With a frustrated shout, I yanked my boot free from a vine’s ensnaring tendrils. Even the delicate spring foliage had started to feel less friendly. Fleeced with clouds, the blue sky beamed as harmlessly as Gadfly’s smile, and squirrels bounded along the branches above me, shaking loose showers of white petals. But if I had learned anything from fair folk, it was not to trust the way things appeared.
I cleared the thicket and sat down on the same stump as the afternoon before. A breeze rattled the leaves of Rook’s tree, and a few twirled downward, scattering across my lap. I picked one up and traced its edges. Its color stuck out like a sore thumb, much like Rook himself.
Things weren’t going entirely as I’d expected. I shouldn’t have let myself get so carried away with Aster. There was no mistaking that she had felt real anger, human anger, as impossible as it seemed. Not only that—my portraits had affected some of the others, too. I’d been painting fair folk for years, and never once had I seen such reactions to my Craft. Foxglove had felt something, I was sure of it. Perhaps she had experienced emotion. Or perhaps she had caught a glimpse of what it meant not to, and found herself confronted by the emptiness of her existence, the hollowness of never having once known joy. I wasn’t certain which possibility was more alarming—or more dangerous.
All I knew for certain was that I couldn’t fail. My life wasn’t the only one at stake.
I realized I had torn the leaf apart, stripping it down to its fibrous veins. I flung away the pieces and put my face in my hands. My eyes prickled. My heart ached. Even if everything went perfectly according to plan, and I was working myself up over nothing, I faced a future I was no longer certain I could bear.
“I wish you were here, Emma,” I mumbled, wanting nothing more in that moment than my aunt’s embrace. She would know what to say. She would reassure me that I wasn’t a terrible person because there was a part of me that didn’t want to go home. Perhaps she could even convince me that I could live with myself after I buried my heart in the autumnlands and left it behind forever.
“Who’s Emma?” a cheerful voice asked, right next to my ear.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Lark! I didn’t know you were there.”
She sat perched on the edge of my stump like her namesake, smiling at me with her hands cupped around a pile of freshly picked blueberries. When she saw my face, her smile vanished. “You’re dripping!”
“Yes, I’ve been crying.” Seeing her raised eyebrows I added, “It’s what mortals do when we’re sad. I miss my aunt, Emma.”
“Well, stop now, please. I’ve brought you some blueberries—Gadfly told me you were out of things for your Craft. Here.” She poured the blueberries onto my lap, in the basket my skirts created between my legs. At the last moment she snatched a few back and stuffed them into her mouth.
I felt strangely touched. “Thank you, Lark. That was very thoughtful.”
“Yes, I know. I’m simply full of thoughts, but no one cares to realize it, and everyone treats me as though I’m the silliest creature in the spring court.”
“I don’t, do I?” I asked, concerned.
“No. And that’s why I like you so much!” She sprang to her feet. “Come along now, let’s find more berries.”
With a wet laugh, I plucked one of the blueberries from my lap and popped it into my mouth. Its ripe, tart flavor burst sweetly on my tongue.
A black-eyed raven alit on the uppermost branch of Rook’s tree.
Lark grinned, showing each and every one of her sharp, purple-stained teeth.
I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that berry—shouldn’t have considered eating that berry—even before the world spun in a kaleidoscopic wash of color. I plummeted downward as though a hole had opened up in the earth beneath me. The sky receded, growing smaller and smaller, surrounded by a warm, soft, rumpled darkness that I first grasped at frantically as I fell, then recognized with senseless horror as my own clothes.
I thrashed, smothered by fabric on all sides. My body wasn’t working the way it should. My face, my limbs, my very bones had taken on an alien assemblage that sent terror jittering up and down my spine. As I strained for any sense of what was going on, two long appendages swiveled on the back of my head. For some reason I sniffed, and my flexible nose twitched in response. My heart beat so rapidly I couldn’t identify the feeling at first—it was like a trapped wasp buzzing madly in my chest.
I kicked free of my clothes and hopped through the shoulder-high grass, half-blinded by the sun, finally grasping the nature of my transformation. Lark’s enchanted berry had turned me into a rabbit.
Her shriek rang out behind me, stabbing my tender ears. Impossibly, my heartbeat kicked up another notch. I thought my heart might burst as I raced toward a hawthorn bush that loomed above me higher than the tallest bell tower in Whimsy, and broader than a house. The forest had grown so dauntingly large it hardly bore looking at. I needed to get somewhere dark, safe, and enclosed, right now.
“Run, run, run!” Lark laughed. “I’m going to catch you, Isobel!”
With a dreadful unspooling of my memories I recalled what she had said to Rook the day before. Can you turn into a hare for me again and let me chase you about? I thought of the way Rook had been ignoring her in favor of paying attention to me instead.
I skidded under the bush, sending dirt and platter-sized leaves flying. My fur slid sleekly beneath branches that hung mere inches above the ground. I zipped forward, aware Lark must have seen me disappear under this bush, and judging by the sound of her laughter, she was already following.
There—a hole! But as I approached the burrow dug into the hawthorn’s roots, I shrank from the rank odor emanating from its depths. My instincts screamed Danger! Somehow, I knew the thing that lived in this hole would eat me if it got half a chance.
“Oh, you’re a quick one! I think I’ve lost you!” Through a space between the leaves I watched Lark’s gigantic feet stomp over to the bush across from mine. She bent and looked under it, her golden hair cascading down in a shimmering wave as huge as royal tapestry.
It was obviously a game to her. Surely she didn’t mean me any harm. By the sound of it, she used to play this game with Rook often. Yet if she caught me, would she understand I was a mortal rabbit, not a fair one in rabbit form? Might her fingers go around my little ribs and squeeze them just a bit too hard? I shuddered, recalling that if fair folk caught rabbits they ate them raw.
And what if she was truly upset with me for stealing Rook’s attention from her?