Chapter 14
This time, when I sneak into the pre-dawn kennels, I have a burning mission inside of me. I’ll get the Wolf to tell me about my grandmother.
Now.
I can’t help him escape. If he wants to live, he needs to play by my rules. I have the upper hand here. Answer my questions, or die in the kennels.
The guard outside the kennel is too sleepy to ask many questions of the girl with a hood pulled low over her face. I lug a pail of well-water through the door, careful not to spill it on the stairs as I descend.
The kennels are eerily silent while the foxhounds sleep.
My light casts shadows through the bars and into their cells as I walk down the aisle.
Mixed into the filthy, scattered hay on the stone ground are gnawed bones and carcasses.
Rabbits, mostly. Flies buzz around them, taking the opportunity to feast on the dead flesh.
In the furthest corners of their cells, the foxhounds sleep.
They’re curled up in tight balls of matted copper fur.
To the unwise, they might look like nothing more than household pets.
But when one of them lifts its white-tipped tail to peer at me from the shadows, the illusion is broken.
His copper-colored eyes shine with hunger.
A low, rumbling growl follows me as I hurry past.
The Wolf isn’t asleep in the back of his cell. He watches me through swollen black eyes as I set down the pail of water and walk up to the barred door. I won’t risk opening his cage. These bars are my best bargaining chip.
“You haven’t died yet,” I say, by way of greeting.
He laughs humorlessly. “No. Not yet.” He squints at my orb of light, trying to adjust from the pitch darkness he’s been sitting in.
I reach into the bag that I strapped underneath my cloak. I pull out the bread I stole from the kitchens late last night. “Hungry?” I ask.
He doesn’t move.
I wait.
“I expect there’s a price.” He watches me through the curtain of dark hair covering his face.
There’s a long, grisly cut along his cheekbone that’s sealed together with dried blood, and the skin around his eyes is mottled with purple bruises.
Probably from the broken nose, though it looks like he straightened the cartilage back into place.
I shrug. “Isn’t that true with everything?”
His face doesn’t betray his thoughts. He merely waits.
I hadn’t intended to show my hand just yet, but I suppose the sooner the better so I can retreat before I’m discovered.
“I need information.”
His iron chains rattle as he slowly stands, never showing the pain he must be in. Hunter doesn’t have strong healing power. He couldn’t have done much more than keep the Wolf from dying.
“As I said before, you can get it.” He holds my eyes in his cool, gray gaze for a long moment. “For a price.”
“Escape.”
He nods. “Escape.”
“I can’t offer you that.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Both.” My voice is calm. Matter of fact. “But I can offer you some life-sustaining bread.”
He tsks, shaking his head slowly, but his eyes drift to the food in my hand. There’s hunger in his eyes that he can’t hide.
“Do you expect me to beg, Red? To crawl on hands and knees and offer you my entire kingdom for a slice of bread?” His words are bitter, mocking.
“No. I expect answers.”
He turns his back to me, staring into the dark corner of his cell. “As I said before, the only answer you seek lies with the queen in Annwyn.”
“You don’t know the question yet.”
He turns to watch me, wordless. He’s right to suspect a trick. I am a Fox, after all.
I reach back into my bag to retrieve a book of moths. Something tells me not to show him Grandmother’s necklace where it hides beneath my clothes. I fumble with the book, opening it up to a page with a sketch that resembles the silver moth. The same one I found scratched into the shop’s paint.
“What do you know of moths?” I ask.
There’s a slight change in his face that I’m sure is unintentional. Lines deepen around his mouth and his gray eyes darken.
“That they are beautiful but elusive creatures susceptible to a whack with a swatter. What of them?”
His indifference can’t fool me. I sense a new layer of tension in the air between us. He knows something.
“Try again.” My voice is full of unearned confidence.
He watches me for a time, assessing. A Wolf calculating the success of a potential target. “Maybe you could be more specific?” His eyes drift to the food in my hand and I know I’ve got him.
“More specifically ...” I lean toward him. “Why have I seen these moths in secret places all around Caerwen?”
I haven’t, of course. But I’m willing to bet they exist. If there truly is something more to these moths, there’s no way they exist only on my grandmother’s necklace and the dirty wall of an old pawn shop.
The corner of his mouth twitches. “You expect a Wolf to know the secrets of a Fox’s den?”
I lower my chin, staring harder into his eyes. “Yes.”
The Wolf walks back toward me with a slight limp, sizing me up like a predator. His chains rattle as they drag along the ground. He grabs the bars on his cell door and leans forward. I resist the urge to back up, standing my ground.
“Do you even know what you’re asking, Little Fox?”
I don’t blink, don’t swallow, don’t breathe. Nothing to give away my position. “That’s inconsequential. I want to know what you know.”
He holds his hand out for the bread. I rip off one small square from the loaf and place it in his hand.
He chuckles as he stuffs it into his mouth, wincing slightly as he chews.
After he swallows, he pushes himself off the bars and takes a few steps back toward the shadows of his cell.
For a moment, I think he won’t tell me anything, but then he speaks, his back still facing me.
“Moths are curious creatures, aren’t they?”
I say nothing.
“They emerge gloriously from the husk of their former selves. Reborn from little more than worms.” He looks over his shoulder at me. “You, Red, are no worm. And thus, no moth.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
He laughs in that infuriating way of his, low and taunting. “It means you could never be one of them.”
“Them?” I cross my arms. “So, the moth represents a group of people?”
He turns to face me again, his eyes dark. “Yes.”
“People who some might consider worms.” It’s not a question. That explains why we found the carving in the filthy shop in White’s End. “Commoners.”
He waggles his head noncommittally. “Yes … and no.”
“You’re not really holding up your end of the bargain,” I warn, irritation flaring.
“Aren’t I?”
I dig through my bag and take out a hunk of preserved meat. The Wolf stills. I can practically see his mouth watering.
“If you want this food, then you’d better talk.”
“What happened to the helpful little fox who saved my life?”
“She’s grown tired of your evasive answers,” I snarl.
The Wolf paces in his cell, thinking. He turns to look at me. “Do you trust me, Red?”
“No,” I spit out so quickly it has to be the truth.
“Then why would you come to me, your mortal enemy, for answers about a pretty little bug?”
“Truth for truth?”
He nods.
“Because I have no one else to ask.”
“Hm,” he says. “Like your questions about áine.” He returns to the bars, staring into my eyes with a ferocity that’s both terrifying and somehow thrilling.
My heart jumps in my chest. I’m not afraid of this man, the shiver running through my veins is something else entirely.
His words hiss like a snake. “The moth is the symbol of the underground. The Llwyn that hides in the shadows.”
I shake my head, confused. “Why must they hide?”
He tuts, mockingly. “Why, from you, Little Fox. And your great Fox King.”
My head is whirling. Why would the people of Llwyn need to hide from the monarchy? My father hardly pays attention to the actions of everyday people. To say he cares what a shopkeeper in White’s End thinks is to compare him to a great bear who interests himself in the affairs of an ant.
I glower at the Wolf. “I don’t believe you.”
He shrugs. “Suit yourself. But we traded a truth for a truth.” He holds out his hand, expectantly.
For a moment, I consider not giving him the food. But in the end, my guilty conscience wins. I toss the bread and meat through the bars, past his outstretched hand.
“What good are veiled answers from a Wolf in a cage?” I ask.
He stares at me through the bars.
I step closer, our faces only inches apart. He could bite me now, if he tried. “I’d be careful of trying to outwit a fox,” I warn. “The fox always wins, eventually.”
He grins. “Unless she’s devoured by a wolf first.”
The Wolf’s proximity sends a reckless thrill through me, unfamiliar and exhilarating. It’s power, I realize with a shudder. Maybe I’m more like my father than I care to admit.
I smile at him as I turn to walk back out of the kennels, taking my light with me. The first foxhounds stir from sleep around me. Their snarls echo up the stairs as I walk, thinking of moths and foxes.
And hungry Wolves that look at me like they want to taste my flesh.