.52.

A FUZZY HALF CREATURE

Later that night, Quicksilver lay awake in her bed, unable to sleep. She listened to Sly Boots snoring in the chair beside her, and his house creaking and groaning.

She could not sleep because she kept thinking of too many things—the cages where the girls had been kept at the Black Castle. Whether or not she wanted to visit the convent. How long it would take for the witches who had survived the hunt to come out of hiding and rebuild. How the people of the Star Lands would learn to trust and live alongside witches again, and how long that would take, and if there would be violence in the meantime. They had been taught to hate magic and witches for so long. What would they think of it all now?

What would this world be, without a Wolf King?

Quicksilver turned over, away from Sly Boots, and stared out the window. The open shutters let in a soft, warm breeze.

For a time, when they had been in the Star Lands of long ago, Quicksilver had felt like she was becoming the person she was supposed to be, that all the unhappy years at the convent had simply been a hardship to endure so she could be rewarded with magic and witchiness. But with Fox’s death, everything had been ripped away from her. She was now neither witch, nor girl, but something fuzzy between the two. How was she to live in this strange new world—a fuzzy half creature with a Fox-sized hole in her heart?

Sly Boots had said she was herself, Quicksilver Foxheart, and that was all that mattered. But she wasn’t sure he was right.

She crept out of bed and retrieved the crutches Sly Boots had fashioned for her. Tottering down the stairs seemed ill-advised, but if she stayed in bed any longer, she would go mad from thinking too much.

Downstairs, snoring witches slept on the floor in the foyer, using rolled-up cloaks for pillows: Lars and Otto, Tommi and Karin, Irma and Veera, and old Matias, who had tended Sly Boots’s parents when the coven went north. Quicksilver tried not to look at their bandages and bruises, nor think about how awful it must have been for them to fight the wolves and the First Ones while so many of their friends died around them.

A door in the wall beneath the staircase creaked open, revealing a tiny room warm with candlelight.

A vaguely familiar voice whispered from inside. “Who’s there?”

Curious, Quicksilver hobbled over and peeked in.

The Wolf King sat on a pallet of blankets, his arms, his chest, and half of his face bandaged. His smile was cautious; either he was in pain or he was frightened of her.

Quicksilver hoped for both.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s you. Hello.”

“You survived,” said Quicksilver flatly.

“Mostly. Lars told me I’ll have a lot of scars.”

“Good.”

The Wolf King lowered his eyes. “I understand why you feel that way. I do too. It feels like I’ve been living in a nightmare for hundreds of years, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t wake up from it.”

Quicksilver could not match up what she knew the Wolf King to be—and what he had done—with the boy now in front of her. Without his monsters, without the First Ones, he seemed small and unimpressive. She stood there, shifting her weight on the crutches, unsure how to deal with him.

“If you want to yell at me,” said the Wolf King quietly, “I suggest you wait until morning. We shouldn’t wake the others.”

Quicksilver’s eyes narrowed. “Interesting that you should care about them now.”

The boy was quiet for a long time, while Quicksilver glared at him, trying to sear her grief and anger into his skin using only her eyes.

“I won’t say I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I mean, I am, but no one wants to hear me say that. It’s not enough, after everything that’s happened.”

Quicksilver gripped her crutches hard. She knew she should pity him, and she did, but if he wanted to be soothed and fussed over, he was talking to the wrong girl.

He gave a soft laugh. “You know, it’s funny. All the horrible things I’ve done, all the pain I’ve caused—and received,” he added, wincing as he tried to stretch out his leg. “And all I can think about is how I miss them. The wolves, I mean. I suppose it’s what I deserve, of course, and they did terrible things while they were bonded to me, but . . . they were still my monsters, even if the worst part of them belonged to the First Ones, too. And now, without them, I feel . . .” He paused, frowning. “I don’t know why I’m talking to you, of all people, like this. I’m sorry.”

“You feel like part of you is missing,” Quicksilver said, moving closer. “Like part of you—the biggest part—has been cut out.”

The Wolf King’s face brightened. “Yes, that’s exactly it!”

“Like you’re not a witch anymore, but you’re not a human either.”

“Like you’re somewhere in between.”

Quicksilver felt him watching her and stared stubbornly at the floor. She wished she had not said anything, but she knew no one else who had once had a monster, and now did not. Despite herself, she itched to talk to him about it—him, the Wolf King!

She scowled, toeing the floor with her unbandaged foot. “So what will happen to you now? I hope it’s something along the lines of throwing you into a dark and lonely prison as punishment for your crimes.”

“I will be tried by the Council of Lords,” the Wolf King said quietly. “But Lars and his coven said they would vouch for me, explain what happened. I have family left, he said. Some Tarkalias, up in Valteya. One of them’s Lady Lovisa. She’s trying to change the name Council of Lords to Council of Thrones. You know, because there are women ruling now, too. She sounds nice, don’t you think? Distantly related, of course.” The Wolf King laughed, a soft, sad sound. “I thought I had killed all my family, long ago, but apparently I missed a few.”

Quicksilver looked up at that, and immediately regretted it, for the Wolf King seemed so miserable and lost, sitting there covered in bandages, that she found herself pitying him. She remembered one of the memories she had stolen from him—the lonely witch boy, unlucky enough to be born without much magic in him, chasing after a deer and longing for a monster of his own.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we should start again.” She tried to extend her hand without falling over and realized it would be easier to simply extend the crutch. So she did, and said, “I’m Quicksilver. I’m a thief and a witch, but don’t ask me to make any spells for you. I can’t do that anymore.”

The Wolf King’s watery smile grew larger. “And I’m Ari Tarkalia,” he said. “I used to be an evil king, but now I’m just a boy. And don’t ask me to make spells for you, because I’ve got no magic in me, and . . . I’m all right with that.”

They slapped hands, palm to crutch.

“Don’t think this means I like you,” Quicksilver warned him. “You’ve a long way to go there, Ari. I hope you know that.”

He nodded, taking a deep breath. “I know. But I’m ready for it. Anything’s better than where I’ve been.”

And Quicksilver saw then, in the serious set of his face, the king who should have been: Ari Tarkalia, son of a powerful witch family. Not much magic of his own, the poor boy—but perhaps, Quicksilver thought, magic wasn’t everything.

She sat beside him until the sun rose—not for the conversation, she told herself, nor for the comfort of being near another half creature like herself, but because someone had to keep an eye on him, and it might as well be her.