Hero (16 page)

Peregrine cracked a smile. “From the gullet of a dragon.”

11

SATURDAY WOKE up shivering in the darkness. She reached for her blanket, but Trix had stolen it again. Scamp.

As sleep left and reality crept in to set up shop, Saturday remembered where she was and how she’d gotten there. What she’d done to Trix. How she’d abandoned her mother. She sent up a prayer to the gods for her brother’s well-being and Mama’s safekeeping, then turned her face to the icerock floor of the armory and refused to give in to the urge to cry. She needed to get up and start saving the world. It’s what Jack would have done. It’s what Trix would have wanted her to do.

Too bad their last exchange had been a fight. Lately it seemed like most of Saturday’s conversations were arguments.

The moment she raised her head, she wished she’d had that bath. Her dirty skin crawled over her aching muscles and her head itched. It wasn’t a state she was a stranger to, but she never slept this way. Mama always made her, Papa, and Peter wash before dinner. Time-consuming as the custom had been, Saturday had grown to enjoy ending the day clean and fresh. She looked forward to ridding herself of this filth when she was done mucking out the bird’s cave. She tried not to consider the quality, quantity, or temperature of the water to come, or what dubious means Peregrine had of providing it, but he had promised her a bath, and she’d hold him to it.

He had also kissed her.

Saturday pressed her lips together. There was no more sting left from the poison, only the memory of the pressure of Peregrine’s mouth upon hers and the ghost of his warm arms around her. She had dreamt of being kissed, once when she was a little girl and once when she’d been kidnapped from Thursday’s pirate ship. She wondered now if that second time had been a dream at all.

To Saturday, falling in love was a nonsense never hoped for. Love and marriage and family would mean the end of her adventuring. She had only just begun to live her life outside the towerhouse. So far, that life had been full of swords and witches and life-or-death decisions. Kissing had no place there.

And yet, Saturday couldn’t bring to mind a tale about Jack in which he’d banished evil or bested a beast without winning the heart of some girl in the end. Saturday sighed. Did romance
have
to be part of the adventure? It just seemed so unnecessary and distracting.

Worst of all, she had
liked
the kiss. She wanted to do it again, and that annoyed the hell out of her.

Fighting with someone was so much easier than caring about him, and caring would make Saturday’s final decision that much harder. It wasn’t just herself she’d be sacrificing by killing the witch and waking the dragon; the deaths of Peregrine and Betwixt would be on her hands as well.

She stood up and collected the rake. If she could not conquer her emotions, she could at least conquer this day. A hard day’s work might not solve everything, but it would help her sort out her thoughts.

Saturday got lost on the way to the privy cave. This mountain was a piskies’ parlor, mazes upon mazes of dark tunnels and chambers in which even a kobold could get lost. She arrived just in time to do her business and avoid being burned by the cleansing fire. Clever, whoever had discovered this particular alcove. Cruel, that Peregrine had not mentioned the marsh-gas odor that heralded the cleansing fire. But then, she hadn’t gone out of her way to be kind, either. She decided to make an effort to be nicer.

And then she wondered why.

Stupid kiss.

Too bad she couldn’t leave her clothes behind to be incinerated as well. The privy cave smelled better than she did. She stayed close to the fire, missing the feel of warm sun on stiff muscles. She found a lantern and used the embers left in the wake of the privy fire to light it, coaxing them to her with the handle of the rake. She tossed the rest of the useless pebbles into Puddle Lake. She’d started keeping a handful of pebbles in her pockets to toss whenever she suspected such a mirage.

Her stomach growled angrily. Dubious of the multicolored mushrooms guarded by the bearlike rock formation, she tried to locate a place in the walls where she could chip away at the icerock. What clear ice she finally did manage to carve out melted disappointingly on her tongue. Her stomach was not fooled and loudly voiced its opinion about her trickery.

The caves wound down and around, up and through, with sometimes sloping, sometimes jagged floors and ceilings low and high. Somewhere in between Saturday realized she was even more lost than when she’d started. Tired of knocking her sore noggin on cleverly concealed protuberances and fingerstones, she sat back against the wall with the rake beside her. Someone would find her eventually. She secretly hoped that someone would be Peregrine, even though she still hadn’t decided what to say to him.

His kindness reminded her a little of Peter, always offering to help, always letting her get under his skin. Peter was compassionate without being soft, so what was it about Peregrine that bothered her so much? She should try harder to consider him as she did her brother.

Except for the kissing part.

There was a shuffling noise in the shadows, the same scurry of little feet she’d heard in the armory the night before. Curious as to the source, Saturday did not move the lantern. She remained very still. Creatures in the Wood were often brave enough to sniff her out so long as she did not pose a threat to them. Not that any creature of the Wood could have stood her current scent, but cave dwellers might be a bit more forgiving.

Tentatively, a small, ginger-furred tailless rat-thing entered the golden ring cast by the lantern. It led itself more by its whiskered nose than its cloudy eyes. Its ears were wide and pointed, like a cat’s, and the left one was missing a chunk. The light reflected off several sharp teeth. The rat-thing opened its mouth and snapped at the air.

Trix would have been able to tell her if the animal meant her harm, but Trix was not here to guide her. Not sure that she wanted it nearer, she shifted slightly. The animal backed away with a hiss and quickly retreated to the shadows.

Saturday heard a fluttering of wings from the opposite end of the cavern, but it was not Betwixt. The witch’s familiar rounded a corner and landed on a fingerstone beside her. The lantern light revealed green in the bird’s changing feathers today; the tips were the color of rich rye grass.

“Hello, Cwyn.” The greeting was raspy in Saturday’s dry throat, and she realized that these were the first words she’d spoken since waking. Yet another odd feeling. Members of the busy Woodcutter house were often expected to converse before fully leaving Lady Dream’s realm. “I don’t suppose you’re here to lead me to a fine breakfast?”

“Caw!” said the bird.

“That’s what I thought.”

Saturday moved her weary bones off the floor and dutifully followed the raven down the tunnel to the bird’s nest. The lorelei waited for her there, a ghostly vision of tattered rags dancing in the shadows up and down the corridor. Saturday tucked one of her daggers inside the waistband at the small of her back, in case the witch decided to remove the other one, in her belt.

“Shall I sing you a tune?” Saturday asked the witch, fully intending to do no such thing. Saturday had the melodious voice of a lizard. She only ever burst into song when Peter got on her nerves.

“The rocks sing their own tune,” said the witch. “When I had my eyes I did not know how to listen.”

“Perhaps losing your eyes was a blessing,” said Saturday.

“Perhaps I will cut you into pieces and eat you for dinner.” The witch licked her lips. The raven settled on her mistress’s shoulder. Her talons made deep furrows, but if this was painful the witch showed no sign of it. She looked pale beside her richly colorful pet, the yawning sockets of her eyes like puddles of shadow unable to catch the light.

“I have more tasks for you,” said the witch. “I need you to bring me seeds and mushrooms and spiced moss. And if you do not clean this mess today, my bird and I will dine on your bones.”

Saturday was suddenly glad she’d gone to Peregrine for help despite . . . everything else. “I suspect I will make a lovely supper,” she said boldly, “if a bit tough and chewy.”

“I will cook your meat until it is tender,” said the witch. “You will melt on my tongue.”

“But if you cook me, how can I find your eyes?” asked Saturday.

The lorelei grasped Saturday’s arm in an iron grip. Her seemingly frail and withered appendages were as much muscle and bone as raven’s claws. “If you do not find my eyes,” said the witch, “I will simply take yours.”

Not if I kill you first,
thought Saturday. She considered the dagger in her waistband. She could do it now, dispatch the witch and be done with all of this. But she wanted to find her sword first and, if possible, a way off the mountain. She knew there would be very little chance of survival against the dragon, but she had to try.

Saturday turned her face away, but the witch’s hand found it anyway, lovingly tracing the contours with her wrinkled blue claws. “Your skin is smooth,” the witch said dubiously. Her cheeks flushed a deeper blue. She smelled of frostbite, cold and sharp.

Saturday tried to hold her jaw as arrogantly as she could.
Jack,
she repeated the lie to herself.
I am Jack.
She let her voice fill her whole chest and deepen in tone. “I should get to work.”

“Work!” The witch threw back her head and cackled at length, all soberness melting into hysteria. “Live to fail another day, Jack Woodcutter! Come, Cwyn. Your mistress tires and there is much to do.” But the raven had already taken wing, quietly riding the chilly drafts down the cavernous hall, her glowing wings illuminating the path with soft green light. “Foul fowl,” the witch grumbled.

Taking one last lungful of icy air from the hallway, Saturday entered the disgusting bird’s nest. Immediately her nose wrinkled and her eyes watered. Before her towered pile after pile of once dried, now soiled, moss, easily four times the amount there had been when she’d started. Saturday brushed her uneven forelocks behind her ears, sickened by the griminess of herself, and set to work. She lifted the rake like a club and thought about Peregrine’s armory, procured from an era’s worth of fallen warriors.

“What idiot came to best a dragon with a rake?” Amused at the images the thought evoked, she took a shallow breath. “Here goes nothing.”

She grasped the rake just below the business end and poked the handle into the moss pile. As if skewered by an invisible pitchfork, a heaping helping of soiled moss rose into the air. Ridiculous and implausible it may have been, but Saturday could not deny what she saw. It was nothing that lifted the straw, nothing that held it, and nothing that tossed it away from a pile that this time shrank instead of grew.

“I’ll be damned,” she whispered.

The soldiers in the practice yard used this expression all the time, but it wasn’t one Mama encouraged. The Woodcutters’ lives were strange enough without tempting Fate with a request for punishment. Considering her circumstances, Saturday wasn’t terribly worried. It would be considerable work for the gods to make her life more complicated than this.

Before going any farther, Saturday dropped the invisible forkful of moss and exited the cave again. She poked around in the crystalline darkness for Peregrine’s promised sacks and found them behind a large pillarstone, about thirty yards from the cave opening, far enough away that a meandering witch wouldn’t have tripped over them. Three were full of fresh, clean moss. The rest were empty. Saturday filled her arms with the sacks—it took her several trips—and then dutifully began filling them one by one.

While she worked, Saturday thought about every member of her family. She made up rhymes about them all, and what they might be doing. But she couldn’t stop her mind from constantly drifting back to the swordfight with Peregrine . . . and that kiss. On and on she worked and thought and blushed and worked some more. She considered what Peregrine had said before about the length of a “day” in these caves. Saturday could go on for hours in the Wood without getting tired. She didn’t even stop to eat unless Papa or Peter reminded her. If left to her own devices, exactly how long might a full day’s work be?

The chill air kept Saturday from sweating profusely, but she was forced to stop and carve untainted ice chunks from the wall as she grew more and more weary. Saturday filled fewer and fewer sacks between breaks until, finally, her body gave up.

She woke to water splashing in her face and a chunk of ice wrapped in linen at the base of her neck.

“Wake up, Woodcutter. You’re too big for me to carry, and you’re no good to me dead.”

Wasn’t she? Without her, the witch would have her blasted stew, may it give her heartburn and spoil her stomach and ruin her spells. Peregrine and Betwixt could continue on with their freedom to live, if not their true freedom. Freedom. Sword. Water. Trix.

“Trix,” she croaked. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m the one who’s sorry. If I’d known you were going to wake up and work yourself to the bone straight off, I would have left you some food. Why didn’t you come find us first?” Droplets of water on her face again. “No, no, come back to me. Here, drink this.”

Saturday could not manage to open her eyes, but she knew a cup of cool water in her hands when she felt it. She drained it.

“More,” she croaked, but her stomach was louder.

“This first.” The cup was ripped from her reluctant hands and replaced with bread. Gods of heaven and earth, a small roll of bread. Saturday could imagine it was still warm from her mother’s oven. In her kitchen. At home. On a winter’s day. Or maybe Friday had baked this one, because it was chalky and flat and had a funny spice to it. Her chair at the table was freezing.

“Peter, shut the door.”

There was a crack and a sting in her cheek as Peregrine slapped her.

Saturday’s eyes flew open. In the next heartbeat, she had her dagger pointed at his throat.

He caught her hands in his easily, too easily, and lowered his head to look deep into her eyes. “There she is.”