“Go, you moron!” she shouted. The dog yapped. Finn yelped and scrambled away. Kestrel started running after him, but her feet got tangled in the beetle dress, and she stumbled. The dog leaped, its powerful jaws snapping around the bottom of her boot, and she plunged to the ground.
12
BONES IN A BOX
“Let go!” Kestrel shrieked.
The black dog had her by the shoelaces. It was pulling her through the forest at a terrific speed, panting and growling under its breath. Kestrel grabbed fistfuls of earth, but nothing could stop it.
“Kestrel!” Finn yelled in the distance, but she was moving too fast even for him. They were going toward her mother’s house. It was too late.
Pippit bounded up behind her. He landed on her face and ran into her pocket. She wanted to clutch him in her arms, but all the breath was being knocked out of her by the lumpy ground.
The wolf fire had been abandoned and the path to the house was clear. The dog headbutted the door open and dragged Kestrel inside. She scrambled to her feet as the door slammed behind them, feeling like a sack of bruises.
Kestrel slammed her fists against the door, but it was locked tight. The dog yawned, as though it had known exactly what she would do.
Everything was cold and silent. Kestrel peered into the gloom, but for the first time she could remember her mother wasn’t there.
The trapdoor to the cellar was open, and there was a strange scraping sound coming from below.
“What’s she doing?” Kestrel asked the dog suspiciously. The dog had planted itself in front of the door to stop her leaving, but its eyes kept flicking to the cellar. It obviously hadn’t known her mother would be down there, and it didn’t know what to do now.
It just growled at her instead. Pippit shuffled and nudged his way up her sleeve, where it was safe.
Kestrel trod softly toward the hole in the floor, scattering the abandoned dressmaking pins. What was it her dad said? I think she’s hiding things. She felt a cool shiver in her spine. If her mother was hiding something, where would she keep the evidence?
The dog twitched an ear, sensing that something had changed. Kestrel took her chance. She threw herself at the trapdoor and pitched headfirst into the gloom.
She landed on stone, her arms breaking her fall. She scrambled up quickly, reached for the trapdoor, and slammed it shut just as the barking dog tried to wedge its muzzle through the gap.
Pippit snickered gleefully in her sleeve.
Kestrel waited with bated breath, certain her mother would have heard the commotion, but nothing happened.
“Mother?” Kestrel whispered, regretting her impulsive behavior. The cellar was a lot bigger than she’d imagined, spreading far away from the house and quietly absorbing any kind of noise. It was cool and crammed with leering shadows. “Are you here?”
No answer.
A candle had been left by the stairs. It illuminated the long, thin cellar, which was piled with junk and covered in soft, gray spiderwebs. It was like a museum of her early childhood. Kestrel could see her old bed, her books, her toys—everything that had been moved to make room for her mother’s weave. It was all heaped against the walls, leaving a narrow passage down the middle that Kestrel could only just about squeeze through. The end of the pathway was pitch black.
As Kestrel squinted into the gloom, she heard the long, low scraping sound come from it.
She couldn’t turn back now.
She stretched her arms out and moved forward, feeling her way through the shadows, although part of her was shouting to run back upstairs and take her chances with the dog. She could hear its toenails clicking on the floorboards above them as it paced back and forth.
As Kestrel walked, her fingers brushed against a patch of wet mushrooms. She shuddered and almost moved on, but then recognized the chair they were growing on. It used to sit by her bed, back when she slept in the house.
There was something carved in the left arm.
She paused, digging the mushrooms away with her fingernails until she could see what was underneath.
There were eleven letters, cut deeply into the wood. Each one was in her own cramped writing: C h o o s e a n a m e.
It was as though someone had run their fingers down her back. When had she carved that there? And why? Then it happened. It began as a slow, cold trickle inside her head.
“Not now,” she muttered desperately, stuffing her fingers in her ears. But then her right ear went pop, and the images were as unstoppable as a flood.
Kestrel was in her mother’s cottage, her fingers tightly wrapped in the blanket under her. She was sitting on the bed, facing the wooden door with hundreds of faces in the wood, trying not to cry.
Smoke poured from her grandma’s pipe and crawled over the door, making it look as though the faces were shifting. Shadows flickered on the walls, and Granmos issued another bloodcurdling shriek that seemed to come from the mouth of the biggest monster. Kestrel stuffed her fingers in her ears. This was one of the worst training sessions she’d ever lived through. Granmos had taken one of her fears and made it even worse.
All of a sudden, the shrieks fell silent. Her grandma sighed and leaned over. Kestrel flinched, expecting her to do something horrible, like dig her fingers into her arm.
“Putting your fingers in your ears won’t help,” Granmos said. To Kestrel’s surprise, she patted her on the knee and smiled. “Choose a name for the faces. Make friends with them. Hadn’t thought of that, had you?”
Kestrel stared at her.
“Training you is like trying to train a brick,” her grandma said, shaking her head and picking up her pipe again. “Just try it, duck.”
Kestrel watched the faces through the cracks in her fingers. She reluctantly fixed her gaze on the face with wide eyes and a jagged, twisting mouth as it flickered through the smoke.
“That one’s called Fearn,” she blurted.
“You can do better than that,” Granmos said. “What else?”
Fine, Kestrel thought. She screwed her eyes up, and the face twisted into a comical grin. Your name’s Fearn, she told it, feeling stupid. Your job is to keep the door locked at night, to keep me safe. You’re scared of . . . spiders. And you’re allergic to toads.
It worked. The face twisted away and sank into the wood. Kestrel latched onto the next face, her mouth dry, and the next, and the next. Soon they no longer looked like monsters. After a while she stopped seeing the faces at all, and the door was just a door.
“Good girl,” her grandma said, grinning widely. Had Granmos ever been this proud of her before? “Monsters want you to be scared. Otherwise they’d have nothing. So this is your birthday present. The best piece of advice you’ll ever get. Got it? Write it down somewhere so you’ll remember it. Name your fears, duck, and acknowledge them.”
Kestrel opened her eyes to the cold, gloomy cellar. She had an uncontrollable urge to get away from the vision. It felt so real that she couldn’t convince herself it was made up.
“Wassat?” Pippit asked, nudging her with his face.
“I dunno,” Kestrel said, touching her ear. She felt like she’d been privy to something important and terrible. “I think I’m remembering things. None of it makes any sense.” She shivered. “My gran told me to name the things I was scared of. I carved it in the arm of the chair, so I wouldn’t forget it. But I forgot anyway.”