Page 48

“Why didn’t you say this before?” Bartos asked stiffly, trying to shrug off a wriggling cape of worms.

“I... I was afraid it might hurt,” mumbled Zaf.

“Will it hurt less than being eaten alive by a swamp?” Bartos pointed out. “I can deal with a lightning shock.”

“No, I mean it could hurt...me.”

“Then don’t do it,” Thorn said at once, her chest tight with sudden fear. “That isn’t fair.”

“If she doesn’t try, then we’llallhurt,” Bartos yelped, and ducked. The horrible beakless birds were circling around his head. He darted this way and that, dodging their wide mouths. “Zaf, hurry! Do it!”

“We won’t make it to the mountains like this,” Noro said urgently. “I fear that if any of these creatures bite or claw us, whatever has happened to them may happen to us.”

A coil of fear loosed in Thorn’s belly. She clenched her left hand, digging her nails into the place where her wound had once burned. She hadn’t dared look at it since they had left the dead unicorn.

“Zaf, please!” Bartos shouted, his voice cracking. Thorn’s heart quaked to hear him so afraid.

“Everyone grab on tight,” Zaf cried, squaring her thin shoulders.

Thorn tugged on her hand. “Zaf,no—”

But Zaf plunged into the swarming birds and grabbed Bartos with her free hand, and Bartos seized a fistful of Noro’s mane, and the world flared to brilliant life. Heat raced up Thorn’s arms and legs.

The swamp crested, a slimy maw stretching higher than the trees. Inside writhed animals trapped in sheets of slime, struggling to break free.

Then the ground tilted beneath Thorn’s feet and disappeared.

.19.

The Silver Snare

High in the foothills behind Aeria, Brier stopped at a rocky crest and leaned against Thorn’s broom, her breath puffing in the cold air.

Someone was following her.

“Mazby?” she whispered. “Do you see anything?”

“No, but I feel them,” he replied, shivering atop Thorn’s broom, his feathers frosted white. “They’re close.”

Brier felt them too.

It had started that morning. She’d been snuggled up with Mazby on a patch of hard black dirt beside a cliff wall, gripped by ill dreams.

Floating up out of sleep, she’d heard it: a twig snapping. A scrape against the ground. A snuffling.

A beast, breathing?

She laid there, listening, waiting for whatever it was to pounce. Certainly she wouldn’t be able to fight. She had no Noro (oh,Noro). She could hardly stand.

She breathed through the pain of her chest—each inhale a stab, each exhale a punch.

And waited.

But nothing pounced. The thin mountain air remained unbroken.

So she’d shared a breakfast of sour, unripe berries with Mazby, all the while thinking longingly of Thorn’s breakfasts back home, and then wondering, with a different, sharper pain in her chest, if Thorn was all right, wherever she was. If she was also eating sad sour meals and being stalked by... something. Something unseen.

Then Brier had kept walking.