Chapter 58
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
FOX
Sleep came in fits and bursts between the pain and the cold and the heckling from the soldiers in the camp. Fox felt like an animal, beaten and caged to be gawked at by the others. He was an example of what it meant to defy the chief commander and the kingdom.
Fox refused to keep his eyes down, glaring at the soldiers who stopped to look at him, sneering through the bars. They took to throwing dirt in his face, forcing him to turn away. He just brushed the dirt away and kept staring, not letting them win.
But the moment they walked away, and he was alone again in the center of camp, he felt his shoulders slump and every ounce of fight leave his body.
It was all an act, and they probably knew it, too.
He’d been given his shirt back after the whipping, torn as it was, but they hadn’t allowed him to clean his back.
The bloody mess had simply dried, fusing the shirt to his skin.
It was better than being bare-chested in the cold.
They’d only given him a thin scrap of a blanket, barely enough to keep him from freezing when the sun went down, curled like a cat in the center of the cage.
Even the metal floor worked against him, sapping the heat from his body.
The weather held out, not quite dropping low enough to snow again. Perhaps someone was looking after him.
Fox watched the moons rise as night fell for the third time since he’d been captured, and he sent a prayer to Quelia and the other dragons.
He had no feather, no connection to them, but he hoped they heard him anyway, though his prayer was as disjointed and confused as his thoughts.
He wanted to be saved, but he didn’t want Sofia to come.
Harlow had made it plenty clear: he was the bait in this trap, and he didn’t want her to suffer for him.
But he needed the pain to stop. He didn’t want to make it back to the city after all of this.
He didn’t want to walk up the steps to the execution block.
The same one he’d stood on once before to serve Luz’s sentence—the one man he’d executed. He’d once been proud of that fact.
His chest ached as he thought of all the mistakes he’d made leading to this moment. Would his brother hate him for everything he’d done? Would he be proud he’d finally seen the truth of their world and fought back—even though he’d failed?
He shivered as the wind cut through the bars, and he wrapped his arms around himself tighter.
The crunch of frosted grass cut through his thoughts, and the hair on the back of his neck rose, his heart beating hard in his chest. He turned his head slowly, not wanting whoever was there to know he’d heard them.
The silhouette that stood against the bars was thinner than he’d expected, their body curved in a way that made it clear it wasn’t a soldier. He turned slowly.
His mother was wrapped in a shawl, her hair loose around her shoulders. Her curls had gone wild over the past few weeks. His father would have hated it. She looked a little bit feral. Fox liked it.
She pressed something between the bars, and he moved with stiff aching joints to pick up the roll. She’d tucked some meat and cheese inside it, and he ate it in two bites, barely bothering to chew. His stomach cramped at the intrusion of food, but he knew it was better than not eating.
“Did you do it?”
He looked up at her, unable to make out her expression in the darkness. He could just see the whites of her eyes, reflecting the light above.
“Do what?” he asked, his throat raw. He’d been accused of so much, he wasn’t sure what she was asking.
“Did you kill your father?”
The food in his stomach turned sour, and he clenched his fists, letting his nails bite into his palms. He didn’t answer immediately.
If he opened his mouth, he was afraid of throwing up the food he’d just managed to eat.
But she waited, the patience louder than anything Fox had ever heard before.
He hated it. He wanted her to cry or to yell. Instead, she was silent.
“Yes.” He didn’t elaborate. Any excuse or context he had didn’t feel enough for her. She deserved better than that. So, he let the word speak for itself.
She was silent, but he watched her silhouette in the darkness and saw her shoulders shaking. A soft sob escaped her lips, and it cut through his chest like a blade. The whip had been nothing compared to that single muted sound of his mother breaking. This is what he had done.
He didn’t regret making the decision he had. He refused to regret murdering his father, especially knowing he would have killed him and Sofia both without a second thought. But he hated he had done this to her.
He waited for her accusations or anger, but she only cried until she took a deep breath, pulling back the sob and swallowing it. She breathed for a moment, and he held his body rigid, the pain shooting down his back in sharp cracks.
“There is a lot of animal activity around camp suddenly. More than there was before.” She said this with her eyes upturned to the sky, and Fox wondered, only briefly, if he’d truly broken her.
If her mind had snapped with the pain of knowing her only living son had killed her husband.
But then she was creeping away, and he was left with no answers.
It was only after her shadow had disappeared around the tents that he thought of how she’d come to see him.
Had Harlow granted her permission to come talk to him?
He doubted it. So, she had sneaked out to meet him.
He’d known Harlow had said she wasn’t a captive, but he didn’t know how free she was to wander.
Had he been trying to save her this entire time only to find out she’d already been free?
Perhaps she came with Harlow willingly, having heard of her son’s betrayal.
Fox let himself sink back to the ground, the icy cold of the metal cage pressing into his body.
A single hot tear traced down his face, and he wiped it away.
It would only turn to ice in the night air.
He fell asleep to the moons glaring down at him and his mother’s last words echoing through his mind like some strange curse.
The fifth time he woke up, body aching and chilled to the bone, the sun had just crested the horizon, the sky turning a petulant gray.
Clouds had moved in at some point, and he shuddered, knowing he wouldn’t even have the sun to soothe away the cold today.
Fox remembered reading stories as a child about overcast—when the sun hid behind the clouds as they blanketed the sky in gray.
But had thought them just as magical and mythical as dragons and faeries.
It turns out they were all true. He wasn’t sure he liked such blanketing clouds, though.
Or faeries for that matter. The storybooks had described them with fewer teeth and cuter wings.
If he ever made it out of here alive, he’d ask Sofia where the cute-winged faeries lived.
He was still staring at the clouds when a hawk swept through the sky, a brown streak across gray. A few moments later, another hawk flew by. Or perhaps it was the same hawk, sweeping back and forth.
Fox blinked. He sat up, the motion slow and difficult.
His muscles screamed at him, and he wasn’t sure what aches were from the whipping, the cold, or sleeping in the metal cage.
His eyes traced the sky, focusing to the point of pain, but then he saw it again.
The hawk swept across the camp. It was staring down at them. Staring at him.
Surely, he was going crazy. He was making up stories in his head, but then he remembered Lumi jumping and twisting their body and flying off into the sky as a hawk in the blink of an eye. That hawk had definitely been looking down at the camp, surveying it.
He watched until he saw the bird sweep over the camp six more times, head tilted in the same focused way.
“There is a lot of animal activity around camp.”
Not for the first time since his father was killed, he remembered that his mother had collected the faery books that had been kept in their library growing up. She’d been the one to tell him stories about dragons and faeries and even shapeshifters.
Fox let out a breath, the smallest sense of hope blooming in his chest. His body aching, he lay curled in his cage. But he listened, and he watched.
He saw the hawk sweeping overhead and the condor that would occasionally join it. He heard the soldier mumbling about their own hunger and the cold pressing in on them after days in this half-frozen forest.
“Another fight broke out,” one man said as he passed by the cage. “They caught five king-damned elk and refused to share any of the meat.”
“I say we just shoot of few of them in their wolf forms and eat them. They’re animals, aren’t they?”
“We should kill them all before they betray us.”
Their voices faded away, but Fox smiled, face tucked in his arms. They were going to eat themselves from the inside.
Fox faded again into sleep, the buzz of the camp and the gray-tinted sunlight doing little to stir him.
They were coming. They had to be coming for him, which meant he needed to keep his strength up.
What little he had of it. So, he tried to sleep and tried to find the bit of sunlight that broke through the clouds and crossed his cage as late morning came.
He heard shouting at one point, pushing himself up with difficulty, only to realize it was three soldiers fighting amongst themselves over the noon meal’s rations.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, morning had faded into afternoon, the shadows stretching long. He didn’t know what had woken him until another high-pitched howl filled the sky, followed by the screams of a few men.
“They raided the king-damned stores! The fucking beasts stole our food!”
“Why would we steal food from humans? We can feed ourselves without your help.”
“Then why is there food missing from our stores?”
“Why should I concern myself with human affairs?”
“Human affairs? Perhaps you should concern yourself with how you speak to your betters.”
The fight had moved toward the center of camp as the three wolfshifters stalked toward the dozen soldiers that had gathered, glaring down at them like they were nothing. Fox had seen that look in their eyes before, when they’d nearly crushed his head in and thrown him over their shoulders.
“Our betters?” the tallest of the shifters spat the words out. “You are insects beneath our feet.”
“You are here because of what we’ve promised you.”
“You know,” the shifter said, grinning with sharp canines as he looked back at his men. “I think we can just take the land we want without your pathetic little leader’s permission.”
“Chief Commander Harlow might have something to say about that.” The soldier who spoke pulled himself up, trying to look tall, but he had to strain his neck back to look the shifter in the eyes. And even Fox could see the way his knees trembled.
The wolfshifters howled as one, and the soldiers reached for their weapons instinctively.
The shifters’ leader froze, nostrils flaring wide as he saw the men’s hands on their daggers and swords.
“Go back to your camp,” a soldier said.
“You don’t command us.”
Fox was watching now, alert for the first time in days, but a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye had him looking up. A condor circled above the camp, its eyes focused fully on the fight brewing.
A soldier let out an undignified shriek, and Fox turned back to see a wolfshifter holding the man in the air by his neck, the dagger he’d apparently pulled lying on the ground at his feet.
“Don’t pull weapons on us, you insect.”
But the damage had been done. The rest of the camp had gathered, humans on one side and wolfshifters on the other, drawn by the yells and the smell of a fight.
Fox knew this had been brewing for weeks now.
But tensions were tightening to the breaking point, and everyone could feel it.
Even the air held its breath. The condor above waited.
They raided the stores, the man had said. The wolfshifters weren’t lying. They had no reason to steal human food.
Fox smiled, lips cracking. Sofia.
And then the tension snapped.
The soldier at the head of the group, who’d originally accused the shifters, pulled his sword. “Drop my man!”
“Gladly,” the shifter said. His hand twisted and clenched. The soldier’s head snapped to the side with a sickening crack. The shifter smiled as he dropped the man’s body, and it crumpled to the ground at his feet.
And then weeks of simmering rage and distrust exploded as the two groups surged toward each other, swords clashing against claws.
Fox nearly grinned as the fighting worsened, watching as soldiers fell like flies.
He heard Harlow screaming a command from somewhere behind the tents, and a volley of arrows ascended into the air before crashing down into the tumult.
An arrow hit its target, piercing the chest of a shifter.
He dropped like a stone, black veins spreading from the wound, and Fox realized these weren’t normal arrows.
They were iron-tipped. Harlow had indeed been ready to betray the wolfshifters.
One arrow hit the bar of his cage, and Fox pushed himself back. He heard a growl behind him and saw a shifter slam into his cage. The shifter snarled at him, his clawed hand reaching through the bars as Fox backed away again. “What are you looking at?”
Someone speared the shifter with a sword, hot blood splattering across Fox’s face as the soldier pulled his sword back and swung it to behead the shifter.
Fox crouched at the center of the cage, watching the bloodbath unfold, rooting for neither side and realizing no matter who won, he was still locked in a cage and helpless.
He could only hope his suspicions were right.