Page 19 of The Court the Fae Forgot
I fished a pebble from the bottom of the river at my feet and tossed it in the direction of the fox. He didn’t so much as flinch, just turned his head slowly to regard the place where the pebble had lodged itself along the bank.
“Go!” I shouted after him a second time. “Get out of here.”
I don’t know what it was, but something about the way that he looked back at me after, I finally justsnapped.I remembered the last fox just like this, the one that had lured me into the forest toward the Wildness that would have all too happily engulfed me. I remembered the fae that had met me there, beautiful in his darkness, and so dangerous that even now, within sight of my own home, fear began to well up inside me. It was as raw as a wound with salt poured in it, stinging at my insides until they burned out of me in a scream.
This was not the fox that had stolen my coins and lured me into the forest.
I wasn’t so stupid as to think that.
I was just too angry to think at all.
I kneeled down again, this time bringing up a handful of stones. The first one I threw flew wide, thudding into the trees behind the fox with a resonatingthwack.The next stone didn’t miss.
At leastthatgot the fox’s attention.
“I said … get out!”
The creature stumbled back a half step, his neck curving to look down at his body where I’d hit him, as if in confusion. There was no mark left, but I knew from the yelp that escaped the fox when the next stone hit that it did hurt.
It was another stone before the fox hesitantly took a second half step back, toward the forest, and still several more before the fox’s confused glare finally slipped from his face with his final yelp. I kept throwing the stones, one after the other, until the last of the fox’s yelps had so long ago finished echoing through the trees that they were only a memory.
Only then did I stop, breaths panting, shame immediately spilling into place as the rage in me began to ebb. The fox had nothing to do with this. I couldn’t even be mad at the fox that had stolen my coin purse. It had simply spotted something strange and shiny and it had run away with it. It hadn’tluredme into the forest.
It, like the fox that I’d just pelted with rocks until it fled, injured and afraid, into the trees, was just that. A fox.
A dumb creature.
Nothing more.
But it wasn’t the memory of the fox or even the stolen coins that had really gotten to me. My hands reached into my pocket for a scrap of ribbon that wasn’t there.
All my life, I’d been reaching for that golden ribbon in times like these. It was more than the repetitive motion of winding and unwinding it around my fingers. It was a comfort, a small secret piece of something that was not only wholly mine, but that had always been there with me. I’d long since lost the beautiful golden blanket, but the ribbon always remained.
Without it I was exposed, naked to whatever fate or her sister, chance, decided to throw at me. I waited for my breaths to quicken, for my knees to weaken, for my body to betray me as it always did when I was once again reminded of how little control I really had over this life that was granted me.
But the short breaths didn’t come. My legs didn’t shake beneath me. My body thrummed instead, that strange energy that had begun the moment I rose from the fae’s attack—for that was what it had to be, I decided—rising up in me instead.
My hand stilled its grasping for the ribbon, choosing instead to tighten into a hard, angry fist inside my pocket.
That boiling rage that had spurred me to chase off the fox in a fit of anger had begun to solidify into something far more resilient than the comfort that ribbon had ever brought me. Instead of feeling lost without it, I found something new, a strength inside me that was never there before.
I turned, slowly, away from the forest to look up at the thatched roof of the cottage, and then down again to settle on the aged mill.
A thousand times I’d considered running away from this place, and a thousand times I’d had to remind myself that it was impossible. I had no money. No education. No skills outside of the mill. I had little here, sure, but I had my sister—and until now, that had been enough.
But with Rayner now firmly secured as my future, all those other reasons for staying suddenly began to fade. I had no education, no skills, sure, but soon there would be more than enough coin—coin that wasn’t mine, not in the strictest sense, but coin all the same.
I had a choice to make, now. A choice I never had before.
And compared to the alternative, it was an easy one.
For the first time in my life, there was nothing left holding me here.
CHAPTERNINE
If stealing backthe coin I earned made me a thief, then so be it.
Better a thief than dead.
