“So I want more,” she said, knowing she was pushing her luck. “Tell me what you know about the Marrow Orchard.”
“You’re bold, aren’t you?” the Briny Witch said. He looked, in some small way, delighted that she’d asked. “It’s no place for a stupid young girl. The Marrow Orchard will chew you up and spit out your bones.”
“What about the things guarding it?”
“Bonebirds,” said the Briny Witch. “They chew the body parts that get spit out.”
He leered and held out his hand.
Kestrel wanted to know more, but every second she wasted bargaining with the Briny Witch was another second in which her own grabber could grow stronger. She’d have to take the chance. Kestrel took the stone out of her pocket and tossed it to the Briny Witch. He caught it eagerly and pushed it into his right eye, completely regardless of the eyeball that was already in there. It looked like he was wearing a peculiar monocle.
“Well?” said Kestrel, perturbed. “Can you see the future?”
The Briny Witch slowly inserted a finger through the hole and fiddled with it. Then he fixed Kestrel in his particularly stony gaze.
“Yes,” he whispered. “I can see everything.”
“What’s it like?” she asked, feeling cold.
The Briny Witch didn’t answer. Kestrel could feel that weird sensation on the back of her neck again, like something was watching her, and her only instinct now was to get away from the bog. She grabbed the cloak and rolled it up.
“Can you tell me the way to the Marrow Orchard?” she asked.
“That way,” he said, pointing a long finger. He sounded like he wanted her to disappear as fast as possible. “Just follow the smell.”
“Thank you,” Kestrel said, backing away. The Briny Witch still looked deeply disturbed. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” he replied quietly, gazing right through her. “In fact, I don’t suppose you’ll be around for very long at all.”
14
THE MARROW ORCHARD
“Follow the smell,” Kestrel muttered, her hand clamped over her nose. “Good one.”
“Smell” was an understatement. After scrambling through the undergrowth for more than an hour, Kestrel had arrived at a thick, dark pond. The surface was covered in an oily skin, and every now and then something brown and greasy would lurch from the water and snap at a fly. On the other side of it, just visible through the trees, was a clearing. Kestrel was sure that it was the Marrow Orchard. The smell was coming from there, rolling toward her in thick waves.
The stink was so thick it made the air sticky, and even though it was nighttime, flies bumbled around lethargically as though they’d just staggered home from an eating contest. Even the trees around the pond were bent over like they had a stomachache.
Kestrel wondered if the forest got more and more moldy the farther you went from the village, until the whole world just collapsed like a rotten fruit with a tiny cluster of people at its core.
She considered her options. She and Finn had never gone into this part of the forest, and it wasn’t just because it was one of the last places in her grandma’s notebook. Even the wolves avoided it, sensing something inherently wrong with the air. She stopped for a moment, leaned over, and spat on the ground to get the strange taste of mold out of her mouth. Her stomach was shrieking with wild hunger, but the thought of eating made her press her lips together.
A large, bloated tree had fallen into the pond, making a bridge that stretched almost the whole way across. It looked like it would fall apart under her feet. But then Kestrel looked at the thick, dark trees around the water and realized that anything could be hiding in there. Anything like—
I’ll take my chances, she decided quickly, pushing the thought away. The less she allowed herself to think about her grabber, the easier it was to carry on. But it didn’t stop the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, or the sensation of eyes boring into the back of her neck.
She stepped onto the log. It sank lower in the water, and scum sloshed over Kestrel’s feet. She took one step, then another, her legs wobbling. The log bobbed up and down, sending thick ripples through the oily pond. A large, brown fish slowly rose to the surface and watched her, its tail squirming.
Granmos had liked using water in her training. Once, Kestrel had woken up to find that she’d been tied to a plank and set adrift in the middle of a leech-infested pond. She had nightmares about those leeches for years, remembering the way they swarmed over her as she struggled to paddle to safety. She couldn’t see a leech without thinking of her grandma and feeling sick with fear.
Maybe my grabber will be something to do with water.
But even as she thought it, she knew that it wasn’t true. There was something else that she was terrified of, something a hundred times worse. As she tried to shove the thought away, she lost her concentration. Her foot slipped and she wobbled. The brown fish saw its chance and lurched at her, but she was already gone, running along the rest of the trunk and leaping to dry land. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and crept toward the clearing in front of her.
Kestrel secreted herself in the gnarled roots of a tree, then she peered over the top to get a better look.
Her stomach curled up like a piece of bacon in a frying pan.
In the middle of the clearing a ring of huge gray stones encircled a sprawling mass of fruit trees. Each stone was the height of her waist and as pitted as a rotting tooth. They were spread with moldering fruit, as though they had been used as grim banqueting tables. Twisting in and out of the stones was a wall of black thorns, each one the size and shape of a carving knife, in horrible, almost comical contrast to the bright white flowers poking out of the grass.
Despite the decay on the ground, the trees inside the ring of stones were drooping with the kind of fruit that lives in fairy tales: red, glossy apples; purple plums the size of Kestrel’s fist; pears that were so huge they looked like they would burst. Suddenly Kestrel couldn’t smell mold anymore.
She was almost drooling, but her common sense kicked in before she could hurl herself toward the trees.
Look again, she could hear Granmos saying, and Kestrel obeyed, still longing to feel the fruit between her teeth.
She blinked and refocused. Animals hung from the black thorns that surrounded the orchard, flat and empty as clothes hung out to dry. Foxes and rabbits and stoats had all been impaled on the spikes. All the blood had been drained from them, dripping through the gaps in the stones and soaking into the soil.
Kestrel’s stomach groaned again, but not in a good way. She could see now that the grass wasn’t covered in white flowers. It was strewn with bones of all sizes and shapes, white and smooth as though they had been sucked clean. There were teeth marks in most of them, like something had been happily gnawing on them for days.
It eats things, Kestrel thought, imagining that she was writing it in the notebook. If you make it inside, it chews you up and spits out the bones.
She was about to inch out of her hiding place when something huge and gray smacked into the ground in front of her. The creature landed a few inches from Kestrel’s hiding place, turned its head, and caught a beetle from the air with a powerful crunch. The creature was the size and shape of a human, but it was thickly covered in stiff gray feathers, and it had huge, dirty gray wings.
Kestrel ducked back between the gnarled tree roots, her heart thumping. The creature gobbled to itself happily, preening.