Chapter Twelve
Twelve
The badger snarled and lunged at Juniper just as Mo crawled from beneath the little cave opening, hauling both their bags behind him.
Juniper let out a very dignified scream, clawing at the badger, who, in turn, clawed at Juniper. This thing was big, bigger than he had expected, and certainly bigger than the badgers that would steal chickens from their farm from time to time.
He flung it backward off of him and scrambled to his feet. The badger hissed at him, its small, sharp teeth showing, and then darted through the gap into its cave.
Juniper caught his breath, swaying on his feet.
Mo was staring at him, those dark eyes sparking with something that was almost definitely a laugh he was trying to contain.
“You can laugh,” Juniper said, not meaning it in the slightest. “It’s okay. I know I was a sight.”
“Not at all,” Mo said. The last word came out a little squeaky, the repressed laughter right there ready to burst out of his stupidly beautiful mouth. “Are you all right, Junebug?”
“No, I am not all right,” Juniper snapped. “I’ve been attacked by a badger and threatened by a prince. I’ve had to see Bill today. And hear him speak. There’s a dragon loose in the forest, and she might want to burn us alive, but you want to help her. And—”
And you’ll never want to stay as badly as I need you to.
What a stupid day, and a stupid quest, and a stupid, stupid life.
Mo’s warm hand nudged his. In his outstretched hand were a few cubes of cheese.
“That’s the very best hard cheese Farmer Abernathy sells,” Juniper said accusingly. “I don’t have any in my pack.”
“It’s from the emergency stash,” Mo said gently. “Now, eat a bit of that and let’s be going before the prince returns. Your scream was…Well, I think there’s a chance they heard it.”
Juniper cursed but ate the snack anyway. Of course, it would be better if he had some apple juice to go with it—they sold it in personal-size boxes at most markets back home, and Juniper loved a little treat to go with whatever work he was doing—but he could make do. And this was quality cheese.
And at least the badger fight had distracted from Juniper’s near panic.
Mo had asked him to come with all those winters ago, with that same hopeful light in his eyes.
“Which way from here?” Mo mused as Juniper ate.
Mo ran the calloused pad of his finger slowly across his wrinkled map of the area, which was an absurd way to behave.
Juniper shook his head, eating another bite of cheese. He very badly needed to be in his own room, the door firmly shut, where he could think whatever wild thoughts came into his mind—and affected his body in embarrassing ways—without anyone else to see.
“She would have gone north, maybe?” Juniper managed at last. “Is she old enough to know she’s from the mountains? And why do you think she ended up all the way down here, if it’s dangerous to be a dragon in these parts?”
Mo shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “About any of it. But she needs food, doesn’t she? She didn’t really tell us anything beyond that she was waiting for her mama.”
“And that her mama left through the roof,” Juniper said, wolfing down his last bit of cheese. “We really should have guessed when she said that, shouldn’t we? Unless you did, and I was the only one surprised when she turned into a dragon and tried to kill us.”
“Tried to escape,” Mo corrected him. “I’m sure she didn’t mean any harm.”
“She’s a dragon, not a little itty-bitty darling who has done no wrong,” Juniper said, a little too snappishly.
Juniper could honestly relate. He had personally always been a menace—such a menace, in fact, between stealing cheese from the market every chance he had, telling inappropriate stories to his classmates, and rigging pails of water to overturn above the banker’s doors, the fine townspeople of Tús had suggested that Juniper was more of a little beast than a little boy.
“You’re the only itty-bitty darling who has done no wrong around these parts,” Mo told him, that sparkle back in his eye.
“I’ll tackle you later.” Juniper waved his hand at him in weary dismissal.
“Good,” Mo said. “So you think you can track her? You know I’m shit at that. Always have been.”
Mo was good at everything he did, so shit was a nonsensical descriptor, but Juniper allowed it. In this very particular case, Juniper was better at tracking.
He didn’t object to quests because of the outdoors component: In fact, he loved being outdoors beneath the trees, listening to the river. Looking at Mo’s ass in those trekking pants. The whole bit.
It was just that he never, ever wanted to sleep anywhere cold again, and he’d had too many days as a child not knowing when he’d be allowed back inside. Or if he would, if his dad got too angry. Or worse, if his dad was too drunk to remember he had a kid waiting to be let back in.
And that was why it was important to lock unpleasant memories away, because the more you thought about them, the more other, worse ones came rushing back in. Best to tuck them all away before they flooded the place.
“I can track her,” Juniper answered. “But you haven’t been shit at anything you do. I bet you even looked graceful getting out of that cave, which isn’t fair.”
Mo cleared his throat. “My, uh,” he said. “My ass actually got stuck at one point.”
Juniper threw his hands in the air. “See?” he said to the gods and the forest and anyone who might be listening. “Cheeks so sculpted they got you stuck in a cave.”
“Is that—a good thing?” Mo was not looking at the map at all now. He was looking squarely at Juniper, the full force of his gaze lighting Juniper on fire. Those brown eyes.
It wasn’t fair.
“Of course it’s a good thing, you fool,” Juniper said.
“Now come on, let’s track her. We should start back at the barn, I think, though they might have people stationed there.
Mo? Have we thought about what we’ll do when this is done?
How will we go back home if the prince himself thinks we sold him out on a quest? ”
As soon as he asked the question, he regretted it. Because Mo might very well say he never planned to go back home, and Juniper wasn’t sure he could bear hearing those words.
Mo hesitated for a long moment, and Juniper felt like a criminal standing before the constable awaiting his fate. Any moment, the stocks. A prison sentence. Mo leaving forever.
“We’ll sort that out when we’re through,” Mo said. “He doesn’t know that we know. He only knows that we ran, and we can just say that we were running from the dragon. Besides, if we can give the prince something he wants instead, we should be fine.”
Juniper’s shoulders relaxed, but his stomach sank even as it did. It felt like a stay of execution—not knowing Mo was set on leaving forever, but not not knowing it, either.
“Do you think they’ll have men at the barn?” Juniper asked as he lifted his pack and fell in behind Mo on the narrow, muddy trail, which was now full of crisscrossing boot prints.
They walked a steadier, slower pace than they had earlier, Mo stopping to scan the trail ahead of them multiple times.
“I think they must have moved on from this area,” Mo said. “It’s so quiet here.”
“Yeah,” Juniper said glumly as the charred outline of the barn came into view. “Because it would take a fool to return to this place.”
Mo laughed, turning and nudging Juniper with his arm. “I think your idea was a good one,” he said. “And the only way to find Bear’s trail.”
They paused in the trees near the dilapidated farmhouse. Some of the trees at the perimeter of the yard were lightly burned, but the barn seemed to have taken the brunt of it, and the dampness of the day had saved the forest from lighting up like the other night.
Nothing was left of the barn but charred support beams, still reaching gnarly fingers toward the gray sky.
It was nearing the end of the day, the shadows deepening at the edges of the sky. Juniper shivered. It was going to be another cold, damp night out here, and Juniper was going to have to spend it thinking about how cold he was and how to tell his best friend the truth.
“Well?” Mo turned to him again.
Juniper had to look away, or blush, and he was not about to blush twice in one day.
“Let’s start behind the barn.” He was better at tracking animals who walked on the ground—when a sheep did not return to the pen at night, or when their dog had wandered off for a few days trying to befriend Farmer Abernathy’s much larger (but female) guard dog.
Juniper had even been good at tracking people, once finding his father three towns over at the bottom of an empty horse trough.
Though the tracking had done him little good then, because at thirteen winters old, he’d just thrown a bucket of slop on top of him and left him there.
But with something that flew—that was new territory.
Juniper must have looked rather pitiful as he was staring around the treetops, looking for a place to start, because Mo pressed a few more cubes of cheese into his hand and squeezed his wrist comfortingly.
“She took off that direction,” Juniper said, picturing the moment Bear had snarled his name and sent the fire roaring in his direction.
It seemed almost guaranteed that she would do the same as soon as she saw them again, but this was the risk Mo wanted to take.
“The branches are bent in all that way—we start there.”
“Good.” Mo nodded his head, though his brow furrowed. “She must have been so scared.”
“So was I,” Juniper mumbled. He had been the one who was almost on fire. “Oh, I suppose I should thank you,” he said.
The words tasted sandy in his mouth. It wasn’t thanking Mo that was the problem. It was just—sincerity. Talking about feelings.
Ew.
“For what?” Mo asked as they followed the trail of broken branches and scattered leaves.
“Saving my life.”