“We’re about to find an enchanted sword that I shoved in a spring with the aid of a knight and a witch,” Rey said. “Who overcharged me, by the way. That’s strange enough.”
“Oh, yes, I should have considered uncharitable witches. Was this the same witch who made your love potion?”
“That’s vvitch, actually,” Rey said, and tapped the side of the cart. “Vvitch-made.”
Eli doubled back to look at the words Rey had painted on the cart. “What is a vvitch?”
“Haven’t the foggiest, honestly.”
Eli laughed. It was a surprisingly light laugh, though it still had a touch of the gravel in Eli’s voice. It made his sullen face light up, and with the sun tinting his copper curls, he almost looked like a true prince from a story, instead of a cursed noble who went around cutting down killers in Starian hamlets. If Rey had seen him laughing like this in the early days, he would have agreed to anything he suggested, just like he had with Emeric.
But he knew what happened when he became too fond of mortals. No, it was better to simply do what he could and slip away, leaving Eli to his own devices.
They cut between fields and through unused farmland until they reached a patch of grass next to a creek, where Rey let Unicorn rip up wildflowers and Eli rummaged around in the trees for firewood. If Rey wanted to, it would be the perfect time to run, but Eli had guessed right—he couldn’t pull himself away from this now. It was too strange to not see how it ended. So Rey stuck around, taking out his supplies to cook dinner while Eli cleared space for a fire pit.
The fire was already burning by the time Rey returned with his cooking gear, and Eli was filling a metal bowl with crabapples on the embers near the edge. “Don’t do that,” Rey said, “I have plenty of food.”
“They taste fine when you cook them, and I told you, I can’t eat other people’s food.” Eli set the bowl further away from the flames and pulled out the onion grass and some twisted roots from his pockets. “Back in a minute.”
Rey watched Eli walk toward the creek with his paltry dinner, then looked down at his own rations—salted pork kept cool in a spelled box in the back of his cart, rich butter he’d bought from the market that morning, spices in twisty little packets and vegetables tossed to the side like an afterthought.
One of the crabapples made a popping sound in the heat, and Rey stirred the embers before setting his pan down.
“Maybe you can try just a sliver,” he said, when Eli came back to toss his roots and onion grass into another small metal bowl.
“Ash isn’t very appetizing,” Eli said, “but thanks anyway.”
Still, Rey could see Eli watching the strips of pork as he drowned them and the vegetables in butter, and when a piece practically fell apart on the way to Rey’s plate, Eli sighed and angled his body away to block out the sight.
“I eat better when I have time to hunt,” he said. “Really.”
“I’m sure you do,” Rey said, taking the guiltiest bite of food in years.
That night, Eli slept outside in a small canvas tent while Rey set up his bed in the cart. As he lay there, he found himself wondering how Eli had been hanged in the first place, and why. Eli spoke of it as though it were something shameful—as though he deserved it. Rey, who had deserved plenty of punishments over the centuries and nevertheless escaped most of them, wasn’t so sure. How long did Eli have to taste ash on his tongue and fight off hunters before the mark on his soul was allowed to lift? It seemed unnecessary. Foxes didn’t have to bother with guilt. They just had to bother with the consequences, if any.
He fell asleep at last with an uneasiness in his chest, and dreamt of a young Eli running from a burning Duciel, a rope tightening around his neck like a strangling snake as he fled.
Sometimes,Eli wondered if he was still swinging on the gallows.
The last few years were the kind of thing a fractured mind would cling to in its last moments—wandering the wilderness like a squire unstitched from time and avoiding spirits from folklore felt like a story that belonged in the book of fairytales in a faraway nursery. Some nights, when a hunter found him andEli stood there with his muscles straining as he drew his bow to loose an arrow into the hunter’s eye, he thought that maybe that too was just a dream. It would be over in a second, and he would be buried in a pauper’s grave and disappear into the river of souls.
Then he’d wake up the next morning hungry and tired, with an ache in his shoulders and a missing arrow in his pack. Hawks would circle overhead, and crows would drive him from the fields and into the streets of quiet villages. Hunters would watch him from their gardens or slowly trail him across farmer’s fields and through creeks, salivating with the power of the Wild Hunt. It was as though he’d been dragged out of his grave and into a different Staria entirely, one he’d never seen from his ancient townhouse in Duciel.
Sometimes it was beautiful. Sometimes, when the hunters weren’t raking sharp nails down his throat or gargling curses with their last breath, Eli would look out over the fields and find himself unable to look away. He had sat at the edge of festival fields and tapped his heels to the music while lovers danced under arches of willow and holly. Even at its darkest, Staria gave him a reason to keep going.
Like the girl in the well.
Eli thought of her often, lately. Her father had tracked Eli down to his camp outside a village, and when Eli struggled for his life in the underbrush with just a knife and his fists, the man hissed out a confession that had sent Eli running through the village with dread heavy in his stomach. He’d dug through the mortar in the well with his knife and bruised a shoulder climbing down the hole he’d carved out of it, and when he’d found the girl lying in the shallow water, her skin had been cold as ice.
He carried her up the well anyway, because someone had to, and when he’d laid against the well in the dark with her little body wrapped in his arms, thinking that none of it was worth it,that Tristan might as well come and take him now, the girl had curled her hand around Eli’s wrist.
So he kept going, and here he was, following a trickster to a spring. Would the Eli who thrashed at the gallows have wanted this life, if he’d had time to bargain for it? It was hard to tell. As far as he was concerned, the boy who had stepped onto the gallows was as strange and distant as a storybook.
That morning, he climbed out of his tent to find a trickster spirit bathing in the creek.
Rey was in his fox form, splashing and rolling about in the water like any animal delighted to be alive. Eli watched him out of the corner of his eye as he packed up the tent.
When Rey transformed again, he was naked once more, dripping water down his long auburn hair and over his chest. There was a bit of fuzz there, and he was whistling softly to himself as he traipsed toward the cart.
