn branches and muddied snow.
I heard it then, in the hiss of the wind. A pain as deep as the earth, as bitter as ice. A gaping wound lay buried somewhere beneath the snow, a sinister thing from which cold and darkness bled forth, spilling into the veins of the forest. And this… This was no ordinary forest, was it? The deeper I hurried, the lusher it became: dancing flowers, bright-green moss, shivering grass. A mosaic of color and aliveness, despite the winter.
This was a Wandering Wood, and it was dying.
The wind howled, in anger and anguish. I scarcely managed to keep on my feet, throwing my weight against its frigid breath.
Let me see you, it screeched.Let me taste you, witch.
I strained to see against the whirls of snow. To understand what had put the animals in such a fright. The hounds. It must have been the hounds who’d caused this uproar, stalking this alive forest with gnashing teeth. They’d find me soon and I possessed no tool to take myself Beyond—
A little farther, in a glade, stood a circle of toadstools. If I ate enough of them, the poison might take me quickly. I hurried there, but when I glanced at the red-capped gathering again, it had scattered. The trees shifted like shadows, knots morphing into faces, hollow trunks twisting to reveal new paths and obscure others.
Let me see you, sang the trees.Let me taste you.
I lurched with a shriek through a narrow gap between two old oaks, afraid that the shifting trees might crush me if I lingered in the glade. A sticky thing caught my fingers, my arm. It twined around my wrists and around my ankles, and it trapped me there, amid the trees. A ravel of silvery string snared me—spidersilk, thicker and sturdier than yarn, shimmering with dew. It stretched between the gnarled branches like a sheet, designedto trap much mightier creatures than me. I was but a gnat caught in the web of something I never wished to meet.
As I thrashed, tearing with nails and teeth at the web, it tightened and robbed me of breath.
A high-pitched cackle came from the glade.
I ceased my senseless writhing to squint into the dark. On the tallest toadstool, draped in garments of half-rotten leaves and glistening rubies, perched a little faerie.
“Oh, little little brittle-bone,” it sang with a voice like nails against metal. “Lost in the thorn, shredded and torn, forever forlorn. Oh, brittle brittle little-bone. Stuck in the web, red as it bled, soon dead.”
It was smiling, teeth as long as knives jutting from bleeding gums. Its face was strangely twisted, greyish skin stretched tightly over the bone, no flesh between to cushion the sharpness. I’d never seen such a horrid creature. It had wings, like the faerie I’d met in the wasteland, but they were limp and black-veined, its hair matted. A faerie of the woods, no doubt, but one who suffered a malady.
My heart thumped achingly, filled with a final, macabre hope. If I upset the faerie well enough, it might lose its temper and slit my throat before either the owner of the web or the hounds found me. “Help me,” I said to it, as sharply as my strained voice allowed. The faeries did not take well to being commanded. “Get me out.”
The faerie hissed in anger, as I’d hoped. “Rude, brittle-bone,” it shrieked as it leaped from its mushroom and stepped into thin air. The twilight shimmered as the faerie appeared again, settling on a near trunk. Its hollow eyes caught the dusklight, red as blood. “Crude, brittle-bone!”
Darkness rolled like a wave over the near hill. On its crest moved a large shadow.
“Make haste, will you?” I snapped at the faerie. The hounds would be upon me within seconds. I could not let them take me. “Help me, useless thing.”
A screech ruptured the quiet—I cried out, ears ringing. The faerie had lost its nerve with me at last. Its claws drove through the web, tearing the silk. I tumbled into rotten leaves, bruises blooming on my ribs. I braced for the slice of blade-like nails, but I felt only a breeze and I smelled only a tidekissed breath. The shadow slipped from the trees and pounced.
I knew that shadow.
It was no hound.
I’d watched it for many dark hours beneath the fir. I’d painted moonlit sparkles into its copper-red fur. It was just as vicious as I remembered from that night in the snow, sinking its fangs into the screeching faerie. I shrieked into the wind and with its force at my back, I ran. The fox might have seemed like a friend with a locked door between us, but in this dark and twisted forest I did not trust it. It might try to take me back to Wildemire again—a fate much worse than dying in the cold.
I could not face the shame.
I leaped gracelessly over fallen trees and stumbled over naked roots uncovered by the stampede. I raced for my life to the sound of swift paws and a low growl. My useless feet and wounded leg were no match. I tumbled over a frozen log, palms scraping over ice to catch my fall.
The fox had herded me to the road. To a moss-draped ruin of cracked stone and splintered wood. I stumbled over crumbling garden walls, through tangled briar and onto the road.
