Chapter Fourteen #2
“She’s a dragon,” Mo said, unbothered. “And arsonous isn’t a word. Murderous, maybe?”
Bear giggled. “I can kill the prince,” she said. “Mama thinks all princes should be set on fire. Should I do it?”
“Yes,” Mo said.
“No,” Juniper said. “Mo, are you encouraging her?” He whipped around to look at them.
Mo was smirking, those eyes sparking as sure as the fire had last night. Beside him, Bear was also smirking.
Their expressions looked identical.
“Was this your bi-moonly use of sarcasm?” Juniper groused. “Before breakfast? Bear, have you seen my tallow?”
“Yes.” She kicked her legs cheerfully and stared back at him. “It was tasty.”
“It was tasty?” Juniper sat back on the ground with a thump. “That wasn’t food. That was more important than food. That was skin care. Bear!”
Mo cackled. There was no other word for it: a full-throated, devilish cackle, as if he had never been this delighted in his life. “We’ll get you more tallow,” he promised. “Bear? You really ate it?”
She nodded. “Yep. When Junebug was sleeping.”
“And you let me look for it all this time?” Juniper stared at her in amazement.
Bear grinned. “Yep.”
Juniper found that sighing was now a near-hourly occurrence, but at least he wasn’t letting out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. That would have been a truly insufferable repetitive tick, even if it was a realistic depiction of anxiety. “Do we at least have any breakfast left?”
Mo held out a small tin cup that was still warm around the edges. “We made you oatmeal. Bear…well, she wanted hers with meat in it. Don’t ask me. But I made yours with some wild blackberries I found along the trail a ways back. Bear says her mother mostly caught her rabbits or deer.”
“We can’t do that,” Juniper gasped. “Mo, you hate killing animals.”
“And so do you,” Mo said. “But we have to keep her fed. Maybe we can learn to hunt?”
Juniper would rather beg the old gods for a swift and immediate death, but here he was, camping in the woods, accidentally acquiring a wee, dangerous child, and apparently learning to hunt.
Three things he had sworn he would never do.
All without skin care. Four things.
“We have to manage a resupply,” Mo said, before Juniper could add anything of value. “Before we head into the mountains. And we’ll need quite a bit, to keep both of us fed, and Bear, too.”
“I’ll hunt.” She hopped to her feet. “Mama showed me how. You just swoop down through the trees, grab an animal, and break its neck.”
“You are truly terrifying,” Juniper said. “Please no neck-breaking. I’m a highly sensitive person.”
“You’ll be fine,” Mo told him. “And HSPs aren’t real, no matter what the village medium tried to convince you of. Now, can we focus?”
He had that same tone he’d had the day before when he said, Take this seriously for once, Juniper.
Juniper winced. Divona’s sake, he could never stop fucking up long enough for either of them to catch their breath.
Was that what it had been, that winter Mo had left?
There had been tension that winter. It had been long and cold, and food and coin had been scarce.
Still, it had also been sudden: A night of brawling and drinking and singing.
Falling asleep together in front of the hearth.
That kiss neither of them could ever talk about after.
And two mornings later, he’d woken to Mo packing his bags and disappearing for almost two moon cycles. Reappearing without a word about where he’d been.
For all Juniper knew, Mo could have been on one of these dumb little quests. That would explain why he was so much better at it than Juniper now.
“I think we should find someone who can help us,” Juniper said.
“We’re in over our heads. Drowning, if you will.
Impossible to continue. And I never agreed to going all the way to the northern mountains to look for people who may or may not even exist. Do you really think that’s a good idea?
When winter will set in within the moon? ”
Mo’s eyes flickered with annoyance. “Winter won’t be here for almost two moons, and I thought you agreed we should help Bear,” he said. “And that you would at least try to take things seriously.”
“I do,” Juniper shot back. “And I am. Bear, stay here. Mo and I are going for a walk.”
“Oh, are we?” Mo’s usual good humor had evaporated, his brown eyes harder than they had been a moment ago.
“Yes,” Juniper huffed. “We need to talk about this, and we can’t do that here.”
“Is that because you’re going to talk about leaving me behind?” Bear’s look mirrored Mo’s. Hard as steel, with a side of fire.
“No,” Juniper said. How had he turned the entire camp against him within moments of waking? This really was a special skill. Perhaps he should add that to the skill section of the scroll next time he applied for a job back home, right alongside “easiest to leave behind.”
Oh, now he was really hosting a pity party. A shame he had to do so without tea and pastries.
“Mo, please.”
“All right. Fine.” Mo stood and followed him into the forest. When they were far enough from camp that Juniper could be sure they wouldn’t be heard, he stopped walking.
“We have to talk about this,” Juniper said. “I do agree we should help her. She’s just a kid, and she’s scared. And also very scary. But—”
“We can’t just solve this one through a wrestling match,” Mo said, his tone strangely cold in a way that sent a shiver down Juniper’s spine.
Because if Mo stopped seeing him the way he always had, if Mo got a good look at that selfishness beneath the layers of silliness…what would Juniper have left?
“I thought you liked our wrestling matches,” Juniper said.
Mo shifted from one foot to the other, and then finally looked at Juniper again. “Well,” he said. “Yeah, okay. I do. Except for that time you tackled me in the town square and my pants ripped.”
“If those pants couldn’t keep your ass in, they don’t have a right to call themselves pants,” Juniper said.
“And I stand on that business. Besides, I mended them. Anyway, we can’t just gallivant into the mountains hoping we’ll find people who maybe don’t exist anymore and who also maybe don’t want this kid.
We don’t know that they want this kid. Do we? ”
Mo stopped. “We already decided—”
“No, you decided,” Juniper snapped. It made his head feel light and spinny.
He had never argued with Mo quite like this. Mostly, Mo decided things and Juniper fussed about them on principle, but never pushed back. Not really.
“This isn’t something that only you get to decide,” he continued boldly.
Mo arched an eyebrow at him. “Did you have a better idea?”
“I find the prince, profusely apologize to him for running off yesterday, promise him our reward money and glory, and he helps us rehome Bear,” Juniper said.
“He’s rescued princesses before! I’ve read about this guy.
There’s a girl in the town of Gilitín Lintéir, on the coast, who narrowly escaped some dangerous giants?
Or something? Listen, all the gossip scrolls had his face in them.
That’s how I knew he was the third prince. ”
“You can’t believe everything you read on a scroll,” Mo said. “And you think we can trust him? After he was going to arrest us, or worse? After he was perfectly fine hunting Bear, even after we explained to him that she was just a little girl?”
“It would never have come to that,” Juniper said confidently. “If I hadn’t messed everything up by throwing that flaming fire ale cocktail, and—”
“I actually thought that was genius,” Mo said. “I didn’t even know you had any fire ale.”
“Genius?” Juniper stopped still. “You thought so?”
“You don’t need to sound so shocked,” Mo said. He had the smallest of grins on his face, and Divona’s sake, he was standing very close to Juniper, wasn’t he?
Mo’s shirt stretched across a broad chest that rose and fell with each steady breath. His hand, the one that had held Juniper’s so securely only yesterday, was so close to Juniper again.
“I know you’re smart, Juniper.”
“You…you do?” It was too late to bury the shock in his voice. Nothing for it but to be embarrassed about that for the next one to two business moons.
His mouth was close to Juniper’s, too. Those warm lips and that rough, bearded face that he hadn’t shaved out here in the woods. That Juniper was hoping he would never shave again.
Was…was he going to kiss his best friend/totally-casual-roommate right here in the forest? Juniper had been waffling back and forth between thinking he was going to lose Mo forever and thinking that maybe, just maybe—
“Are you…are you crying?” Mo’s voice shocked Juniper out of the moment.
He leaped backward, swiping at his face. He…he was crying, yes. He was crying because he had just entertained the idea of kissing Morn Elmthorn for the second time in his life.
Juniper had seen enough. He turned, taking in a panicked breath, and made a run for it.