Evie pulled her cloak tight around her as she led Cece into the trees. The murmur of voices from town bled into quiet, replaced by the rustle of night creatures moving about and cricket song. This wasn’t the Old Forest; it was just the normal trees, moss, and occasional-bear forest. The dividing line where the Fel forest started was very well marked and much farther on.
Evie gave Cecily’s hand a tug. “Am I going to have to drag you the whole way?” she asked. “What is there to be scared of?”
“Robbers,” Cecily muttered. “Bears, mountain lions, amberticks…”
“Amberticks?” Evie fixed Cecily with her best piratey stare.
Cecily wilted a little and stopped pulling so hard when Evie started walking again. “How are we going to find one, anyway? Fel are supposed to be tricky. They’re not going to come out just because we ask.”
“I brought bait.” Evie pulled open her cloak pocket, revealing the slightly smushed raspberry tart inside. “Not a creature alive could resist, and you know it.”
Cecily nodded unwillingly. She did know it.
They walked on and hadn’t even reached their tree fort when an icy cold washed over Evie, as if she’d walked through a waterfall. The trees suddenly looked larger, darker, and painfully twisted about one another, without even a hint of starlight making it through the gaps between their leaves.
“Wha … what was that?” Cecily whimpered. “We shouldn’t be out here, Evie. Let’s go back.”
A delightful prickle ran down Evie’s neck as she looked out into the darkness. The trees’ ghostly shapes leered at her like monsters newly risen from sleep. The very air smelled spicy and sweet, as if adventure were cooking nearby in a Fel’s dinner pot. Evie could almost feel dark crow eyes watching them. “We’ve been planning this for ages, Cece. I’m going to ask for a pirate ship and hat, and then the Fel will ask for something in return—”
“—or come at us with forks and knives. And pepper.”
“I don’t like pepper.”
“It won’t ask if you like it or not.”
“Mum’s going to send you to France if you get any more boring, Cece.” That was what Mum always said—French loaves were the most boring, so they must have come from a horribly boring place. Whenever Mum got mad, she’d curse about France rather than Fel or saints because she thought that was blasphemous. Evie didn’t mind saints or Fel, but she did like the idea of a boring country where she could send off all the boringness so it wouldn’t bother her anymore.
Not Cece, though. Never Cece.
Linking her arm through Cecily’s, Evie walked into the old trees, heart beating against her ribs like a flag in high wind. When they came to a clearing, stars peering down through the hole in the trees, Evie pulled out the tart. She scampered to the very center of the clearing and placed it on a rock. Skipping back, she pulled Cece behind a tree. “It’s perfect,” she whispered. “All we have to do is wait.”
Cece whimpered, a hand going to her mouth as the forest around them seemed to hush, the background chorus of crickets and frogs suddenly all taking a breath at the same time. The hairs on the back of Evie’s neck stood on end.
She grabbed Cecily’s hand, staring at the little lump of darkness that was the raspberry tart, waiting for the nighttime orchestra to start back up. It didn’t. The clearing before them seemed to hum with all the silence.
And then, something did hum.
Cecily’s grip on Evie’s hand tightened. The hum seemed to grow and then shrink, the sound unstable like a group of adules singing out over the river as they floated by on their boats. Cecily’s shoulders hunched, her whisper coming out in a rasp. “I can feel it to my bones. Is it bees?”
“I think it’s singing.” Evie pulled Cecily farther behind their tree. A dark shape detached from the craggy tree limbs on the opposite side of the clearing, the jagged feathers of its wings silhouetted against the moon-purpled sky.
The shape didn’t come toward them exactly. It circled the clearing once, then twice. And then it truly began to sing.
“Bonded, bolted, barred, and branded
by the Robber Lord demanded.
Setting right what’s long forgotten
lest our bones grow thin and rotten.
But when the pact we’ve made is broken
Silence ends and truth be spoken—”
The black outline streaked across the sky, circling one last time before diving toward the raspberry tart. For a moment, the humming dulled, the strange singsong fading from Evie’s ears. The sound of a beak clicking and raspberries being swallowed echoed through the silent clearing.
Was that … a Fel? A crow creature, full to the beak with magic less than a fifteen-minute walk outside of Paline? Evie looked around, hand fisted in her apron pocket. How to catch the thing?
“Beautiful, isn’t he?”
Evie jerked back from the tree, looking for the man who belonged to the rumpled-sounding voice. The night seemed blacker just behind them, the darkest patch suddenly flaring in the center as the owner of the words lit a match. He didn’t look at her, as if he’d been speaking to himself, not expecting her to hear it at all.
She gulped. She hadn’t missed that bit in the creature’s song about a Robber Lord.
Everyone knew about the robbers in the forest. And that it wasn’t just apricots they took off carriages. They stole everything, including the people inside.
The crow’s song started up again, swirling around the clearing faster and faster, becoming so frantic Evie could no longer understand the words, the sound a buzzing tangle that vibrated up through her toes and tore at her ears from the insides.
The man frowned toward the oversized bird as the notes flared red hot. He put the match to the end of a cigar hanging from his mouth. “What’s got you so excited?”
A cigar. And a bristlebrush for a face. It was the same man Evie had seen buying tarts at the market square.
“Uh, well, nice to meet you … forest man.” Cecily edged to the side, filing her voice down to a whisper. “Come on, Evie. Let’s get out of here.”
“You can see me?” The man turned around to look at them properly, then swiveled back toward the circling Fel. “What gives?” he called.
Evie backed away, her footsteps breaking twigs as she tried to slip into the trees with Cece on her arm. The man didn’t look like a robber any more than her own pop. If he had, she’d have called the guard quick enough back at the festival—Max had been right there with his flintlock, even if he probably would have had to use it as a bludgeon instead of firing it. She slowed a step to look back at the man with the cigar, his eyes on the flying shape above the clearing. He seemed to be muttering something about deals and bloody this and bloody that, including some very interesting words Evie had never heard before.
Cecily gave Evie’s arm a good tug to get her moving more quickly, but the unexpected pull made Evie lurch to the side. Her toes caught against a tangle of low branches and she stumbled, falling to her knees.
The man’s attention snapped back down to the girls. He smiled, teeth clamped around the awful cigar. “Where do you think you’re off to?”
“Evie!” Cecily grappled with Evie’s flailing arms, trying to pull her out of the bush.
“Run! Just run, Cecily.” Evie rolled away from the bush, wrenched herself up from the ground, and dashed after her friend, the auburn glint of Cecily’s hair quickly lost in the darkness ahead. Evie hadn’t gone two more steps before another man with spiky hair and a leer slipped out of the trees in front of her, blocking her way. She skidded to a stop, changing direction.
But now there were more of them behind her, to the side of her, up in the trees, the one with bright red hair she’d seen at the market in Paline, the one with a broken nose and fingernails she’d seen in the bakery. They were all men she’d met before, and now they were out here in the Fel forest as if they’d never eaten cranberry cake while having a laugh with Pop.
They were robbers.
The man with the cigar stepped into the circle they’d made around Evie. “Quick little lass, your friend. She’ll never get back to Paline.”
Evie shoved a hand into her pocket, wishing she’d thought to bring one of Pop’s prize knives, but there was nothing in her pocket but the Fel mask.
The air around her went still again, as it had just before the crow had appeared. Evie’s ears seemed to crawl all over on the insides as if she had ants for brains and she couldn’t hear through their twisting bodies. Everything began to vibrate with Fel song, but the words had changed to raspberry tart raspberry tart raspberry tart. The robbers seemed to hear it too, each of them clapping hands over their ears, one falling to his knees, crying, “Where’s my raspberry tart?”
The distraction, especially of a fully grown man sobbing for a raspberry tart, was why none of them, not even Evie, noticed the guardsman on his horse until he’d charged straight into their midst.