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We continued heading northwest, according to Edrich’s compass, stopping only a few times for him to rest his legs and for me to stretch and check on Maggie.
My hedgehog had been delightedly following close by, happy with the freedom to snack on bugs and berries she found along the path. This forest called to her the same way it called to me. I could sense it.
The third place we stopped was my favorite. The air was sweeter, ripe with the scent of summer’s end. Colorful fruit hung from the trees and bushes around us, animals tittered and scurried nearby, completely unbothered by our presence. There was a stream with dancing lilies on top of the water. Butterflies and bumblebees flitted from each of the flowers, and back again.
Wild mushrooms grew on the bark of trees in shapes and sizes I’d never dreamed of before. Some looked like spun sugar, white and frosty and fine. Some were dense and glowing and every shade of the rainbow. And still more had spots and designs that looked as if they’d been hand-painted.
Lifting my arms, I spun around, allowing the gentle breeze to whip through my hair and the fringes of my dress, making me feel lighter than I had all day.
Making me feel like I can fly.
Maggie sniffed at the air before her eyes locked on to something in the distance. Suddenly, she was nothing more than a ball of spikes, rolling under the bushes nearby.
A shadow grew overhead, and Pepper’s caw rang out. Edrich’s eyes went wide with fear as she swooped down and landed next to me. She was fast, faster than any bird I’d ever seen. And far faster than Edrich as he desperately tried to bridge the meter between us to get to me.
“Lina!”
“Edrich, it’s fine,” I said, reaching out toward her.
Before Edrich could reach us, I was petting her, and she was pressing her head into my touch.
I couldn’t help the giggle that escaped me when she practically burrowed her beak under my arm, in an effort to get as close as she possibly could. She let out a few soft chirps each time I stroked her feathers.
Edrich’s jaw was practically on the ground.
14
Edrich
Irolled my eyes at the cooing sounds Lina was making to my deadly gyrfalcon. We had been back on our trek for a solid half hour, with Lina securely in my pocket and Pepper on my shoulder, and her attention hadn’t faltered. Worse still, Pepper was eating them up, like she was one of Lina’s furry woodland friends, instead of a fierce bird of prey.
I had forgotten the way Lina always seemed to do that, in the end. Once I had found her caught in a spider web, merrily chattering away at an enormous wolf spider who actually appeared to be listening to her.
Or, at least not eating her, which was something.
It wasn’t the only thing I had forgotten, either. Or, more accurately, tried not to think about. When I was gone, it was easy to forget the way she had this unyielding faith in me, as though she thought there was nothing I couldn’t do.
I hated the way it almost made me hope I was everything she thought I was, instead of the person I had actually become.
“Why are you so angry?” Lina’s question startled me from my thoughts.
“I’m not,” I lied, automatically.
“Yes, you are,” she said simply. “I can feel your heart thundering with it, even if I can’t see your face.”
“Canyou see my face from that angle?” I tried to change the subject, carefully picking my way around several holes in the ground that looked like they might house small, ground-dwelling creatures.
Probably venomous ones, given our luck.
“Yes, Edrich.” She sounded as exasperated as I’d ever heard her. “I can. You didn’t answer my question.”
And I wasn’t going to. She wouldn’t begin to understand that I was still angry from visceral memories of being held in a dank cell for something I hadn’t done. Of watching my brothers be dragged away to have information “extracted” from them. Of dragging an innocent family to the same woman who had tortured us.
I focused on the small relief of having safely reached the other side of the holes, but Lina needled again.
“Edrich?”
I narrowed my eyes at her, but her resolutely navy skin and the stubborn tilt of her chin told me I was getting nowhere. I scowled.
