He didn’t even have a stick to beat it off. All he had was a single remaining stone, which seemed more likely, at this point, to anger the creature.
Dropping to all fours, the bear snuffled his shirt. Its breath scorched his skin. He swallowed.
With another roar, the bear lunged at him. He yeeted the stone at it, uselessly, and tried to dive aside—too late.
Claws raked across his chest and stomach. The children screamed. His fingers scraped in the leaf mold for another stone, a stick, anything with which to defend himself, but all he could do was throw a fistful of wet, dirty leaves at the creature. He didn’t know where the acorn had gone.
The bear grabbed his ankle with its massive jaws, whipped its head around, and threw him into a tree. He gasped, winded. Blood trickled from his chest, his stomach, his ankle. His clothes were shredded and filthy, his glasses askew, the children were screaming and throwing rocks, bark had grown up the boy in the tree’s face until all that was visible was one dead eye.
In the distance, a stag bugled. The bear turned from Arthur with one paw raised over him, confused. Black ooze dripped from its eye onto his torn chest.
Arthur turned his head, barely, blearily. The fluffy shape of a cat leaped over a fallen log and sped toward the children. The last thing he saw, before he lost consciousness, was the blurry form of a stag bounding after her.
xl. In which Arthur has a reunion but also, unfortunately, wood sickness
Arthur ached. His neck was throbbing—dully, but the throbbing had escaped containment. His chest throbbed, too. And his stomach. And his ankle. And, well, his whole body.
Nice to know he was alive enough to feel pain. He hadn’t been sure when the bear grabbed him that it wasn’t the end. And it was a dull pain, not the sharp stab it had been when the bear’s claws raked across him. That was something.
He shivered. The pain spiked. He was wrapped in furs, but the cold he remembered from before—the cold that had frozen the blood oozing from his chest and stomach—was bone-deep now. Something heavy and warm rumbled on his chest. He hoped it would warm him up.
Now there was a voice. Rather, the voice had been there, but he’d been too busy picking out feelings to notice. The voice rose to the forefront, soft and soothing and achingly familiar.
“...and this door opened in the wall, and Odette found that secret room of Mrs. Wellsley’s. You remember I told you about the secret room the other week. Anyway, Odette found it, but we don’t know what’s in it yet.”
Her radio program. Charlotte was recounting the latest development in her radio program, no different than if they’d been at home on a Saturday morning, drinking coffee and swapping stories. Arthur’s mouth curled into a smile, or tried to.
“Of course that was Friday. If we don’t get out of here soon, I’ll miss the next episode. Not that worse things aren’t likely to befall us.”
When she paused, he imagined her sitting across from him at the kitchen table, taking a sip of her coffee.
“Still,” she said. “I’ll hate to miss it. What if they finally reveal Mrs. Wellsley’s secret? I won’t know a thing about it until the following week, and by then I’m sure I’ll have lost the plot entirely.”
Arthur wriggled his fingers. They were so stiff he wasn’t sure they’d moved.
Her breath hitched. “Arthur?”
He tried again.
She clutched his hand. “I’m here.”
He opened his eyes.
Everything was blurry, of course; he wasn’t wearing his glasses. He wasn’t sure where he was. Not where he had been. The canopy blurred darkly overhead, but around him glowed firelight.
And at his side was his sister.
“Lottie,” he croaked.
She squeezed his hand. He struggled to sit up. The rumbly thing on his chestmrowreddisapprovingly and hopped off him. Freya. She arched into Arthur’s hand before trotting off to curl up beside the fire.
Charlotte helped him sit up and slid his glasses onto his face.
Her features leaped into focus. She looked so like she had when he’d left the house that he could’ve cried.
Then he saw Calyx piled behind her.
Arthur jerked away. Pain jolted through him. “What’s it—has it hurt you? Are you—”
