Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
Mo let him get as far as the bend in the trail before he broke into an easy jog, catching up to Juniper with very little effort on his part. Juniper, however, was huffing and puffing and only crying a little now.
“Is it because I said you were smart?” Mo asked.
His hand snaked out, catching hold of Juniper’s arm and pulling him to a stop.
“I can compliment you more often, if you want? Do I not compliment you enough? Or did I make you sad? This is one of those things I’m really bad at, Juniper.
I know I’m supposed to be able to read it on your face, but I can’t. ”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Juniper shook his head, face burning. “We don’t have to talk about it. I’m not crying.”
“Am I supposed to also pretend this is true?” Mo asked, his voice almost a whisper.
“Yes,” Juniper snapped.
“Okay,” Mo said slowly. “This is just going to be one of those things I don’t understand. And that’s all right. But should…should I not call you smart?”
“You should call me smart,” Juniper choked out. “If you want to. And if you actually believe it. But right now we don’t have to talk about it at all.”
“We should get back to Bear,” Mo said finally. “We—”
Juniper tackled him to the ground with a thump.
There was nothing else for it.
They fell and pummeled and thumped over the muddy ground and Juniper wasn’t crying.
They fell briefly into some brambles (Mo righted them), and Juniper wasn’t thinking about kissing his best friend.
They rolled down a small hill through wet grass and Juniper wasn’t embarrassed and wasn’t crying and nothing, nothing was wrong at all.
They landed at the bottom of the hill, Mo on top of Juniper, the sun glowing behind Mo.
“Is that better?” Mo asked, so sincerely that Juniper would have cried again, if he hadn’t worked so hard to put his tears firmly away.
“Much better,” Juniper said.
And it was. Well, a little.
Something about being pummeled down a hill did wonders for the nervous system.
“I may have to wrestle you again later,” Juniper warned him.
Last time I kissed you, you left. That’s what a man who was not a coward would say.
But Juniper O’Reilly had proved over and over again since this quest began that he was a coward.
Mo grinned, bright as the autumn sun. “I may have to wrestle you,” he said. “Maybe I should only compliment you when there’s a hill to throw you down. Would that work? I tell you something nice and then we immediately fight?”
Juniper bumped him with his shoulder in response. “We still have to figure out what to do with Bear,” he said as Mo crested the hill and reached back to offer Juniper a hand. “I do care about her.”
“I got it,” Mo said. “Listen, I can see how this choice is stressing you out. So I’ve got it.
I’m making the choice. We’re going into the mountains.
Today, I’ll work on mapping out a route and figuring out how we’re going to feed Bear as we go.
I’ll talk to her and see if we can get any information on where her family might be hiding out. ”
“But we didn’t—” Juniper threw up his hands in frustration. Juniper’s stress wasn’t the point. “I think we should—”
“And you’ll go into town, disguised—you can take my cloak—and resupply as quickly as possible,” Mo continued as if he hadn’t heard.
He walked away down the path, his strides so long Juniper had to run to keep up with him.
“Then you’ll get out of town. And not a word to that Bronson fellow. Even if he says a word to you.”
“I’m not a child,” Juniper insisted breathlessly as he ran down the path after Mo. “Ooh, a berry. Mo, are these the berries you found? Doesn’t matter. I won’t say anything to Bill.”
“And you won’t pummel him into the ground, either, right?”
“That wouldn’t be saying anything,” Juniper returned, a little sullenly. If Mo wasn’t going to listen to him, Juniper could at least make a show of not listening in response. “Unless by talking, you mean my fists having a conversation with his face.”
“Juniper.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Juniper said. “We need to resupply. But if Bear doesn’t have family, what are we going to do?
And what are we going to do when we come back from the mountains and the prince is still looking for a dragon—or worse, still angry that we ran off in the first place?
I think we need a plan to get back on his good side.
Or if he doesn’t have a good side, at least to get off of his worst side. ”
“You’re just saying that because he’s a prince,” Mo said. “And you think it’s romantic, or epic, or some such nonsense. He’s just a man, Juniper. And he isn’t even that handsome.” There was an oddly venomous note in Mo’s tone when he said that last bit.
But no, Juniper was saying it because the prince had held a sword to Mo’s throat yesterday. Mo seemed to have forgotten that.
“Are you saying I’m acting this way because I have a crush on him?” Juniper asked loudly as they rounded the bend to their little campsite. “Because I don’t. Even if he’s the only prince I’ve ever met before.”
“Do you have a crush on him?” Mo asked.
“That’s rude,” Juniper told him.
Mo threw up his hands in frustration. “At no point did I understand what was happening in this conversation,” he said.
“But it’s settled, then. We’ll find shelter nearby—another abandoned cottage will do—and then you’ll do the resupply run while I do the route map, talk to Bear, and make a plan for keeping her fed in the mountains. ”
The journey through the mountains would take well past Samhain—maybe until Yule, and by that time, the mountains would be snow-covered, blizzards would be near-daily occurrences, and neither Juniper nor Mo had brought their boots or heavy cloaks, let alone anything to keep Bear warm.
But Mo didn’t appear to be listening to anything Juniper had to say on the matter.
“Fine,” Juniper said. “Fine. We’ll do it your way. For now.”
When they returned to camp, Bear had Juniper’s tallow jar in her hand and was licking the remnants of it directly out of the jar. So there had been some left.
Mo packed up their camp, while Juniper got Bear more breakfast (she demanded oatmeal with jerky in it, again, a horrifying combination), and by the time she had finished off her bowl, Mo had found them a location.
It would have been a short walk, except Bear stopped every single time she saw an interesting rock.
The third time they stopped, Juniper scooped her up and pretended to make her fly. It was a game that he had loved as a small child, but Bear blew a small breath of fire at him.
“I already know how to fly,” she told him, wrinkling her small nose.
“No breathing fire at friends,” Mo said firmly, scooping her out of Juniper’s arms and setting her on his shoulder.
Juniper’s heart thumped faster in his chest at the sight of Morn Elmthorn carrying a child who looked like she could belong to them both. He leaned over as they walked and murmured in Mo’s ear: “This is exactly what we do when the cat bites.”
Mo snorted, but Bear turned a fiery look on Juniper.
“Junebug,” she said. “What’s a cat?”
“A little furry friend,” Juniper told her. “Not a person like you. He can’t shift. But he does like to cuddle, and he does have sharp teeth.”
“Can we eat them?”
“No!” Juniper stared at her, agape. “No, we do not eat cats.” That would be a mess to sort out when she— Juniper stopped the thought cold. She wasn’t coming back to the farm, so she wasn’t meeting Mumford, and any idea otherwise needed to be promptly dashed.
“Cats are friends, not food,” Mo told her, shifting her on his shoulder a little to duck under some branches.
Then they rounded a bend in the trail and found themselves in a clearing that held an abandoned stone cottage with a worn thatched roof.
It wasn’t as cozy as home, not by half, but Juniper could pick a little bouquet of moss stars and primroses and lay out his cloak like a blanket for them to eat supper on, and they’d make it cozy.
Mo swung Bear down to the ground, and she ran toward the empty house, stumbling a little in the long grass. Mo looked down at Juniper.
“We’ll stay here,” he said. “You should probably start that resupply now, shouldn’t you? If you want to be back by dark?”
Well, there went that plan. No cozy-but-abandoned cottage for Juniper.
Juniper wrinkled his nose in distaste, which Mo ignored, and then grabbed his coin (and a little of Mo’s, because this resupply was going to be expensive) and left without another word to Mo, his footsteps slower, his shoulders hunched.
Mo wasn’t willing to listen to any of his concerns—not the snowy mountains waiting, not the angry prince in pursuit, not the absence of any real ability to find Bear’s kin.
And if Mo wouldn’t listen to Juniper, Juniper would have to solve the problem of the prince himself.