Foxheart

by Claire Legrand

  Grab them! yelled Fox.

  Quicksilver scooped up every last bone and shoved them into her pockets, clinging to the drawers with one clammy hand. Last of all, she reached for the skull—only a couple of inches long, with those wicked-looking hare’s teeth at the end.

  Master, look out!

  She turned, skull in hand, just in time to see the Rompus crash into the room, the broken mannequin dangling from his claws.

  He stared at her—first in confusion, and then, his face darkening, in rage.

  “You’re stealing from me?” he growled, black smoke puffing from his nostrils. One of his hind feet pawed the ground. He raised himself to his full height, his horns brushing against the ceiling.

  Jump, master! yelled Fox.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and thought of Fox, held her breath, and jumped—and right before she hit the hard ground, Fox darted below her, invisible, and cushioned her fall. She landed in softness—warm fur and itchy whiskers and a cold nose kissing her face.

  I’ve got you, said Fox. You’re all right.

  The Rompus gaped. “How did you do that?”

  “It was the ghost,” said Quicksilver, jumping to her feet. “He works for me!”

  As she spoke, she shifted Fox into an enormous, lion-sized spider, ghostly and gray. He lurched at the Rompus with a rattling roar, and the Rompus’s eyes rolled back into his head.

  He’s fainting! yelped Fox, as Quicksilver shifted him into a dog once more. Run!

  Quicksilver raced from the room just as the Rompus crashed to the floor. She and Fox darted back through the caves, the bones of the First Monster hot and sizzling in her pockets. The skull sent out little waves of magic that nipped at her skin like teeth.

  They reached the portrait gallery, where sunlight poured in through the mouth of the cave—and froze.

  The net holding Anastazia, Sly Boots, and the witches had nearly reached the flames.

  We forgot about them, whispered Fox, and a heavy, hot shame settled between them. How could we have forgotten about them? What if we hadn’t been in time?

  Quicksilver shoved down the awful guilt tightening her throat and ran toward the fire. Doesn’t matter now. We’re here, aren’t we?

  “Fox, can you bite through that net?” she shouted out loud.

  “I can try,” said Fox.

  Fly, instructed Quicksilver, shifting him into a golden eagle. He alighted on the net and started slicing through it with his shining beak. Meanwhile, Quicksilver ran back and forth between the fire and the Rompus’s table, dousing the flames with water and tea. When that wasn’t enough, she kicked up dirt from the cave floor.

  A despairing howl rang out through the cavern: “PIG FACE!”

  Olli and his monster dropped to the floor. Before he could say anything, Quicksilver shouted, “Go! Run! I’ll hold him off!”

  Olli didn’t question her. As Fox cut the net, the others jumped free, and Olli hurried them out of the cave, his owl monster leading the way.

  The Rompus burst into the room, flinging treasure at Quicksilver. She dodged fistfuls of coins, soaring dolls in lacy white gowns. A goblet hit her hard on the top of the head, and she swayed. Fox swooped in to cloak her.

  Hold on, master, Fox whispered, warm all around her. Don’t fade on me, or we’re both dead.

  Quicksilver gritted her teeth against a wave of dizziness, grabbed her pack from where the Rompus had tossed it beside the tea table, and ran. She wove in and out of the Rompus’s legs as he chased them through the room, grabbing at the air in search of them.

  “But you was my friend!” he cried, dripping ropes of snot and tears.

  Everyone’s safe, came Fox’s steady voice, and you’ve got the bones. Keep running. You’re almost there.

  Quicksilver did not stop running until she was out in the woods, huddling beneath a felled tree with Fox wrapped tightly around her. The Rompus’s wails of grief rang through the night.

  It’s biting me, Quicksilver informed Fox as the snowy hare skeleton squirmed and hissed in her pockets, and I think I’m about to faint.

  Then, without further warning, she did.

  .21.

  THE THIEF DAGVENDR AND HIS MANY NEARLY PERILOUS ENCOUNTERS WITH DEATH

  Quicksilver awoke to the sound of cheers.

  “You’re awake!” cried Olli, smacking a kiss onto her cheek. “She’s awake, everyone!”

  Quicksilver blinked and looked around. She was surrounded by the smiling coven. They seemed to be in the tavern of an inn. She sat on a cushioned high-backed chair that had been draped with an only slightly stained tablecloth, and on her head, she wore a crown made out of butcher paper. Anastazia and Sly Boots sat at a table to the side. Anastazia looked amused; Sly Boots looked incensed.

  Quicksilver blushed and stifled an assortment of garbled words.

  “Quix, we don’t know how to thank you,” gushed Lukaas, his bright green lizard monster curled happily about his neck. “You saved us!”

  “I . . . I did?”

  “So modest, you are. Without you and Fox outwitting that beast, we’d never have escaped!” Lukaas raised his arms and conducted Freja and Olli in an enthusiastic, if more than slightly out of tune, rendition of “The Jolly Old Queen of Greenhart,” substituting Quicksilver’s name for Queen Lemvala’s.

  Quicksilver squeezed her way through the singing, dancing witches to Anastazia. By the time she reached her, Quicksilver’s cheeks were wet from sloshed drinks and sloppy kisses. Irritably, she wiped her face on Anastazia’s robe.

  “Where are we?”

  “Farrowtown,” said Anastazia. “Olli’s monster, Pulka, found you and Fox, and we brought you here straightaway. Six of the others left after escaping the cave, which is right smart of them, if you ask me. Seven stayed—including Lukaas and Freja. I’m not entirely convinced Olli hasn’t bewitched them into following him around like puppies. No offense, Fox. The inn’s called the Laughing Farmer.” Anastazia toyed with the speckled meat on her plate. “Their supper menu leaves something to be desired.”

  Quicksilver’s head felt heavy. She didn’t even protest when Sly Boots started fussing over her many cuts and bruises, treating them with an ointment he’d scraped together somewhere. The paper crown kept sliding down to her nose, and she knocked it off in a fit of frustration, abruptly ending Sly Boots’s nursing.

  “Fox and I found one of the skeletons,” she said.

  “The snowy hare,” mumbled Fox as a mouse, tucked beneath Quicksilver’s collar. “At least, we think it’s one of them.”

  Anastazia’s face lit up. “All of it? Please tell me you have the whole skeleton.”

  “Every last bone.” Quicksilver made a nest out of her paper crown and gently settled a snoring Fox onto it. Then she fished the hare skull out of her pockets. When Anastazia touched it, a set of ghostly white teeth chomped down on her fingers. She yanked her hand away with a hiss. The teeth disappeared, cackling to themselves.

  “That’s one of them, all right,” grumbled Anastazia, though she couldn’t hide her relieved smile. “Good work, Quicksilver.”

  “It really doesn’t like you,” Quicksilver observed.

  “We’re both nasty pieces of work.”

  “Why don’t we just hide the bones in different places while we look for the other skeletons?” Fox mumbled from his nest. “They’d be much harder to find that way, much safer than keeping them all in one bag.”

  “I only wish we could do such a thing,” said Anastazia. “But do you remember how I told you that the First Ones and their monsters were all born of the same pool of magic, the same ancient star? The bones of each skeleton want to be together. You can separate a skeleton for a time, but its bones will always find their way back to one another.” She scowled at the skull in Quicksilver’s hand. “The little fiends. Put it away before it makes any trouble.”

  Quicksilver rearranged the contents of her pack, filling one of its pouches with all their food and coin, and carefully transferring t
he snowy hare skeleton into the other pouch. As she handled the bones, she felt as though something very small and very angry was biting her. By the time she tied the pouches shut, her fingers were red and throbbing.

  “What if the bones disappear while I’m carrying them?” asked Quicksilver, dunking her fingers into a cup of water.

  “Hey, that’s my cup!” said Sly Boots.

  Anastazia nodded grimly. “They could disappear—or maybe you’ll get lucky. Remember, those two I lost just before I found you, I’d had in my possession for ten years. Others I only managed to hold on to for a matter of days. It’s all a matter of luck. The First Monsters were vain creatures, and so are their remains. All you can do to try to keep these skeletons near is pamper them. I’ve found them to be particularly fond of singing.”

  “I hate singing.”

  “I’ll sing!” said Sly Boots. “I’m good at it. My mother always said so. There’s this one song about the thief Dagvendr. My father used to sing it to me when I was little, and it goes like this.” Sly Boots cleared his throat. “Oh, the wise old thiever Dagvendr, he had a wicked plan, he—”

  “Not just now, Boots,” groaned Quicksilver, as Olli, Freja, and Lukaas launched into the twelfth verse of “Queen Greenhart.” “I’ve had quite enough singing for one day.”

  Sly Boots flung himself out of his creaky chair, scowling. “Fine. Just see if I sing for you next time you ask me.”

  “There is absolutely no danger of that happening.”

  Sly Boots’s scowl deepened, and he stomped off to another table to sulk.

  Anastazia snatched a plate of hot buttered rolls from the serving boy and tossed one to Quicksilver. “Something wrong?”

  Quicksilver tore off a chunk of bread with her teeth. “I almost didn’t save them,” she mumbled at last. “Or you and Sly Boots, either.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to get the bones. I was focusing on that, and I . . .” She paused. “I forgot about all of you, stuck in that net.”

  Anastazia nodded. “You were thinking like a witch. Those bones are more important than any of us. Well done.”

  “But they think I’m a hero!” she said through a mouthful of bread. “I’m not the heroic type. I would’ve let them get roasted, if I’d had to.”

  If I had left them, maybe Fox and I could have gone off on our own, sold this stupid skeleton for a lifetime’s worth of coin. Quicksilver hunkered down in her seat, miserable and angry—at herself, or maybe at the world. She couldn’t decide.

  “They don’t need to know that,” said Anastazia, shrugging. “Could have, would have. That’s none of their business.”

  “But . . .” Quicksilver swallowed and stared hard at the floor. “I would have left you. I mean . . . myself. I don’t know what I mean.”

  “And you should have, if it had come down to that,” said Anastazia briskly. “My life doesn’t matter much, these days. I’ve done my part, and now this is your fight. I’m only your shadow now, and I’ll help you for as long as I can manage it.”

  My fight, Quicksilver thought. But what if I don’t want it? What if I just want to be a thief?

  Anastazia squeezed Quicksilver’s hand and went upstairs to bed, and Quicksilver was left alone with her thoughts, Fox the mouse sleeping on the table, and Sly Boots bumbling through a conversation with a pretty serving girl in blue braids. Olli’s coven sang Quicksilver’s praises long into the night, until the innkeeper came down in her robe and nightcap and told them they’d better make the singing stop, or she’d deny them hotcakes in the morning.

  .22.

  A TINY BIT HEARTLESS

  Though she was rash, and impatient, and a tiny bit heartless, Quicksilver was not one to forget things, nor one to break promises (unless, of course, a promise was made in the course of thievery), and so she did not forget the promise she had made to Sly Boots.

  After everyone had gone to sleep that night in Farrowtown, Quicksilver crept to Sly Boots’s bed, Fox at her heels in dog form. Quicksilver placed her hand over Sly Boots’s mouth and shook him.

  “It’s just me,” she hissed. “Get your shoes on. We’re going out.”

  “Out?” Sly Boots hopped around in his socks, pulling on his boots. “Where?”

  “I told you we would steal medicine for your parents, and I meant it.”

  Quicksilver led Sly Boots down the twisting stairs. The inn’s front door creaked awfully, but when Quicksilver thought to Fox, Whisper us, Fox transformed himself into a wispy cloud that glowed faintly and bore the snout of a dog. In this form, Fox wrapped himself around the door and muffled the noise.

  Outside, the air was still and warm. They wandered the streets of Farrowtown, keeping to the shadows while Quicksilver searched for a promising target.

  “I thought you’d forgotten about that,” said Sly Boots, watching his feet. “About my parents, I mean.”

  “I don’t forget things,” Quicksilver replied.

  “But Olli, and the coven . . . I don’t know, I thought maybe you cared more about them than anything else back home. We could have just left them to the Rompus, but you went after them. You risked your life for them in that cave.”

  Quicksilver bit down on the truth—that she had nearly been too late to save any of them, including Sly Boots—and then said calmly, “I’m a thief, not a murderer.”

  “But . . . you left my parents to come to the past, and dragged me along with you.”

  “I had to make a fast decision. Coming back to the past with Anastazia saved our lives.”

  Sly Boots considered her carefully. “So you don’t fancy Olli?”

  “Fancy? Great stars, Boots. What does that have to do with anything? I’ve got no time for fancying people. I’ve got magic to learn and skeletons to find. Now are you going to help me rob this place, or aren’t you?”

  Sly Boots looked up at the narrow, crooked house in front of which Quicksilver had stopped. A wooden sign hanging above the stoop read THE CURIOSITY SHOP: APOTHECARY, ANCIENT RELICS, AND ANTIQUE APPRAISAL.

  “The place looks ready to fall over,” he said.

  “Well, then, we’d better move quickly, hadn’t we?” Fox, Quicksilver thought to Fox, who sat patiently beside her in dog form, find us a way in.

  I thought you’d never ask. Fox transformed into his yellow mouse self. He squeezed under the front door, and then Quicksilver felt him climb up to the latch and unlock it. Quicksilver cracked open the door to slip inside, and then suddenly she and Sly Boots were wrapped in the warm, furry cloak of invisible Fox, Quicksilver’s nose mashed against Sly Boots’s chest.

  “Fox,” she said through gritted teeth, “if you don’t mind.”

  “My apologies, master,” murmured Fox, adjusting his cloak so that Quicksilver could wiggle loose. She and Sly Boots crept through the shop’s candlelit foyer, which was crowded with bulging crates and marble statues and dark tables weighed down by tall stacks of books.

  “Remember,” whispered Quicksilver, “I’m the witch here. You’re only the—”

  “Only?”

  “Fine. You’re the monster. But when you do things without asking me first—”

  “Chaos ensues, the order of magic is upset, and you yell at me.” Fox huffed, annoyed. “It’s just I knew you were about to ask me to cloak you and Sly Boots, so I did it. It’s called taking initiative, master. What if I’d waited for your instruction back in the Rompus’s cave? We’d have been stomped flat.”

  “Life-and-death situations are one thing,” said Quicksilver, “but when it comes to normal life situations, I’ll thank you to wait until I say so—ow!”

  Quicksilver rubbed her arm. The skeleton of the snowy hare, though tucked away in her pack, had apparently decided to announce its presence. A set of grinning, ghostly rabbit teeth hovered by Quicksilver’s elbow and then faded away.

  “What was that for, you horrible thing?” demanded Quicksilver.

  “I don’t think it likes that you two were fighting,” said S
ly Boots.

  “Of all the stupid things you’ve ever said, Sly Boots, that might be the most—”

  The ghostly set of teeth reappeared and chomped down on Quicksilver’s thumb.

  Be nice to it, Fox thought to her. Isn’t that what Anastazia said? It likes to be cared for.

  Quicksilver forced a sweet smile and crooned to her pack, “What a nice skeleton you are. So polite and kindly. Of course we should not have been fighting. Of course we are all friends here, and love one another.”

  A happy sigh drifted from the pouch holding the skeleton.

  “I think it’s working,” Sly Boots whispered.

  Quicksilver showed him her thumb, from which the set of teeth still dangled. “Is it, now?”

  “Didn’t Anastazia say you should sing to it?”

  Quicksilver closed her eyes in an attempt to find patience.

  “Oh, yes,” added Fox in a suspiciously cheerful tone. “I do believe Anastazia said that exact thing.”

  “Who’s there?” called a voice. Still concealed within Fox’s cloak, Quicksilver and Sly Boots turned to see a tiny, spectacled woman with short purple hair peeking down the stairs just ahead of them.

  Sly Boots nudged Quicksilver. “We never shut the door!”

  It was true—the front door stood ajar behind them. Quicksilver crept back toward it, pulling Sly Boots with her, and quietly kicked the door closed. Then they stood in silence while Fox’s cloak swirled slowly around them.

  The woman squinted about the hallway and inspected the door’s handle. Quicksilver, Fox, and Sly Boots flattened themselves against the wall between a suit of armor and a tall blue cactus crowned with white flowers.

  Finally the woman shook her head and retreated back up the stairs. “The children’s books are at it again,” she muttered to herself.

  “Well?” Sly Boots asked, once she was gone. “Shall I sing to it, or do you prefer walking around with skeleton teeth hanging off your thumb?”

  And so, as Fox ushered them invisibly through the house—which was undoubtedly spelled in some way, for it was much larger on the inside than it appeared to be from the outside—Sly Boots sang all twenty-two stanzas of “The Thief Dagvendr and His Many Nearly Perilous Encounters with Death.” Soon Quicksilver’s pack was as quiet and warm as a basket of baby bunnies.