Foxbrush made a pathetic attempt to wrest his cousin’s grip from his shoulder. Lionheart merely pressed him more firmly into the tree. Foxbrush snarled, “You’ve had plenty of opportunity, Leo! You’ve had every chance in the world to play the hero, and it’s not as though you’ve done a rip-roaring job of it!”
Lionheart, by some superhuman effort, managed to not punch his cousin in the nose. “Rip-roaring or otherwise, I won’t accomplish anything with you along.”
“I’m not asking you to take me along,” Foxbrush replied, giving up the fight against Lionheart’s grip and focusing his attention instead on making the most obnoxiously superior face possible. “I’ve come on my own, and I intend to continue on my own. Daylily can’t have gone far, and I’ll find her, and I’ll tell her what I want her to hear. And dragons eat the lot of you!”
“You?” Lionheart nearly laughed. “You are going to find Daylily? Here? In the Wilderlands?”
“You think I’m not man enough?” Foxbrush cried. “You think you can intimidate me? You think I’m scared of you?”
Shaking his head, Lionheart released his cousin and took a step back. “You’ll find far worse than me here in the Wood, Foxbrush. Go back. Get out of here while you still can.”
For a moment more, they stood quietly facing each other. Then Foxbrush sniffed loudly and started walking. Without an idea in his head, he plunged into the vast Wood Between, arrogant as only a mortal can be. But Foxbrush always was an idiot.
Lionheart hurried after, debating the merits of clunking his cousin upside the head and dragging him back to the Near World. He had just convinced himself of the wisdom of this plan and was searching for some likely clunking weapon when he noticed something he never would have anticipated, not in his wildest dreams.
A Faerie Path opened at Foxbrush’s feet.
Faerie Paths are a strange phenomenon to those unacquainted with the ways of the fey. Lionheart, despite his recent journeys into the Wood Between and the Far World beyond, still did not think he quite grasped what they were or how they worked. He knew there were hundreds of them, thousands perhaps, invisibly winding through the Wood, and each one belonged to a different Faerie king or queen. Some were safe for mortals to walk. Most were dangerous, even deadly. And the Wood itself would lay the more dangerous Paths before the feet of the foolish and do everything in its power to lead them astray.
But Lionheart recognized the Path at Foxbrush’s feet. He had expected to find it for himself.
“Wait,” Lionheart said, catching his cousin by the shoulder. Foxbrush tried to shrug him off, but Lionheart held tight and pointed. “Do you see that?”
“What?” Foxbrush looked where Lionheart indicated and saw nothing but forest floor.
All in a rush, Lionheart considered many things. Where he walked in the Wood, shadows and trees obscured his way. Where was the Path his Lord had promised? Where was the Way that would be made for him in darkness?
He considered—and this with a curse—that serving as a Childe of Farthestshore was not nearly so straightforward as he might have liked.
“I think,” he said with utmost hesitancy, “that perhaps you should come with me after all.”
Foxbrush narrowed his eyes at Lionheart, and bile rose in his throat. He knew better than to take at face value anything his cousin said. “Is this a trick?”
“Maybe.” But it wasn’t. Lionheart prodded Foxbrush again. “Go on. Standing there looking stupid won’t find Daylily.”
Foxbrush rubbed his nose. His eyes stung with the dust of his climb, and his knees were weak with fear he did not like to admit. Nevertheless, he took a single step.
The sylphs were upon them before he could take a second.
8
SHE CAME TO HERSELF UNWILLINGLY, the song of the sylphs still echoing in her brain but distant enough now that she could discern up from down once more and even remember her own name: Daylily, Lady of Middlecrescent. Soon to be queen.
What was she doing in the middle of a forest in . . . Oh! Great Lights Above! Was this her wedding gown?
The rest of her memories crashed back down upon her with such force that she groaned and dropped her head to the dirt. Her hair, which had been so carefully crimped and curled and pinned into an impressive tower that morning, lay in mats down her back, every pin plucked away, every curl pulled straight by the curious fingers of the sylphs.
But she had escaped. Slowly her heart resumed its regular beat and she drew a long breath. She had escaped the wedding, escaped Foxbrush, escaped the future they had for her.
She had saved them all.
She sat up and pushed her hair back from her face. And she saw the bloodstained warrior.