“ ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the witch said again, and then she waved a birch branch at him and poor Cuthbert turned to stone.
“All of the sudden Cuthbert became very heavy—so heavy that he began to sink into the lake. He sank and sank and didn’t stop sinking until he was covered in water all the way up to his neck. His animal friends saw what was happening, and though they felt terrible about it, they decided they could do nothing to help him.
“ ‘I know you can’t save me,’ Cuthbert shouted up to his friends, ‘but at least come and talk to me! I’m stuck down here, and so very lonely!’
“ ‘But if we come down there the hunters will shoot us!’ they called back.
“Cuthbert knew they were right, but still he pleaded with them.
“ ‘Talk to me!’ he cried. ‘Please come and talk to me!’
“The animals tried singing and shouting to poor Cuthbert from the safety of their mountaintop, but they were too distant and their voices too small, so that even to Cuthbert and his giant ears they sounded quieter than the whisper of leaves in the wind.
“ ‘Talk to me!’ he begged. ‘Come and talk to me!’
“But they never did. And he was still crying when his throat turned to stone like the rest of him. The end.”
Bronwyn closed the book.
Claire looked appalled. “That’s it?”
Enoch began to laugh.
“That’s it,” Bronwyn said.
“That’s a terrible story,” said Claire. “Tell another one!”
“A story’s a story,” said Emma, “and now it’s time for bed.”
Claire pouted, but she had stopped crying, so the tale had served its purpose.
“Tomorrow’s not likely to be any easier than today was,” said Millard. “We’ll need what rest we can get.”
We gathered cuts of springy moss to use as pillows, Emma drying the rain from them with her hands before we tucked them under our heads. Lacking blankets, we nestled together for warmth: Bronwyn cuddling the small ones; Fiona entangled with Hugh, whose bees came and went from his open mouth as he snored, keeping watch over their sleeping master; Horace and Enoch shivering with their backs to one another, too proud to snuggle; myself with Emma. I lay on my back and she in the crook of my arm, head on my chest, her face so invitingly close to mine that I could kiss her forehead anytime I liked—and I wouldn’t have stopped except that I was as tired as a dead man and she was as warm as an electric blanket and pretty soon I was asleep and dreaming pleasant, forgettable nothings.
I never remember nice dreams; only the bad ones stick.
It was a miracle that I could sleep at all, given the circumstances. Even here—running for our lives, sleeping exposed, facing death—even here, in her arms, I was able to find some measure of peace.
Watching over us all, her black eyes shining in the dark, was Miss Peregrine. Though damaged and diminished, she was still our protector.
The night turned raw, and Claire began to shake and cough. Bronwyn nudged Emma awake and said, “Miss Bloom, the little one needs you; I’m afraid she’s taking ill,” and with a whispered apology Emma slipped out of my arms to go and attend to Claire. I felt a twinge of jealousy, then guilt for being jealous of a sick friend. So I lay alone feeling irrationally forsaken and stared into the dark, more exhausted than I had ever been and yet unable now to sleep, listening to the others shift and moan in the grip of nightmares that could not have equalled the one we would likely wake to. And eventually the dark peeled back layer by layer, and with imperceptible gradations the sky feathered to a delicate pale blue.
*
At dawn we crawled from our shelter. I picked moss out of my hair and tried in vain to brush the mud from my pants, but succeeded only in smearing it, making me look like some bog creature vomited from the earth. I was hungry in a way I’d never experienced, my belly gnawing at itself from the inside, and I ached just about everywhere it was possible to ache, from rowing and running and sleeping on the ground. Still, a few mercies prevailed: overnight the rain had let up, the day was warming by degrees, and we seemed to have evaded the wights and their dogs, at least for the time being; either they’d stopped barking or were too far away to be heard.
In doing so we’d gotten ourselves hopelessly lost. The forest was no easier to navigate by day than it had been in the dark. Green-boughed firs stretched away in endless, disordered rows, each direction a mirror of the others. The ground here was a carpet of fallen leaves that hid any tracks we might’ve made the night before. We’d woken in the heart of a green labyrinth without a map or compass, and Miss Peregrine’s broken wing meant she couldn’t fly above the treeline to guide us. Enoch suggested we raise Olive above the trees, like we had in the fog, but we didn’t have any rope to hold her, and if she slipped and fell into the sky, we’d never get her back again.