“Four gods, Mia.” He plucked the knife out of her hand. “At least one of us should take an interest in keeping us alive.”
In the sun’s waning light, Quin was a flurry of activity. After days of creeping along at a glacial pace, he came alive: he found a piece of old rope in the satchel and cut off a swatch, stringing the hare up by its hind legs. With his sheath knife he cut around each ankle, slitting up the inside of first the left leg, then the right. With a flourish, he made a long cut from the vent up the abdomen. Mia watched him carefully peel back the skin.
“I didn’t take you for a butcher,” she said.
“Perhaps you could get a fire started? Make yourself useful?”
How the tables had turned. She would have found it amusing, if a sense of impending doom wasn’t playing her spinal column like a harp.
“I’ll make us a soup hole,” Quin murmured to himself. “Use the bones to get some nice broth simmering. Flavor it with wild leeks and a handful of chokecherries.”
She walked a few paces to scavenge for wood and stopped dead in her tracks.
“Firewood,” she said.
“Yes, well, I can’t do everything, can I? You’ll have to—”
“No, I mean, here’s a stack of firewood.”
Quin lowered his knife.
A bundle of logs sat at the edge of the clearing. They weren’t ax-hewn, exactly—they were mostly tree branches, swyn and spruce—but the timber was bone dry, clearly gathered and stacked by a creature with more agency than an owl or wolf.
Quin raked a hand through his curls. “Curious. Maybe someone lives in the forest? I still think this is a brilliant stroke of luck.”
But he no longer sounded quite so certain.
They worked in silence, Mia tense and on edge, Quin humming to himself, perhaps to cover the fact that he, too, was tense and on edge. But he didn’t seem it. She marveled at his abilities with a knife. He extracted the hare’s innards, trembly loops of pink and red, palming them as casually as if they were hair ribbons. He used his blade to free the hide from the body in the places where it became stuck, without puncturing any organs. He pulled out all manner of small fleshy parts—the liver, kidneys, and heart—and laid them out neatly on a rock.
“You’re alarmingly good at that.”
“I told you. I spent scads of time in the kitchens.”
“The cooks let the little prince eviscerate rabbits for supper?”
“The cooks were honored I took an interest in their work. My sister was always out on the hunt—she never set foot in the kitchens, but they were my favorite part of the castle.”
Thanks to the dryness of the mysterious wood, Mia had a fire crackling in no time. She followed Quin’s instructions and stacked three large stones over the flames, then used a stick to scoop a hole in the ground, lining it with fresh hide and packing it with melted snow. Once the stones were sizzling hot, she added them to the packed snow and watched it melt into broth.
“Heat a few more stones,” said the prince. “The broth has to be boiling hot to cook the meat.”
She nodded and set to work. Once the broth was heated to Quin’s satisfaction, he dropped in hunks of raw flesh and a smattering of small bones. He slit one large bone open, slurping out the liquid.
“Four hells, this is good.” He held it out to her. “Marrow. It’s rich in minerals. Very nourishing.”
She sucked out the rest of the marrow and licked her lips.
Mia was struck by the changes in the prince. In one short week, he’d gone from a sniveling brat to a competent woodsman, someone who could deftly carve up a hare for supper. She wouldn’t have thought watching a boy butcher meat would be attractive, but seeing Quin’s hands flick over the viscera, separating fat from bone, was, in a word, appealing.
Despite the cold, Quin was perspiring; he kept brushing the curls off his forehead with the back of his hand. The firelight bathed him in a ruddy orange glow. A flame of heat curled through Mia’s belly.
She sensed a quiet thumping in her chest, a feeling of all not being as it should be. Did someone leave the firewood for them? Had they arranged the hare so she and Quin would find it?
Her gut feeling told her something was wrong. But since when had she trusted her gut feelings? Mia wasn’t the sort of person to make decisions based on what she felt; she based them on logic and hard evidence.
They were going to be fine. The meal would give them the fuel they needed to make it to their destination—an odd thing to say, perhaps, considering she didn’t know where their destination was. The path to safe haven will reveal itself to she who seeks it.
There wasn’t much page left for the map to spill onto. They had to be nearing the end.
They devoured the stew, slurping hot broth out of hollow stones. The meat was rich and mouthwatering; Mia didn’t think she’d ever had such good stew. When she said as much to Quin, he grinned.
“I can make the leftover meat last, too. I’ll smoke it, maybe dry a few strips in the sun tomorrow morning. Better for traveling that way. Excellent source of protein.”
The soup was warming her, dissolving the knot of tension between her shoulders. She was being paranoid. She had no good reason to be uneasy; beavers and other animals gathered driftwood, and a dead hare was no cause for alarm.
“I’m sorry I’ve been disagreeable,” Quin said, surprising her. “I know I can be odious when hungry, and I’ve been hungry for days.”
He reached out and touched her wrist. His fingers weren’t cold, not even a little.
“More marrow?”
She nodded. He let his fingertips linger on her skin a moment, and she felt her pulse trill to meet them before he retracted his hand.
Her heart was throbbing somewhere in her glottal region. She cast a sideways glance at Quin, but he was staring hard into the hare carcass. Either he enjoyed looking at intestines or he was avoiding her eyes.
Mia inhaled deeply to steady her breathing. The sour pinch of eggs filled her nostrils. She froze. Had someone lit a sulfyr stick?
Quin started to say something, then stopped.
“Is it just me, or do you smell—”
“Sulfyr.” She was on her feet, stepping forward, but she lost the scent. When she moved in the other direction, the smell grew stronger. The unease she’d felt earlier was back, a whole orchestra pounding on her vertebrae.
He started moving toward the odor.
“Quin? I don’t think we ought to—”
But he was already pushing out of the glade, his energy replenished from the stew. She had no choice but to follow. He was fleet, graceful on uneven terrain, while she felt dizzy and not at all sure-footed. The firelight quickly faded, and she found herself stumbling over swyn trunks. Her stomach had shrunk on their meager sylvan diet; it sloshed with undigested meat.
Quin was a ways ahead when he shouted, “Mia! Mia!”
Her blood congealed. She couldn’t read the emotion in his voice. Surprise? Terror?
She ran faster to close the gap between them. Seconds later she charged full tilt into a small clearing—and nearly knocked Quin into the hot spring bubbling at his feet.
“Look what I found.”
Before Mia could respond, he was peeling off his jacket and the shirt beneath it. She wondered if she should look away as he removed his trousers, but he’d discarded them before she had time to think. Her eyes tripped over his smooth golden body as he leapt into the water.
Her viscera were liquefying inside her body, bones dissolving into bonemeal. It was a familiar feeling, and dangerously warm.
Chapter 25
Undergarments
“YOU’RE COMING IN, AREN’T you?”
Quin patted the water beside him. Steam coiled off the surface. The spring was phosphorescent, spirals of sulfyric scurf mingling with starlight so green it shimmered.
“Come on, Mia. It’s insensible not to warm yourself.”
Mia wanted nothing more. The pool was perfect, a natural tub of hot water carved out of the mountainside, an indicator of subterranean volqanic activity. She would have happily jumped in, if not for one little problem.