Against her neck, pulsing like a heartbeat, was the seed that had originally infected her with the woodcurse.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her, but the Grandmaster had already turned away, looking for something else. “The crown! There it is!”

She stood to run for it—but she never reached it.

Wen had been a fast fighter as a human, but as a bone-eater she was something else entirely. She rushed into the room, the wood swirling in behind her, roots and brambles and thorns, and grabbed the Grandmaster by the face, dragging her close. The old woman struggled, trying to free herself, but Wen’s mouth yawned wide and she sank her teeth into the woman’s throat. The Grandmaster gave a gurgling scream, jerking, clawing at Wen to let go, but it was too late. The bone-eater that was Anwen tore the woman’s throat out, and she sank to the floor.

Then Anwen turned slowly to me. Blood dripped from her too-wide mouth.

The crown lay between us.

Until a bolt of orange—Fox—grabbed it up off the ground and ran away with it.

Anwen shrieked. As if called by her rage alone, bone-eaters swarmed into the main hall, scurrying toward me on all fours. Two ancients loomed behind them in the doorway, watching. They were all coming for me, teeth gnashing, claws clicking—

That’s when I heard a yip and the crown clattered to the floor. I whirled toward the sound, and Fox was slowly struggling to his feet, a bone-eater towering over him, having knocked him to the ground. There was a deep gash in his shoulder. A bone-eater hissed at him, and he snarled in retaliation, the fur on his back bristling.

I didn’t have time to think before I was running toward the fox. Stumbling, I pressed my bloodied hand against the floor, and briars immediately began to grow. Thick, thorny ones that curled around one another, creating a barrier between us. They grew, snarling themselves, weaving thick and prickly and dense—denser than any garden wall. They snagged the crown and wrapped it deep within.

I scooped up the fox in my arms.

A bone-eater launched itself toward me.

Kingsteeth.

I threw my free hand over my face. With a flash of a blade, Seren was there, batting the creature back. He shoved it away with his foot. “You go for the fox and not the crown?” he exclaimed.

“I’m sure I’ll regret it later,” I said, and forced a smile, despite everything.

He looked like he wanted to strangle me, but instead he pushed the bone-eater back and with the flat of his blade knocked another one away. “Get somewhere safe,” he said. “I’ll distract the monsters. You figure out how to stop Anwen.”

“I can’t kill her,” I said.

“You might not have a choice.”

He was wrong. If I’d learned anything in the wood, it was that there was always a choice, but sometimes the right one wasn’t the easy one.

Suddenly, one of the bone-eaters caught Seren by surprise and knocked him back. His sword went spinning away, and the bone-eater tossed him against the wall like a rag doll. With a cry, I grabbed one of the growing briars with my bloodied hand, thorns pricking my skin, and tossed it at the bone-eater. It became embedded in the monster’s skin and began to grow across it at a frightening rate, binding it.

With Fox tight in my arms, I backpedaled behind one of the pillars to collect myself. The briars were still spreading across the room, but they were slowing now, and the bone-eaters were almost through. The smell of blood was heavy in the air.

Anwen prowled back and forth on the other side of the wall of briars, searching for a way to the golden crown in the nest of thorns.

In my arms, Fox tried to wiggle free. He was the prince, and he’d come back to help me.

“You should’ve run,” I whispered to him, because I didn’t know how we’d survive this. Maybe we weren’t supposed to.

I had spent so many years thinking that he and Seren were dead—I hadn’t thought of the possibility of either of them being alive. Because in no version of the story were they. But Seren was here, and Fox had been with me all this time. They had never really been gone.

They were still here. But to what end?

Fox pressed his face against my cheek. I scratched him behind the ears, grateful and sad all at once. I reached for my iron knife to cut a slice in my other hand for more power, but then I stopped myself. No matter how much magic I had or how thick I grew the thorns and briars, it wouldn’t bring Anwen back. She was too far gone, and I was too late, and we were too far from home.

“Ceeeeeeerysssss,” called Wen, and I shivered as she hissed my name. “Let me—let me ssseeeee. Let me see your fangs.”

She knew I wasn’t as powerful as she was—that I wasn’t good at fighting, that I couldn’t face her head-on no matter what I tried.

“Cerysssss,” Anwen went on. She grabbed a fistful of briars and tore them through. “Comme outtttt.”

Fox’s cold nose pressed against my cheek softly, comfortingly.

I didn’t know what to do.

In Aloriya’s tale, the curse was always here. But in Voryn’s tale, it had come from King Sunder stealing the crown from the Lady of the Wilds. And now the Lady was gone—vanished for three hundred years. If the wood had become cursed the second she gave her crown, why had she given it in the first place?

I don’t think she’s dead. Petra’s voice whispered in my head, like a secret.

If it had been stolen, then wouldn’t the Lady have come after it with her old gods? She knew where it was and how to get it. But if she was dead, if she was in the air we breathed, then the curse would be gone.

Unless . . .

I glanced out from behind the pillar at the golden circlet in the thicket of briars. I’d never understood why the Lady of the Wilds needed a crown to sway a forest, but that was because she didn’t. In the Grandmaster’s study, the tapestry didn’t depict her with a crown. And ancients didn’t need a crown to spread the woodcurse. Bone-eaters didn’t need a crown. Nor did the animals, or the trees or flowers or the river. . . .

Humans needed crowns.

Wen had almost torn through the thicket. She reached through the briars, thorns scraping her skin off her bones, toward the golden crown. Fear swelled in my throat, making it hard to swallow. I didn’t want to get any closer to this monster—but I had to.

I had to remember that my Anwen was still there somewhere beneath the poisoned roots of the woodcurse that had twisted into her heart. I knew she was still there, even though I couldn’t see her anymore.

If I was going to save her—save this city, the wood, my home—I had to believe I still could.

I grabbed Seren’s sword, which had landed close to where I crouched, and took it tightly in my bloodied hand. The briars that I had grown began to wilt and rot once Wen touched them and carved a hole big enough for her to step through to the other side. There were other bone-eaters lost in the thorns, and they raged and cried, trapped in their snarls. I stood out from behind the pillar and began moving toward the crown in the thicket. The vines and roots wove away from me, creating a tunnel of sorts, leading me straight to the crown—as if they knew what I was about to do.

Fox curled against my shoulders. I looked down at the crown and all the curses it held, and all the ire. Fox had said that I had screamed when I’d put on the crown, and Seren had screamed, and the Grandmaster.

But it wasn’t they who were screaming, not really.

The Lady had been trapped just as surely as we, and she had been suffering for such a long time.

There was no cure for the woodcurse. There was no way to break it. And as long as the crown existed, we would all be trapped.

I curled my fingers around the sword and raised it, and Fox pressed his head against my cheek. I didn’t know what the world would be without the crown—who I would be, or Anwen, or Seren, or Fox, or the Wilds itself. But I knew what we were with the crown, and with the crown there were no happy endings.

Wen screamed, reaching for me, her voice a chorus of death.

With all my might, I slammed the sword against the crown. Cracks raced across the golden briars and gilded leaves. A light poured out of the cracks, soft at first, but it grew steadily brighter. Wen shrieked again, and the bone-eaters cried, reaching out their hands to the broken crown at my feet. I pressed my face into Fox’s fur as the light bloomed brighter, and brighter and, like the coming of a sunrise, washed away the night.

40

For Lorne

Cerys

SIX MONTHS PASSED like a sigh through the trees, soft and brisk.

The Wildwood grew orange with autumn, then white and barren in winter, but now I could feel the first sun-kissed winds of spring again. Of change. It pecked my cheeks like pinpricks. I stepped lightly across the last crumbles of snow in our garden and crouched beside a small hole in the ground beside our storehouse.

Humming, I unwrapped a basket full of leftovers—bits of breads and meats that were about to go bad. I clicked my tongue, calling, and a wet nose poked out of the burrow, followed by beady black eyes and large orange ears.

“Good afternoon,” I greeted the fox as he slunk out to take a bit of bread. I rubbed him behind the ears, and he tilted his face toward me, relishing it.

Behind him, three small kits eased out with their mother.

“Oh, they’re growing so fast,” I mused as they came up and ate their fill before returning into their burrow. “You’ll have a family ready for exploring soon. Just don’t go into the baker’s yard,” I added softly. “I have it on good information that he doesn’t take too kindly to foxes—”

“Sprout?” Papa called from the house, and poked his head out of the back door. “C’mon, hurry up—we don’t want to miss it!”

“Coming!” I left the basket for the foxes to pick through later. As I came back into the house, I shrugged out of the tartan shawl I’d wrapped around my shoulders, pulled my shoulder-length hair out of its bun, and shook it out. I’d cut it a few days after I broke the curse, since it’d been burned on the ends, and there were snarls of briars I couldn’t possibly hope to untangle. I liked the new length, though, so I’d kept it.