“The sooner we get going, the sooner we can get you real medical attention. And maybe,” I added, “don’t fight monsters with your bare hands.”
“I’ll keep that in mind the next time I save your life.”
“If you do, I might not have to save you from bleeding out afterwards.”
“We’ll likelie be able tae shift mair quickly,” Clem said from off to my left, “wance the twa of ye finish flirting.”
Sam made a sputtering noise that did not rise to the level of words. I blushed.
We gathered for a quick breakfast of hard bread and cheese, and I took some time to observe the men. The one who’d woken me up had definitely been Jack, I decided—he was still walking with a bit of a limp. For that matter, while Sam remained cheerful, he was barely capable of standing upright.
I tried to remember the names from the story. Hat On Ear was Max. Detachable Leg was Harry.
Identifying them was going to become impossible if more of them turned up at some point. “Where are the rest of you? The ones you mentioned yesterday?” I asked. “Are those the duchess’s brothers?”
“Aye,” Sam said. “We’ve got the full dozen now. But we left them at Castle Tailliz. Someone needed to stay behind and guard the king.”
“Guard the king?” I frowned. “Why would huntsmen be guarding the king? Shouldn’t the king’s guards be the ones doing the guarding?”
There was a pause, and five of them swiveled their heads to look at the sixth, who rose carefully to his feet. Jack again; he wasn’t putting any weight on his bad leg.
“Sam misspoke,” he said. “He meant they stayed behind to serve at the king’s pleasure, in case he wanted to hold a hunt today. And we should return as soon as possible. For the same reason. Let’s go.”
Sam, who was fidgeting in embarrassment, said nothing in reply. The group’s ringleader had chastised his loose-lipped subordinate into silence. The others likewise remained speechless as they finished gathering their belongings. Jack’s word on the subject, it appeared, was final.
It would have been nice to change into something less covered in blood and dirt. With all the lovely dresses in my trousseau turned into so much mulch and pumpkin seeds, I was beginning to appreciate the utility of Jonquil’s clothes-cleaning magic. The destruction of my garments might have helped me sell my story, but I was desperate for anything dry.
When we decamped, we didn’t make our way to the road, much to my surprise. Instead, Jack forged a path through the forest itself. It seemed like an excellent way to get lost. Which in turn seemed like an excellent way to get killed. Even ordinary woods can hold untold dangers if you venture too far from the known routes, and these woods were far from ordinary. But none of the hunters protested. I hoped they knew what they were doing.
We trailed along behind Jack, except for Harry, who affixed his leg back on and darted ahead to scout whenever he was able. The rest of us tromped leadenly through the leaf litter and mounds of fallen needles, eternally plodding up steep rises or down precipitous slopes, often forced to detour around themassive trunks of the great trees. Jack had to use his sword to hack his way through dense underbrush more than once. It was slow, tough going, especially with some of us wounded. I hung back with Sam and helped him along as best I could. My progress wouldn’t have been much faster than his, anyway, not in a dress whose hem was intent on catching on every bush we passed and thoroughly inappropriate shoes that were soaked through within minutes. Perhaps it was just as well I’d had no ball gowns available.
Walking through the woods should have been much more uncomfortable than traveling in the coach. I was wet, filthy, terrifyingly deep in a trackless forest, and not without my own injuries. The gouges in my shoulder where the spider wolf had raked me ached abominably. Even my good red cloak was failing me, the wind whistling through more torn rents than I was capable of fixing with what was left of Liam’s spool of thread.
Nonetheless, I was finding the journey noticeably more pleasant. The huntsmen’s silence ended soon after we set out, and the chatter of voices was a relief after weeks in the presence of no one but a troop of taciturn teeth. I found a smile drifting onto my face as I listened.
Or rather, I did once I became used to the horrific aberrations we periodically glimpsed peering out at us from the trees.
At first glance, many of them weren’t obviously abnormal. The bird tottering on a tree branch didn’t look unusual to me until I noticed it was perching on the backward-bent legs of a cricket, so thin they barely held it up. I flinched back, but the hunters only regarded it warily, then carried on when it did nothing.
“Most of them are harmless,” Sam told me. “You can go weeks without seeing any deadly beasts, sometimes.”
“Which beasts are the deadly ones?”
“Any that try to bite you. Even the wee ones.” He consideredfor a moment. “Especially the wee ones. Some are extremely poisonous.”
That didn’t make me feel safe, exactly, but once we’d passed a few of them without incident, I stopped shying from every shadow. Most of the monstrosities looked more ill than dangerous: Squirrels with the heads of cats, too heavy for their bodies, chins dragging on the ground as the poor creatures staggered sideways to pull them along. A mouse crawling on a carpet of centipede limbs, with thin membranous wings poking uselessly out of its shoulder blades, endlessly fluttering without enough strength to lift it off the ground. They might not have been deadly, but they still made me shudder in dismay.
We came across far more of the creatures than I would have expected from the mere rumors Liam had described. Had their numbers increased since the last time he’d passed this way, years before? Or did few travelers venture this deep into the woods—and fewer return to tell the tale?
I hoped not, especially when it remained a mystery why my masked companions had chosen to plunge headlong into the forest’s heart.
Chapter Nine
Ask Not for Whom the Hamster Screams
After a while, I began to spot the differences among the huntsmen—they might have looked much the same in their domino masks, but they weren’t at all similar otherwise. Jack remained inscrutable to me, but the rest were coming into sharper focus.
“Hey, Harry,” said Max—Max was the one who liked to tell bad jokes. “Did you know I can cut down a tree just by looking at it?”
