Page 30 of Wondrous

“Wonderful,” he muttered, but he stood up when I did. “Yes, let’s get this over with as quickly as possible. But first, I’ll take another cinnamon swirl for the road.”

Chapter 16

At first, it didn’t seem like either of us was leading the other through the woods. I thought we were heading back the way I’d come, and it was only when dawn began to bloom in the east, and I realized where east was, that I discovered he’d been taking me north the whole time. We were even farther from the Hare’s house than before and deeper in the wilderness. The forest looked completely different—it wasn’t as wet and boggy, and the trees were farther apart, encompassing small meadows of ferns and daisies. The trees were mostly the expected shades of green, with only a few blue ones thrown in here and there.

“Where are we?” I demanded.

“Nearly at the border of our territory,” he said. “One of the mock dragons is lurking in the Lonely Valley—that’s in the Momes, if you didn’t know.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, because we chased him there. He was trespassing in our woods—he blasted some sort of hole in them. He has to be one of the creatures you’re looking for, because he was like you—he smelled like another world.”

I felt a stab of irritation and discomfort at being lumped in with one of the monsters I was hunting. “As long as we’re heading toward a mock dragon,” I said in a warning voice. “And not some trap laid by one of your family members.”

“I suppose you have no way of knowing, do you?” he said in a silky voice.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.

He cast a sly look at me over his shoulder. He was walking more quickly now, and I nearly had to run to keep up. He avoided roots and slid through gaps between trees with an uncanny ease, while I kept bumbling into things. After a few moments, I realized I had lost sight of him entirely.

“J-Jabberwock?” I said.

I stopped, pressing Hedgewitch to my thumping heart. I turned slowly, scanning every tree and shadow. “This isn’t funny,” I called.

A twig snapped behind me, and I whirled around. I caught only the edge of his shadow darting into a grove of trees, and I felt an unpleasant prickle of terror down my back. He hadn’t turned back into a jabberwock, had he? How could he still move like one?

I paced slowly toward the grove of trees, keeping my eye on the shadow I thought was his. The forest leaves shushed under my feet—unlike him, I couldn’t move silently even when I tried.

The teacup enchantment wore off, I thought. It’s never worn off without the antidote before! What do I do? Can I bargain with him some other way?

My mind frantically leapt ahead, forming plans and counterplans, as the shadow I thought was him shifted a little. Then something brushed the back of my neck.

I whirled, and there he was, only an arm’s length away from me—still a boy. The shadow I’d been watching had been only a branch. He held a fern, which he’d used to touch the back of my neck, and wore a wicked grin that faded in the face of my silence.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said, looking angry and oddly flustered when I just stood there, staring at him. The exertion had tousled his dark hair, making it even fluffier than before, and he was close enough to me now that I had an excellent view of the sharp line of his jaw and the fullness of his lips. No matter which feature I focused on, each seemed more handsome than the last.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I actually meant it; he looked almost heartbroken by my reaction to his prank. “But you’re—well, you’re too pretty now to be frightening.”

He didn’t speak to me for the rest of the morning.

It was the second day in a row that I’d spent on my feet, and I hadn’t exactly had a restful night in between. So the prospect of walking many more miles atop the miles I’d already walked was an unpleasant one, and I spent very little time admiring the scenery and quite a lot grimacing over my blisters and aching legs.

As a result, the jabberwock walked ahead of me for most of the day, often so far ahead that I began to feel as if I were on my own again. I disliked this more than I expected to, which I suppose says something about how lonely I had felt since leaving the Hare’s house, if I was yearning for the company of a jabberwock.

Every once in a while, he would stop and wait for me, scowling and tapping his foot. Sometimes I was so relieved to see him that I smiled, which was clearly the wrong reaction. His expression darkened, and he turned on his heel and stalked off. I considered pretending to be nervous around him, to spare his pride, but I was too tired to put in the effort.

We kept to paths when we came across them, if they were going in the right direction. For the most part, we followed a narrow one, almost a deer path, that didn’t seem to have a name, though I spotted a few old signs nailed to trees, their letters long since faded. As the afternoon deepened, we found another meadow, with a little stream running through it. The air was heavy with sweetness, and the flowers rippled like the waters of a vibrant lake as we waded through them.

“Weed!” one of the flowers cried. “It’s that weed again!”

“Oh, hush!” I said, reddening. “I don’t know what you mean by again. You aren’t the same flowers I met all those years ago.”

“Weed!” came another small voice—from my current height, I couldn’t see if these flowers had faces in them, or which one was speaking. Wind spilled through the meadow, tossing their heads about. “And look how large she’s grown! Hideous!”

“Yes, weeds become quite monstrous if they aren’t nipped in the bud,” said another. “That poor jabberwock—he mustn’t know what she is.”

I stamped my foot beside a daisy, which only cried, “That was a threat! What an especially vulgar weed you are!”