“Noise,” Pippit said, leaping to the top of a giant mushroom. It bent slowly under his weight, and Kestrel grabbed him before he could fall off. “There!”
He was right. Kestrel had been breathing so hard she hadn’t heard it, but there was a crackling sound in the trees to her right, perhaps only a hundred yards away. It was like something big was shifting its weight, purposeful and patient. Kestrel knew at once from the way the noise turned and quieted that it knew she was there.
“Do you think it’s him?” she asked, dizzy with hope.
The hill flattened to a plateau. Kestrel wobbled to her feet, following the trail with Pippit in her arms. Her heart was hammering, but she made herself breathe deeply and evenly.
“Hide,” Pippit said as they drew closer. He could feel the same chill in the air as her. “Run!”
“No,” said Kestrel, sounding braver than she felt.
The trail was at an end. The ground was all torn up as though a great struggle had taken place, but there was no blood.
“Show yourself,” she called, her voice bending and breaking, gripping her spoon. “I’m ready!”
“Kestrel!”
She heard her father’s cry half a second before the shadows moved and his grabber lunged at her. She stumbled backward, surprised, and hit a tree. All she could make out was a swirling mass of teeth and raggedy fur, all pinned together with a low, rattling growl. She stabbed at it with her spoon, trying to catch its face, but it had fallen back again. It was the same color as the shadows and completely unmeasurable. Kestrel looked for a heart, an eye, anything that she could drive her blade into, but her hands were shaking, and the grabber was so big that she couldn’t make sense of any of it, and the spoon was slipping in her grasp, and what on earth was she thinking anyway, fighting with a kitchen utensil?
“Kestrel!” her father yelled above her.
“Dad!” She wavered, then clenched her teeth against the tremble in her voice.
Her dad’s huge hands closed around her wrist and hauled her into the tree. The grabber leaped and snapped its jaws at Kestrel’s ankles, but she had already withdrawn them. Her dad was above her again, scrambling away from the grabber and onto a higher branch. Kestrel, shocked to her senses, clambered after him as the grabber took a chunk of wood out of the tree with its powerful jaws.
“What are you doing here?” her father said angrily as she hauled herself onto the branch, which creaked alarmingly under their weight.
“You promised your grabber wasn’t after you,” she snapped, even though it was the last thing that mattered right now.
“That was for your own good,” he said, looking so furious she almost feared him more than the grabber.
“How long have you been here?” she asked, struggling to get the words out through the lump in her throat.
“Long enough to know I’m beaten,” he said, his voice falling.
The grabber lunged at the tree, taking another chunk out of the wood and making it shake so hard Kestrel’s teeth chattered. It drew back, paused, and lunged at the tree, then did it again, and again. As it struck over and over, Kestrel could see every bone and sinew, every piece of its terrible body.
The grabber had taken the shape of a wolf, the hugest wolf the forest had ever seen. Its backbone was a string of pearls tied together with fibrous weeds from a pond. Its paws were made from chicken bones, all clasped together with gristle from a cooking pot. Tatty fur was stuck to its ribs, partially wrapped around its innards: the lungs of a deer, the heart of a bear, and the stomach of a wolf.
Its eyes were large and white, plucked fresh and shining from something huge, with a yellow glow behind them. Its teeth were snatched from the mouth of a terrible fish, its jaws cracked from the body of an old boar. Its legs were made from shards of bark, which crackled as it moved. Its flanks were dripping with tattered rags. The grabber had risen from the belly of the forest, dragging with it all the fallen corpses it could find, taking their best and worst parts to create a body of sharp points and bristles.
“Dad,” Kestrel said, trying to keep her voice light. She couldn’t stand how white and scared his face was. “You know when I stowed away in your bag?”
Her dad looked surprised. Then, to her relief, his lips twisted into a rueful smile.
“I do,” he said.
“We were miles from home, but you marched me all the way back,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “You didn’t let go of my hand once. You were so mad none of the creatures dared come near you. I saw them cowering behind the trees.”
Her father looked at the grabber again. Kestrel grabbed his sleeve and pulled him back to her.
“Look at me,” she said fiercely. “I’ve still got the spoon you gave me. Before you marched me back you sharpened it and gave it to me. You had to tell me which end to hold. You said that if anything snuck up on me, I had to hit it hard. Do you remember?”
“You attacked a plant,” he said.
“Well, yes,” said Kestrel. “I thought it was a snake. But that’s not the point.”
“What is it, then?” he said.
“You taught me how to beat the forest,” she said. “And I’m not stopping now for anything.”
Her dad held her hand, his huge fingers wrapped around Kestrel’s.
“That’s not what I was trying to teach you,” he said. “The real moral of that story is that I’m your father, and it’s my job to look after you. You have no idea how scared I was that day.”
Kestrel shook her head. “I know I said you weren’t brave,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.”
“When did you get so old?” he asked.
“When you weren’t looking,” she said, the answer catching in her throat.
The grabber snarled and hurled itself against the tree, which shuddered with a horrible splintering sound. They both tightened their grip on each other, and Kestrel felt another white-hot bolt of fear. The grabber was drawing its attack out. She had no doubt that it could have leaped up and caught them both in its jaws by now, but for some reason it was trying to shake them out the tree. Almost as though it was having fun.
“Kestrel,” her dad said, a new urgency in his voice. “I need you to promise you’ll do something for me.”
He said her name in the serious tone he only used when something very bad was happening. Kestrel, your grandmother is dead. Kestrel, your mother and I are going our separate ways. Kestrel, I have to leave now.
“What?” she said, dreading what would come next.
“I think I found a way to get rid of the black dog,” he said. “You need to make your mother eat some bloodberries.”
“What?” Kestrel said, stiffening in surprise. The grabber ripped another piece of the tree off, and the sharp crack of the splintering trunk sent a cold shiver through her.
“They grow in a place called the Marrow Orchard,” her dad said. His voice was low and fast. “I wanted to get them for you, but it’s too late. You’ll have to do it, but you can’t go alone. It’s heavily guarded. You need a distraction so that you can sneak in unseen.”
Kestrel’s stomach churned. Not the Marrow Orchard. Not that place right at the back of her grandma’s notebook, on the page covered in purple fruit stains. Not the page with all those horrible drawings of teeth and bones and birds . . .
“I need to feed her some fruit?” Kestrel protested. “I don’t see how that’s going to help.”
“Listen to me,” he said. “If I remember what your grandma taught me, it’s that the bloodberries weaken spells. The dog’s one of your mother’s spells, isn’t it? It’s got a body and sharp teeth, but it’s not a real animal.”