Foxheart

by Claire Legrand

  One witch was not enough to destroy the bones. Even Anastazia had never been able to do that, with all her lives. But many witches, working together . . .

  “Many will be mighty,” Quicksilver whispered over and over, watching the coven move as one. They pulled six spools of light from their monsters’ protective web and sent the spools toward Quicksilver’s abandoned cloak. The First Ones were a howling storm, the wolves a slathering frenzy, and yet the light burned on, the spools spinning into a blinding cyclone. It engulfed the cloak, and the bones within, and became a crackling white fire that snapped between Lars and his coven like lightning. When the bones caught fire, the skeletons screamed, high and shrill.

  And the First Ones fell to the floor, crumbling into shapeless piles.

  One of the piles crawled toward Quicksilver and reached for her with a charred hand.

  Quicksilver glared down at it. “This war is finally over,” she said coldly, “and I’ve won.”

  Then she stomped hard, and the hand collapsed into a pile of ashes.

  The hunt, at last, was finished.

  There was one final pulse of light, and then the web of magic surrounding the coven twisted and dimmed, shifting back into their monsters. The red cat jumped into Tommi’s arms, butting his chin with her head. The black-and-white bat flapped to Karin and hugged her neck with its wings.

  The wolves scattered, slinking off into the shadows.

  “Quicksilver!” called Sly Boots, racing down the stairs toward her, the freed girls at his heels. “You did it! You did it!”

  “I did,” she whispered faintly, just before Sly Boots crashed into her with a ferocious hug.

  “The best thief in all the Star Lands!” he shouted, and Lars and his coven took up the call. “The best thief in all the Star Lands! Quicksilver Foxheart! Foxheart! Foxheart!”

  Dear Fox, thought Quicksilver, smiling as Sly Boots and the girls and the coven and their monsters surrounded her, clapping her on the back and whistling and cheering her name. We did it. You and me. Me and you. Forever.

  .51.

  QUICKSILVER FOXHEART

  When Quicksilver awoke, she was lying in something soft and warm. When she tried to move, a dull pain drifted up her right leg.

  “Don’t move too much just yet,” said Sly Boots, hurrying over.

  “Where are we?”

  “My house in Willow-on-the-River.”

  She shot upright. “Did we—?”

  “Everything’s all right. The First Ones are gone. Their monsters’ skeletons, too. They won’t be coming back ever again.”

  “And the wolves?”

  “Run off into the wild. They’re just wolves now, Lars said, since no one’s forcing them to be monsters anymore.”

  “Does that mean . . . what about the Wolf King?”

  “Ari’s resting. The white wolf nearly tore him apart, in that throne room.” Sly Boots paused, looking grim. “He almost didn’t make it.”

  Quicksilver settled back into what she now realized was a small but cozy bed. “I wouldn’t have made it, if he hadn’t held that wolf back for me.”

  Sly Boots nodded. “I know. I told you he wasn’t as bad as all that.” Then he tossed a clean white cloth over his shoulder and lifted up the blanket covering Quicksilver’s legs.

  She yanked the blanket from him, all thoughts of the Wolf King shooting straight out of her head. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Sly Boots flushed bright red. “I’m only checking your bandages.”

  “Can’t someone else do that?” Quicksilver scrambled to cover herself. Even though she seemed to be wearing a perfectly decent nightgown, the idea of Sly Boots doing anything near her legs made her insides scrunch up and twist around.

  It was not an entirely unpleasant feeling.

  “Someone else could,” Sly Boots agreed, moving about the room to gather additional fresh bandages, a bowl of broth, a cup of water, “but I’m the one in charge of tending to Quicksilver Foxheart, and that’s an honor I don’t want to lose.” He paused, then looked stricken with a sudden, quiet panic. “You won’t make me leave, will you?”

  Quicksilver had to bite down hard on her lip to keep from grinning at him. “Fine,” she said, gesturing imperiously at her bandaged leg. “You may proceed, boy.”

  Sly Boots stood tall, beaming, and then bowed with a flourish. “Thank you, Quix.”

  “Not so terrible a nickname, is it?”

  “Nothing about you is terrible,” Sly Boots mumbled with a quick, blushing glance.

  Quicksilver opened her mouth and shut it again, not knowing how to respond. As Sly Boots changed her bandages, they said not a word, trapped in a thick, tight silence that became so unbearable Quicksilver was tempted to kick him in the face just to remind them both about the true status of their relationship.

  But she could not bring herself to do it, and instead stared at the ceiling and contented herself with imagining it.

  A man and a woman entered the room just as Sly Boots finished working. It was so strange to see them up and about that at first Quicksilver didn’t recognize them.

  Sly Boots caught her staring. “Oh! Quicksilver, these are my parents—Henna and Jari.”

  “You’re healed!” Quicksilver said.

  Sly Boots’s mother, Henna, grinned. “Indeed we are. Turns out your witchy friend Lars knows quite a lot about how to undo curses. And can we just say we are honored to meet the girl who we have heard is the . . . what did they say, Jari? The best thief in all the Star Lands?”

  “Yes, I believe you’re right.” Sly Boots’s father, Jari, leaned closer and raised an eyebrow. “I think we’ll be the judge of that, however.”

  Remembering that Sly Boots’s parents were thieves themselves, Quicksilver straightened and tried to look as formidable as it was possible to look while sitting propped up against many fluffy pillows.

  “You just wait and see,” she said. “Once I’m well again, I’ll show you how it’s done, this whole thieving thing. I’m sure you’re out of practice by now, having been ill for so long.”

  “Or,” Henna suggested, her eyes sparkling, “we could go on jobs together. All three of us.”

  “We’ve never worked with a witch thief before,” said Jari, stroking his beard and looking a bit dreamy eyed at the possibility. “Soon enough we’ll be swimming in riches.”

  Sly Boots, straightening Quicksilver’s blankets, rolled his eyes. “Or you could, you know, get an honest job and not steal things.”

  Henna and Jari stared at him, aghast. “But where’s the fun in that?” asked his mother.

  “And anyway, I’m not a witch anymore,” Quicksilver said, fiddling needlessly with her pillows. “So I wouldn’t be any help to you in that way. If you want a witch thief, you’ll have to find someone else.”

  There was a moment’s pause, and then Sly Boots shooed his parents out of the room.

  “Lovely to meet you!” Jari called back to Quicksilver.

  “We’ll talk more later!” Henna added. “We’ve got lots of ideas!”

  Once they had gone, Sly Boots returned to the chair at Quicksilver’s bedside and started folding a stack of clean bandages.

  “You’d think a botched job like the one they went through would have scarred them for life and put them off thieving forever,” he muttered. “But I swear to the stars, between them they haven’t got a lick of sense.”

  Quicksilver twisted the edge of her blanket in her hands. “Boots?”

  “Yes?”

  When she did not immediately reply, Sly Boots looked up. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, it’s just . . .” Quicksilver sighed irritably and looked away. “What am I supposed to do now? I’m a witch, because it’s in my blood, somewhere, and I’ve been a witch . . . but I’ve no monster anymore, and so I’m not truly a witch like the rest of them. So what does that mean about me? What am I? Am I a witch? Am I just a girl?”

  “You’re Quicksilver Foxheart,” Sly Boots
said simply, taking her hand, “and you’re the only one there is. That’s all that matters.”

  Quicksilver glared at their hands. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Er.” Sly Boots retracted his hand. “Comforting you?”

  “You’re a little too close to be comforting, Boots.”

  Agreeably, Sly Boots scooted his chair toward the door.

  Quicksilver exhaled sharply. “Not that far away, Boots!”

  He returned to her bedside, looking more than a little bewildered.

  “Just . . . keep your hands to yourself,” said Quicksilver, “unless I instruct otherwise.”

  Sly Boots’s eyebrows shot up. “Well. Shall I sing to you instead?”

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  .52.

  A FUZZY HALF CREATURE

  Later that night, Quicksilver lay awake in her bed, unable to sleep. She listened to Sly Boots snoring in the chair beside her, and his house creaking and groaning.

  She could not sleep because she kept thinking of too many things—the cages where the girls had been kept at the Black Castle. Whether or not she wanted to visit the convent. How long it would take for the witches who had survived the hunt to come out of hiding and rebuild. How the people of the Star Lands would learn to trust and live alongside witches again, and how long that would take, and if there would be violence in the meantime. They had been taught to hate magic and witches for so long. What would they think of it all now?

  What would this world be, without a Wolf King?

  Quicksilver turned over, away from Sly Boots, and stared out the window. The open shutters let in a soft, warm breeze.

  For a time, when they had been in the Star Lands of long ago, Quicksilver had felt like she was becoming the person she was supposed to be, that all the unhappy years at the convent had simply been a hardship to endure so she could be rewarded with magic and witchiness. But with Fox’s death, everything had been ripped away from her. She was now neither witch, nor girl, but something fuzzy between the two. How was she to live in this strange new world—a fuzzy half creature with a Fox-sized hole in her heart?

  Sly Boots had said she was herself, Quicksilver Foxheart, and that was all that mattered. But she wasn’t sure he was right.

  She crept out of bed and retrieved the crutches Sly Boots had fashioned for her. Tottering down the stairs seemed ill-advised, but if she stayed in bed any longer, she would go mad from thinking too much.

  Downstairs, snoring witches slept on the floor in the foyer, using rolled-up cloaks for pillows: Lars and Otto, Tommi and Karin, Irma and Veera, and old Matias, who had tended Sly Boots’s parents when the coven went north. Quicksilver tried not to look at their bandages and bruises, nor think about how awful it must have been for them to fight the wolves and the First Ones while so many of their friends died around them.

  A door in the wall beneath the staircase creaked open, revealing a tiny room warm with candlelight.

  A vaguely familiar voice whispered from inside. “Who’s there?”

  Curious, Quicksilver hobbled over and peeked in.

  The Wolf King sat on a pallet of blankets, his arms, his chest, and half of his face bandaged. His smile was cautious; either he was in pain or he was frightened of her.

  Quicksilver hoped for both.

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s you. Hello.”

  “You survived,” said Quicksilver flatly.

  “Mostly. Lars told me I’ll have a lot of scars.”

  “Good.”

  The Wolf King lowered his eyes. “I understand why you feel that way. I do too. It feels like I’ve been living in a nightmare for hundreds of years, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t wake up from it.”

  Quicksilver could not match up what she knew the Wolf King to be—and what he had done—with the boy now in front of her. Without his monsters, without the First Ones, he seemed small and unimpressive. She stood there, shifting her weight on the crutches, unsure how to deal with him.

  “If you want to yell at me,” said the Wolf King quietly, “I suggest you wait until morning. We shouldn’t wake the others.”

  Quicksilver’s eyes narrowed. “Interesting that you should care about them now.”

  The boy was quiet for a long time, while Quicksilver glared at him, trying to sear her grief and anger into his skin using only her eyes.

  “I won’t say I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I mean, I am, but no one wants to hear me say that. It’s not enough, after everything that’s happened.”

  Quicksilver gripped her crutches hard. She knew she should pity him, and she did, but if he wanted to be soothed and fussed over, he was talking to the wrong girl.

  He gave a soft laugh. “You know, it’s funny. All the horrible things I’ve done, all the pain I’ve caused—and received,” he added, wincing as he tried to stretch out his leg. “And all I can think about is how I miss them. The wolves, I mean. I suppose it’s what I deserve, of course, and they did terrible things while they were bonded to me, but . . . they were still my monsters, even if the worst part of them belonged to the First Ones, too. And now, without them, I feel . . .” He paused, frowning. “I don’t know why I’m talking to you, of all people, like this. I’m sorry.”

  “You feel like part of you is missing,” Quicksilver said, moving closer. “Like part of you—the biggest part—has been cut out.”

  The Wolf King’s face brightened. “Yes, that’s exactly it!”

  “Like you’re not a witch anymore, but you’re not a human either.”

  “Like you’re somewhere in between.”

  Quicksilver felt him watching her and stared stubbornly at the floor. She wished she had not said anything, but she knew no one else who had once had a monster, and now did not. Despite herself, she itched to talk to him about it—him, the Wolf King!

  She scowled, toeing the floor with her unbandaged foot. “So what will happen to you now? I hope it’s something along the lines of throwing you into a dark and lonely prison as punishment for your crimes.”

  “I will be tried by the Council of Lords,” the Wolf King said quietly. “But Lars and his coven said they would vouch for me, explain what happened. I have family left, he said. Some Tarkalias, up in Valteya. One of them’s Lady Lovisa. She’s trying to change the name Council of Lords to Council of Thrones. You know, because there are women ruling now, too. She sounds nice, don’t you think? Distantly related, of course.” The Wolf King laughed, a soft, sad sound. “I thought I had killed all my family, long ago, but apparently I missed a few.”

  Quicksilver looked up at that, and immediately regretted it, for the Wolf King seemed so miserable and lost, sitting there covered in bandages, that she found herself pitying him. She remembered one of the memories she had stolen from him—the lonely witch boy, unlucky enough to be born without much magic in him, chasing after a deer and longing for a monster of his own.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “we should start again.” She tried to extend her hand without falling over and realized it would be easier to simply extend the crutch. So she did, and said, “I’m Quicksilver. I’m a thief and a witch, but don’t ask me to make any spells for you. I can’t do that anymore.”

  The Wolf King’s watery smile grew larger. “And I’m Ari Tarkalia,” he said. “I used to be an evil king, but now I’m just a boy. And don’t ask me to make spells for you, because I’ve got no magic in me, and . . . I’m all right with that.”

  They slapped hands, palm to crutch.

  “Don’t think this means I like you,” Quicksilver warned him. “You’ve a long way to go there, Ari. I hope you know that.”

  He nodded, taking a deep breath. “I know. But I’m ready for it. Anything’s better than where I’ve been.”

  And Quicksilver saw then, in the serious set of his face, the king who should have been: Ari Tarkalia, son of a powerful witch family. Not much magic of his own, the poor boy—but perhaps, Quicksilver thought, magic wasn’t everything.

/>   She sat beside him until the sun rose—not for the conversation, she told herself, nor for the comfort of being near another half creature like herself, but because someone had to keep an eye on him, and it might as well be her.

  .53.

  A STRANGE KIND OF FAMILY

  As Quicksilver watched the Willow-on-the-River market from her perch on the church belfry, she munched on a stolen sugar cake and considered things.

  Much had changed, and was still changing.

  There were witches in the world, slowly coming out of hiding. Someday the Star Lands would be bright with magic once more, as they had been so long ago. Quicksilver reached into her dull and faded hair, found the one flaming lock of red—fire-bright and shimmering—and wrapped it absently around her finger. Every time she saw these shining strands, she felt her heart lift to remember how beautiful the world had once been—and how it would be so again.

  Lars and his coven came and went, working with the newly renamed Council of Thrones to abolish the Scrolls and teach the people of the Star Lands what witches were really like. They often showed up at Sly Boots’s house in the middle of the night with no warning, hungry and boisterous, and though Sly Boots’s parents reminded them often that their home was not, in fact, a travelers’ inn, they could never find it in their hearts to turn them away.

  The Council of Thrones had decided to pardon Ari Tarkalia, and he was now on his way to Valteya with Lady Lovisa Tarkalia, who, at their first meeting, had taken one look at him and wrapped him into a ferocious embrace, proclaiming for all to hear that he was family, and if anyone didn’t like that, she would, as the ruler of Valteya, be happy to explain it more fully with the help of her royal guard.