Page 55 of Apples Dipped in Gold

I let the bitter drink flood my mouth before spitting it out, handing the container back to him.

“Perhaps you should pick some flowers,” he suggested.

“I can do it,” I said. “I want to help.”

“Fox can move the bodies,” he said.

I looked to see him already dragging the rabbit to the middle of the grove, and I felt my stomach revolt again.

Lore shuffled to the side to block my view.

“If we cannot bury them, at least they will have some kind of adornment,” he said. “Flowers will help.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Don’t go beyond the tree line,” Lore warned. “And avoid the bell-shaped blooms. They are poisonous.”

I nodded, and he returned to work. I tried to keep my back to him as I picked flowers, but I could still hear what was happening, and that was just as terrible.

When Lore was done and the bodies were lined up, he let me place the flowers on each rotting corpse. I did so with a knot in my throat, and when we were finished, we left without a word, continuing through the forest on our journey to a tree that did not exist.

I expected that we would travel late into the night, since the animals had taken most of our day, but when we came to a wide river, Lore stopped and began searching for a place to camp out of sight.

“Shouldn’t we keep going?” I asked.

“Normally, I would say yes, but I am eager to bathe after handling dead flesh.”

I swallowed, both at the mention of the animals and at the thought of Lore naked.

“You intend to bathe in the stream?” I asked.

He was bent at the waist, clearing leaves and branches from under an alcove of tree roots. He paused to look at me, amused. “Yes.”

“Naked?”

“That tends to be how bathing works,” he said. He was smiling more now.

I liked when he smiled. He almost looked like a different person.

“You should probably bathe too,” he said.

My mouth dropped open. “Are you saying I smell?”

“No,” Lore said.

“Yes,” said the fox.

I glared at both of them. Lore glared at the fox.

“I am only telling the truth,” Fox said as he sat with his tail curled around his feet. “If your brothers could not trace your tracks, they could follow your scent.”

I turned away from them and sniffed myself, wrinkling my nose.

The fox was right. I needed a bath.

I wandered to the edge of the river. The shore was rocky, but the water was clear and grew darker toward the middle where it was deeper. I dipped my fingers into it and found that it was cool.

“Do not wade into the water alone,” said the fox.