“Don’t worry about me!” Quicksilver cried, crawling up the passage on her hands and knees. “Worry about them!” She flung her arm behind her and thought to Fox, Break some bones.
Fox flew back toward the skeletons, an enormous, growling dog with huge, hulking shoulders. He zipped between them and kicked bones from their frames. A femur crumbled at the lash of his tail; a cluster of phalanges scattered across the ground like a handful of dice.
Quicksilver emerged into the main cavern, panting hard. Dragging Anastazia had left her arm feeling sore and burning. Anastazia was slick with sweat, her skin tinged a pale yellow-green.
“Quicksilver,” gasped Anastazia as the sounds of Fox battling the skeletons rang through the cavern, “if you have to leave me—”
“I won’t, so don’t bother asking.”
“I’m not asking, I’m ordering.”
“You’re not a sister, and you’re not my mother.”
Anastazia drew herself up, her violet eyes flashing. “I’m your elder—”
A yelp sounded from behind them. Quicksilver’s heart seized. To me! she cried, and Fox appeared in her arms as a tiny, trembling pup.
There are so many of them, he panted. I’m sorry, master. I need a moment.
“We don’t have a moment, Fox,” Quicksilver replied grimly. “Just hold on to me.”
He obeyed, pressing his face into her chest and digging his claws into her shirt. Quicksilver ran for the stairs that snaked up the side of the sheer black chasm, Anastazia right on her heels. But as they ran, the ground beneath them began to shake. Quicksilver fell hard and hit her head. Her vision tilted and swam.
The wave of skeletons broke and became chaos. Some of them fell into the chasm; others dangled from the edge, swinging over the endless dark. Others crawled across the quaking ground toward Quicksilver, Fox, and Anastazia, pushing past one another with blank-eyed hunger.
A bony hand grabbed Quicksilver’s foot; she kicked wildly. A set of cracked teeth bit down on her leg, and she screamed.
With a furious bark, Fox tried to shift into his dog self and defend her. Quicksilver felt the urge in his heart, ferocious and blazing. But she held him tight, clamping down on his magic.
No, Fox! Save your strength!
Anastazia kicked away two skeletons and grabbed Quicksilver, pulling her to her feet. They started up the stairs again, but when Anastazia’s foot touched the first step, the entire staircase erupted into flame.
She cried out and stumbled back. Quicksilver sent Fox to her, and he wrapped himself around her, dousing the flames on her boot.
“Are you all right?” Quicksilver shouted above the roar of the flames and the rumbling rock.
“Fine,” yelled Anastazia, a shaky hand at her throat. “My boot, however, is ruined.”
“Fox, can you get us to the top, past the fire?”
Fox looked up at her forlornly, panting so hard his entire body trembled. “Putting out the fire took the last of me, master. I need more time to recover. We’re still fairly new at this, you know.”
The skeletons were almost upon them, a sea of bones and broken jaws and reaching hands. Quicksilver yanked out her pack from under her skirts and drew out the cat skull. It glowed a bright blue, scorching hot against her palm, but she held fast.
“Quicksilver, don’t be a fool—” Anastazia protested.
“Do you want this?” Quicksilver called out. She held the skull up high, and the skeletons froze, their empty eye sockets trained on it. “Pretty, isn’t it? Don’t you want it back?”
The skull growled softly, like an annoyed cat, but Quicksilver ignored it. The mob of skeletons watched the skull as she swung it back and forth above her head. As one, the skeletons reached for the cat skull, howling, “Mine, mine, mine!”
“Anastazia, when I say run, follow me and run as fast as you can,” said Quicksilver.
Anastazia gasped. “Oh! Is this a new game?”
Fox, do you think you have enough strength to at least catch this thing before it falls to the bottom?
I can manage that much, Fox answered. Only that much.
It would have to do.
“If you want it,” Quicksilver shouted coyly to the skeletons, “then you’ll have to catch it!”
Then she flung the skull over the side of the chasm.
In one huge, scrambling wave, the skeletons jumped for the skull, clawing, reaching, reaching . . . and diving off the cliff into blackness.
Fox, go! Quicksilver thought to him, but he was already away, soaring after the falling skull as a faint yellow bird.
Quicksilver tied the skeletons’ pouch shut, threw her pack over her shoulders, and ran in the opposite direction, away from the chasm and the fire. She pulled Anastazia after her and sent as much love and strength as she could to Fox.
I’m here, Fox, I’m here. I’m not leaving you. Come back to me. I’m here.
He did not answer, but she felt him—still there, wings still beating. Careening, flying through blackness, reaching, reaching . . .
Some skeletons had not fallen for the trick. They chased after Quicksilver, crawling lightning fast, like giant bony spiders. They grabbed her and threw her to the ground. She kicked them and sprang back up, bleeding where she’d fallen. Anastazia was half running, half crawling, trying to kick off the torso of a skeleton that clung to her skirt and wouldn’t let go.
A soft flash of light, and Fox reappeared—an even smaller puppy in her arms, quivering and helpless. His front paws held the cat skull, which seemed to be in a fit of temper—hissing and yowling as any angry cat might.
“You did it, Fox!” She kept her voice strong as she ran, even though the sight of him frightened her.
“We did it, master,” he whispered. “But where are we going?”
“No idea. I hadn’t thought ahead that far.”
“I think our path is clear,” said Anastazia, jogging unsteadily beside her.
Quicksilver followed her gaze to where the stone floor ended. Past the drop rushed a river of black water. From somewhere not too far away came the roar of a waterfall.
“You don’t mean it,” said Fox.
“We have to.” She paused, set Fox down beside her. “Hold on to that skull, Fox, whatever you do, and stay close. Anastazia, can you swim?”
“Like a fish!” she called cheerfully.
Quicksilver allowed herself one pang of worry at Anastazia’s gleefully oblivious expression. Then she grabbed Anastazia’s hand, pinched her own nose shut with the other, and jumped, Fox at her heels.
Falling into the water was like breaking through a sheet of putrid ice. She surfaced, gasping, spitting out sludge. Anastazia, coughing, still clung to her right hand.
“Fox!” Quicksilver cried. Water rushed at her face in waves. Spluttering, looking up, she saw skeletons jumping into the water after them. The current was swift. Cold fingers brushed against her feet, grabbed on, pulled her under.
She inhaled water, kicked, clawed, lost sight of Fox, spun around, opened her eyes, saw a skeleton looming close through the murk, and punched it right in the face. It fell away, and Quicksilver swam back to the surface, gasping and coughing.
Fox found her, jumped onto her neck, and clung there as they struggled through the water. Quicksilver grabbed Anastazia’s hand again and kicked until her legs and lungs burned.
“Look, up ahead!” Fox pointed his nose at the round opening of a pipe in front of them, through which they could see a spread of stars and a spray of water.
“Hold on!” Quicksilver cried, just before the river sucked them through the pipe and then spat them out into a quiet black lake. They plunged under the surface, and the cool, clear water swallowed all sound away.
Quicksilver saw Fox’s faint glow in the darkness—and the blue glow of the cat skull still clasped between his paws—and followed him up, kicking as hard as she could.
Fox! I can’t breathe!
Keep swimming, master, came Fox’s steady voice. We�
��re almost there.
When they at last reached land and dragged themselves up onto the shore, Quicksilver’s body was weak as a newborn. She coughed up lake water and whispered Anastazia’s name.
“Here,” replied her older self, faintly. Trembling, they collapsed into the mud, still holding hands. Fox the pup circled around them, licking warmth back into their skin while the cat skull watched calmly.
“Did they follow us?” Quicksilver squinted back at the lake, lit by the twin moons. The water seemed undisturbed, but she could just see a mob of bony hands reaching out of the sewer pipe, grabbing greedily at the air.
“I’m not sure they can,” Fox mused. “Whoever spelled that cave did a fine job of it.”
“Almost too fine a job of it,” Quicksilver muttered, shivering. She longed fiercely for a hot bath. She wouldn’t be able to shake the memory of those cold, bony fingers grabbing her legs any time soon.
A low sound from Fox caught her attention. His ears drooping, he held up Quicksilver’s sodden pack from where she had dropped it in the mud.
The pouch containing the bones was safely closed, its contents intact—but the other pouch was empty, its strings hanging loose.
Quicksilver swayed, dizzy with despair.
Their food, what little remained of their money—and, most horribly, the stolen medicines for Sly Boots’s parents—had all been lost to the catacombs.
.30.
A STAR-BRIGHT THREE SECONDS
“What are you looking at?” Quicksilver snapped at every scandalized expression tossed their way. “Don’t you have anything better to do? Careful, or I’ll wipe myself clean on your fancy dress!”
She stomped through the courtyards of King Kallin’s castle, which glowed in the moonslight—incandescent lilies, manicured walking paths lined with glowing blue and green moss, gauzy banners tied between shimmering white trees hung with tiny silver bells.
Getting past the soldiers guarding the castle grounds had been easy, with Quicksilver and Fox working together to distract them and slip back into the party. They hadn’t even needed to use magic. But that did nothing to cheer her up. She was cold, she was tired, and she was not looking forward to telling Sly Boots the news.
By the time they found him, chatting gaily away in a circle of laughing young people—witch and human alike—the mud coating Quicksilver and Anastazia had hardened into a shell of grime.
His eyes widened when he saw her. He jumped to his feet and hurried to her, leaving his new friends looking curious and confused.
“Quicksilver, what happened? Are you all right?” And then, before Quicksilver had a chance to berate him as she so longed to do—for talking to these beautiful people with normal noses, for leaving them to face those horrible skeletons all alone—Sly Boots yanked Quicksilver into an enormous, crushing hug.
Immediately Quicksilver’s eyes filled with unexpected tears. She allowed herself three seconds to stand there and be held, which was not a thing she had enjoyed much in her life. Then, just before she was ready to shove him away . . . he did it for her.
He stepped back, pushing her away slightly, and wrinkled his nose. “You smell terrible.”
Quicksilver stared at him, fuming. “Well, so would you, if you’d bothered to come with us!”
“I’m sorry,” he said, scratching his temple. There was a red mark on his skin; he must have been scratching that spot over and over. “I got . . . I was busy. I didn’t realize . . . so you’re not hurt, then?”
Quicksilver brushed off her sleeves, as if that would do any good at all. “No, I’m not, but—”
“And Anastazia, you’re all right?”
“As all right as all right can be,” Anastazia murmured absently, picking a clump of mud off her shoe and tossing it in her mouth.
A gawking lady nearby, her hair pulled into bunches of aquamarine netting, fainted dead away at the sight.
“Er . . . what’s wrong with Anastazia?” asked Sly Boots.
“Nothing,” said Quicksilver. “Well, something, but I don’t know what. Listen—”
“Did you find the skeleton?”
“Oh, we found skeletons, all right,” remarked Fox.
Sly Boots straightened. A smile tugged at his mouth. “Multiple skeletons?”
“The bad kind, unfortunately. Aren’t you sad to have missed out on all the fun?”
“Listen,” Quicksilver snapped, so fiercely that even Fox looked startled. Flushing, she opened her pack so Sly Boots could see what was missing. “I’m sorry,” she told him, “but everything’s gone. Our food, our money. The medicine for your parents. I thought you should know.”
Sly Boots’s expression froze, and then fell, and then turned flat and hard. A strange light flickered through his eyes, and was gone.
“I didn’t mean to lose it all,” said Quicksilver. “We went into the catacombs, and at first everything was fine, but then all the dead people came to life. We tried to get out, but everything was spelled to keep them in. The skeletons, I mean. There were steps that exploded into fire, everything was shaking—”
A shriek pierced the air. The crowd turned to see King Kallin, who had just come around the corner surrounded by his advisers. He stared in abject horror at Quicksilver.
“You there!” He pointed a trembling finger at Quicksilver. “Did you say . . . did you say something about skeletons?” He took one unsteady step toward her. “So it’s true, then? They’re . . . alive?”
Queen Voina stalked forward. “Oh, help us all, I’ll never get him to sleep now. Mud girl! Come here at once! Tatjana, is this a friend of yours?”
A giggling Princess Tatjana came forward with a group of her ladies-in-waiting, all of them clothed in shimmering gowns of pearl and peach and cornflower blue. The princess squinted and then recoiled. “I’ve never seen that girl before in my life. If it is a girl, that is. I can’t quite tell!”
The ladies-in-waiting burst into peals of laughter. Quicksilver stood seething, her muddy hands clenched into fists.
Fox sighed. I guess the party’s over, then?
Hide us, Quicksilver thought to him, and an instant later, Fox cloaked them in a vaporous veil, and they ran.
Behind them, the crowd shouted in dismay, and King Kallin dissolved into hysterics. Quicksilver glanced at Sly Boots’s hard, quiet face and wished, for a terrible, aching moment, that they could go back to that star-bright three seconds in which the only thing she knew was how it felt to be hugged by a friend.
Quicksilver plopped herself down on a log and flipped furiously through Anastazia’s journal.
The spot they had found to make camp for the night was a good three miles from King Kallin’s castle, in a copse of trees that stood between downy hills. From their camp, the castle and the lines of lights stretching across the surrounding bridges looked like child’s toys.
Sly Boots immediately set to work tending to Anastazia’s and Quicksilver’s wounds as best he could, but his movements were rough and hurried. He soaked a ripped section of Quicksilver’s skirt in the creek nearby and used it to clean the rawest patches of skin. Each time the cloth scraped too hard, Quicksilver gritted her teeth but said nothing. Sly Boots ground up moxbane flowers with a rock and sprinkled the pieces of petals onto the cuts on Quicksilver’s right arm, then ripped the sash from his vest and used that as a makeshift bandage. He tied it far too tightly, and Quicksilver yanked her arm away.
“Thanks very much, but I’m fine,” she ground out.
His eyes narrowed; he said nothing.
Quicksilver looked away, back to the journal in her hands. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to understand any of this. Her handwriting looks like some chipmunk popped out of a tree and decided to give it a go.”
“Give that here.” Sly Boots snatched the journal out of her hands so roughly that a page sliced her palm.
Quicksilver watched him, a sudden coldness gripping her insides. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me? W
hat’s wrong with her?”
Anastazia lay in the grass, pulling radiant chartreuse flowers off a low-hanging branch. “I am,” she said dreamily with each plucked petal, “I am not. I am. I am not.” She paused, considering, and stared at Quicksilver. “Are you?”
Quicksilver ignored her. “If you’re angry, you should just say it.”
“Oh, are you telling me what to do again?” asked Sly Boots. “What a surprise.”
“I’m telling you to stop being a dung head and talk straightforward-like!”
Sly Boots threw the journal into the weeds. “Fine. I’ll talk straightforward-like. How could you lose that medicine, Quicksilver? How?”
Quicksilver retrieved the journal and shook flowers loose from its pages. Clumps of pollen left glowing pink smears behind. “I told you, it was an accident! And don’t you dare throw around Anastazia’s journal like it’s some piece of trash. Don’t you know what this is?”
“It’s a book full of a silly old woman’s mad ramblings.”
Anastazia nodded to herself. “Well, that’s rather the truth.”
“Now, Anastazia, listen to my voice,” said Fox reasonably, dusting flowers from her hair. “You’re fine, aren’t you? You’ve just had a hard few days, but you’ll be good as new after some more rest, eh?”
“She’s not a silly old woman,” Quicksilver shouted.
Sly Boots started pacing, his hands in fists. “You used to call her that yourself!”
“Sometimes I say things I don’t mean!”
“Like how you promised you would learn time-traveling magic and get my parents medicine and get me back home as soon as you could? Like when you said that? Did you not mean that either?”
“Look, I’m doing the best I can. You know we have to find the skeletons first. It’s important, Boots. You saw what happened with the Wolf King. You saw how dangerous he is!”
Foxheart Page 16
