Before my eyes open my ears register the sound of the crying Child, the background resonance of the Dreaming, impossible to ignore now that we are so close to the Crone’s castle.
Then my eyes do open and I see Mark—we’re in the clearing still, with the open cage.
I take a step toward Mark, furious.
Shelby …, he says, hands out in front of him to say calm down.
No, screw you, I say. My name isn’t even Shelby, it’s Angelica.
He shakes his head. Names are unimportant. You are the Maiden.
Oh don’t give me your yoga teacher philosophical bull, I say. My mother is not my mother and you couldn’t have mentioned it? You said you were helping me.
I warned you, he says. His eyes are shiny in the starlight.
Some warning! I say. Like I was supposed to understand a coyote talking in riddles!
I can’t speak directly of your world, he says.
Oh. How handy.
I sit down quite suddenly on the ground. Anger is a wild animal inside me. I think back to the elk, dying. The elk said you played tricks, I say. You didn’t even deny it. I should have listened.
So why should I trust you now? How do I even know you’re telling the truth about this Crone, about the Child? When you won’t fricking tell me anything?
He splays his hands. My tricks are only to help people.
Yeah, right, I say. That’s why the elks were so afraid of you.
I am Coyote, he says. I am a predator. That is why they fear me.
You’re more than that, I say. You are the son of the sky and the earth, you said. You are older than the world.
Yes.
So tell me what I’m supposed to do.
You’re supposed to kill the Crone. You’re supposed to rescue the Child.
Seriously? I say. Do you have any idea what has happened to me?
Yes. That is why you must do these things. Or the world will end.
Oh please, the world is not going to end if I don’t do your stupid quest.
Yes, he says sadly. It will.
I sneer at him. I’m not going any farther with you, I say. The fury is tearing at my insides now—I think of his fear of the iron. If he was so powerful, if he was so old, if he made the fricking moon and the sun, or stole them or whatever, shouldn’t he be able to help some helpless little child, even if it was a trick.
And the Child, the one I can hear crying—if he cares so much then why doesn’t he just go and save it himself, stand up to the Crone? He’s supposedly in charge of the rain or whatever so why is this place so barren, so parched? Why are the elks wasting away?
Even the thorns look wasted, dehydrated.
Suddenly I hate him, and I am dimly aware that some of this hate is not for him, that it’s for the men who plucked me out of the night outside the cabin, and threw me in a cell, who told me that my (mother) stole me as a baby
(like a changeling like a fairy child)
but I don’t care. I throw the hate at Mark, instead, Mark with his fricking infuriating fortune cookie pronouncements.
Go, I say. Leave me here.
I’m not leaving you, he says. I am here to help you in your quest.
GO, I say, not in capitals like that but in a dangerous, low, quiet tone that I can’t reproduce in type.
Mark clearly registers it though because he nods, slowly. All right, he says. If you change your mind, you know which direction to walk in.
Then he sets off, out of the clearing. He doesn’t look back—he moves away from me, and as he moves he melts downward, head and arms folding in, and then he’s a coyote running swiftly through the trees, large and strong, heading forward, farther into the Forest of Thorns, toward the castle.
Then gone.
Oh, I think.
Oh, now I’m on my own.
In the Dreaming.
Then I hear a sound—like a sighing, on the wind. I look up and there’s a huge bird circling above me, a hawk.
No, I think: an eagle.
Its wingspan is easily my body height, and it’s getting lower, gyring down toward me, I can see the white of its head feathers, the brown of its wings, the detail and tracery of its feathers. It opens its beak and emits a piercing cry, Kiiiiiiiii.
The noise of it is unbelievable, like a stabbing in my ears.
Then the eagle folds its wings, and I start to scrabble at the ground with my hands, trying to get up, trying to get my legs under me and to piston myself up into a running—
Too late.
I glance up and the eagle is nearly on me, its talons out, like chef’s knives, its eyes hard and unforgiving as stones, its sharp beak wide open, and the terror must crack the glass of the trance because just like that—