“I don’t fucking know!” she shouted.
“Then you should figure that out first. Even if you did know what would please you, I doubt I could bring you to it. If you saw it on the horizon, you’d probably run the other way. I don’t care about a gods-blasted song! I’m not trying to build mylegend,” snapped Astryx.
“No, you’re just walking straight in the dark until the sunrise—whatever the fuck that means—which is why we’re hauling Zyll in for a bounty and to gods-know what fate, even though youknowit’s wrong!”
“Wearen’t hauling her anywhere,” retorted Astryx, with ice in her voice.
Then she spun on her heel and strode away from the road. “I think I need a walk. Look at all the good it did you.”
Fern watched her go, the anger slowly leaving her body as Astryx disappeared over a swell in the prairie.
“Fuck,” she muttered to herself. “Great job, Fern.”
Behind her, she heard a muffled thud and a squawk, and assumed Zyll had caught something.
At least somebody around here got what they wanted,she thought.
At the gritty noise of a footstep on the road, she turned to find Staysha in the middle of the path, her lute case under one arm, heading Fern’s way.
The expression on the woman’s face was unreadable, her mouth a thin line.
Fern reviewed their loud argument and the words she’d shouted, experiencing a second rush of guilt. “Hey, I’m sorry. I don’t know what you overheard, but—”
Then the Silver Sparrow grabbed the neck of the case with both hands and brained Fern with it.
36
“Hey! Hey, you gotta get up!”
Fern’s consciousness bobbed just above a dark waterline before it sank beneath once more.
A little eternity ensued down in the shadows.
“Kid!”
She unwillingly surfaced again, lost in a forest of whispering green that seemed to heave up and down like the swell of ocean waves.
Something warm and velvety was brushing against one ear and the fur on the back of Fern’s skull, which drew attention to thefrontof it, where her face throbbed. Hot shock waves of pain pulsed from her snout back through her eyes, which felt squeezed by her cheeks.
“Come on, come on. Hey, hey you, with the tail!Damn, that doesn’t narrow it down. Bucket!Horse! Biteher!”
“Muphet,” mumbled Fern into the dirt, eyelids flickering. “Nuh.”
Her stomach flipped, and she thought she was going to be sick.
Then something nipped her ear, and a bolt of galvanizing lightning pierced the nausea. She yelped, pushing herself up onto her paws.
“Fuckass, ow!”
She was sprawled in the long grass beside the road. Turning her head made the ache inside it spill to the right side of her face, as though her skull was a bottle half full of liquid pain.
Bucket snorted, inches from her snout.
“Wuh.”
“Oh, thank the effing Eight,” said Breadlee, with huge relief. “You gotta get up. She’s gonna be out of sight soon!”
“Who? Wh—” Then Fern remembered Staysha striding toward her.
