Besides, you said that you wanted to be the princess. “You get to eat the apple,” Rebecca pointed out. “You get to do everything, and all I get to do is cry and sleep.” “Now I’ll be the evil queen,” I’d volunteered.

So we played that out, and Rebecca hacked at weeds with the axe. “I’ll be sympathetic, because you’re so pretty and sad, so I’ll kill a deer instead.” “First, I am going to be a woodsman and you are going to plead for your life,” Rebecca told me. We carted out props-a rusty axe that had probably never been taken from the garage before, two paper crowns I’d made from glitter and cut‑up newspaper, and an apple, only slightly bruised, but shiny with wax. Like once, when we were pretending to be fairy‑tale princesses. Out in the woods, I’d often think of the games Rebecca and I used to play. Maybe I should consider ripping apart one of my unfamily’s pillows instead. I could catch it easily enough, but it would be hard to be sure the feathers were clean and parasite‑free. “Feathers, maybe.”Īs I flopped down, my gaze tracked a bird in the tree above us. Fox looked uncomfortably like the skins Bogdana hung up to dry after her kills. There was a lot about convalescing and chilblains, so I figured it might make him feel better. Since then, I’d stayed at my camp, reading him a novel about an impoverished governess I’d taken from the library when I’d picked up Foraging in the American Southeast. One night when I returned, I found he’d been attacked by a squirrel looking for material to nest in and most of his insides had been pulled out. Worse, there were a few times I’d left him behind when I went to sit underneath windows at Bex’s school or the local community college, repeating probably useless poems and snatches of history to myself, or doing sums by tracing the numbers in the earth. Fox back from my unparents’ boxes, I’d cuddled up with him every night, and his fur had become dingy from sleeping on moss and dirt. Fox?” I asked my stuffed animal solicitously, as though we were very fancy. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪt fourteen, I learned to make tea out of crushed spruce needles along with bee balm flowers, boiled over a fire.

The stolen heir by holly black