“Where—”
But Pawlin continued as if he hadn’t heard. “When the bird accepts my hand, the stitches will be removed. Then I shall use the hood to lessen her stress, taking it off and placing it back over her head as needed. At first, each time I remove the hood, she will fly away, but I will have her tethered, of course, with a creance such as this.” Pawlin lifted a long, thin leather strap from the shelf. “Rather like your leash, is it not?” he said, smiling.
“Enough of this. Where is my lynx? I demand to know.”
“The bird will tire herself, flying again and again to the end of the creance, retrieved again and again by her master, replaced again and again safely on her perch, until she learns her place,” Pawlin said to Ama—and then, at last, “I believe I saw our king heading toward the village before the rain began, accompanied by his steward, who, it seemed to me, carried an awkward box in his arms.”
The village. Ama turned to leave the mews and spied Pawlin’s cloak. Without asking permission, she grabbed it and threw it over her shoulders, pulling up its hood against the rain.
“Fly, bird,” Pawlin called after Ama as she disappeared into the storm.
The Dog’s Story
No one was out of doors in weather such as this, and Ama had gathered the hood of Pawlin’s cloak as close as she could around her head, only peering out through the smallest slit of fabric, eyes on a spot just in front of her next step. She could see no farther than that.
From Pawlin’s mews, a cobbled path led downhill toward the village. It twisted and turned, but it led reliably away from the castle, and Ama followed it.
The wide great sky, gray-black with roiling thunderheads, growled and threatened and flashed. Wind blew the rain at a treacherous angle, and Ama’s skirts tangled around her legs as she pushed forward. Her whole body trembled with cold, and her fingers, purplish, clung to the soaked-through fabric of Pawlin’s cloak.
She tripped and stumbled, the castle at her back, and hoped this twisted path would deliver her, somehow, to her Sorrow. It merged, at last, with a wider road—the same road, perhaps, that had carried her, upon Reynard, to the castle not so long ago—and this road led her to the village.
Rain had driven the townspeople indoors, but even ghosted, the village smells remained. Smoke, and wet ash, and human waste. Food scraps and fetid trash piles. There, the body of a small, dead dog, pushed off into the gutter, floating now in the gathering water of the storm.
How did it come to be there? Had it been a stray or someone’s loved pet? Had it succumbed to sickness or the angry boot of its drunken master? It was unknowable, and now the dog’s story was over, serving only as a reminder that her own beloved Sorrow could be about to meet the same fate or—worse—had met it already.
Ama was deep in the labyrinth of the village now. The main road was paved with stones, but smaller paths and alleys that branched off from it were hard-packed dirt, turned to mud in this deluge.
All around, windows were shuttered, doors were barred. Surely, Ama thought, it would be impossible to imagine that the king might be in any of these small, sad structures . . . and yet still, he could be. He could be anywhere. He could be doing anything. Ama blinked, and behind her eyes was the body of the waterlogged dog. She blinked again and pictured Sorrow, mewling, scratching in Emory’s arms. Another blink, and the bloated dog became Sorrow, no longer fighting, but limp and bloated herself, drowned by Emory’s hand.
But—no. If Emory had intended to kill Sorrow, he would not have needed to take her from Ama’s room. If he wanted her dead, why not simply do it there, back at the castle? He would not have needed to do it himself. He could have dispatched Pawlin to kill the lynx, or even, terrible as it was to consider, he could have told Tillie to do it, and she would have had to obey.
Ama stood in the middle of the paved road and turned in circles, hood clenched about her face, body shaking beneath it with cold. One part of her brain argued, But Emory had said that Sorrow must be gone before the wedding, and that day is still many weeks away, and another voice whispered, “Before the wedding” means any time before solstice . . . and Emory never promised not to get rid of the lynx himself.
If there was even a chance that Sorrow could be within one of these cottages, Ama had to know. She could knock on every door she saw and demand they let her in. She could search cottage by cottage until she found what she had come for.
The structures all looked the same—thatched roofs darkened by the rain to an orangey brown; wooden shutters lidding the small windows; uneven wooden planks that formed the cottages’ walls, stuffed between with twigs and mud.
She had to start somewhere. She couldn’t just stand here in the middle of the street. Resolved, Ama marched to the closest cottage and pounded on its door.
A moment passed. The door opened, and the small face of a young girl, no more than seven, peered out. Smoke from the fire lit within seeped out, and the girl reeked of woodsmoke.
“Is the king inside, along with a lynx?” Ama asked.
The girl’s eyes widened, and she looked past Ama into the rain, as if searching for some explanation for Ama’s presence. Seeing none, she answered.
“No,” the girl said.
“My thanks,” Ama responded, feeling rather stupid for having asked such a question.
She turned to go.
“Are you the damsel?” asked the girl behind her.
Ama turned back around. The girl looked at her with round, dark eyes. “That is what they tell me,” she replied.
“What was the dragon like?” the girl blurted, as if she could not contain her question.
Ama had no time for questions. She had a lynx to find. Still, she considered. What had the dragon been like? She strained to remember. There was no fear, there, inside her brain, thinking of the dragon. For just a second she squeezed her eyes tightly closed, willing herself to remember something, anything.
Behind her eyes, lids squeezed tight, Ama saw bright bursts of color—red, pink, green, yellow, blue. She opened her eyes.
“There were colors,” she said. “I remember colors.”
The girl looked at her, blinked, and gave a little smile. Then she closed the door.
All up the road Ama went, knocking on doors. Most were answered by surprised villagers, all of whom shook their head no to Ama’s question.
Some doors she knocked upon to no avail. Whether no one was home or they ignored her knock, Ama could not tell. What if it was in one of those cottages that Sorrow was hidden? The thought of perhaps being so close to her lynx without being able to see or help her made Ama feel as if she was losing her mind.
She turned down street after street, winding her way farther and farther away from the castle. It occurred to her that she had no idea how to retrace her way to the castle, no notion in the rain and the mud where was the path that would return her to the mews . . . and then it occurred to her that if the king had truly taken her Sorrow, she would not be returning to the castle. Not of her own will, at least.
Ama felt with a certain sharp clarity that there was nothing for her back at the castle. She imagined herself, for a flash, alone somewhere far away, and very warm. It felt like a blissful dream, the idea of such solitariness. She would need nothing, not a thing, not food or drink or—