The Unready Queen, стр. 4

“No take-backs!”

Fable stomped up to the wall of foliage her mother had grown all around them for privacy. It was easy for her mother. The plants listened to the queen. The animals listened to the queen. Everybody listened to the queen. Nobody listened to Fable. With each practice session she had suffered, her mother’s wall of greenery had felt less and less like a protection and more and more like a prison.

“One more time first,” the queen pressed.

“Why? One more time to feel stupid? One more time to get it wrong?”

“Yes. We learn more from how we get it wrong—”

“—than we learn from getting it right,” Fable droned. “You always say that, but I still haven’t learned anything. Just open the bushes, Mama.”

“Why don’t you open them?” the queen prompted. “Just try. Compel the vines. You’re strong enough. I know you are.”

Fable clenched her fists. “You’re right,” she said. “I am strong enough.” And with that, she spun on her heel, and where a girl had stood moments before now perched a bear cub, balancing on its hind legs.

The queen pursed her lips. “Fable, no.”

The cub narrowed her eyes. The queen sighed. Fable would not be her little cub much longer. Already the child was growing into her flank, her paws looking less adorably overlarge and more suited to her size every day.

In a flurry of motion, the cub shredded the branches in front of her until they were nothing but ragged splinters, and then she stormed off through the gap.

“Violence is not the same thing as strength!” the queen called after her. Fable did not respond. The queen sagged. “She will learn,” she told herself.

The leaves rustled skeptically above her.

Footsteps crunched toward the tattered gap in the foliage. The queen looked up. “Fable?”

The face that peered around the corner was neither human nor cub.

“I take it today didn’a go any better’n yesterday, eh, witchy?” The drab green goblin removed his battered top hat as he stepped into the clearing. Nudd, High Chief of the Hollowcliff Horde, was half the queen’s height, but he bore himself with all the confidence of his regal station. He had come alone. He always came alone.

“My family’s concerns are none of yours, Thief King,” the queen answered coldly.

“Ya know as well as I do that that child is a concern of every last creature in the Wild Wood.”

The queen did not reply.

“Otch. I didn’a come ta hassle ya, Raina. We’re on the same side. Tell me—is she learning ta control it at all?”

The queen hesitated before she spoke. “She will. She just has too much of her mother in her.”

Nudd smirked. “Aye, that’s the truth. An’ a good thing, too. She’ll need plenty o’ that if she’s ta last long in this forest. But ’tis the something else she’s got inside o’ her that has me twitchy.”

The queen took a deep breath. She should never have told Nudd. It was her story—hers and Fable’s and no one else’s—but there was no un-telling a story once it had been told.

“They taught me how to control it,” she said. “I will teach my daughter.”

“Ah, but you were just a wee human lass with a bit o’ magic under yer skin. Yer daughter is something else—she’s a part o’ them, through an’ through.”

“My daughter is human.”

“Human plus . . .” Nudd said. “That’s dangerous magic, theirs. Stronger’n the Wild Wood is used to. ’Twas yer own mother who taught these trees ta trust neither humans nor fair folk—an’ yer wee Fable is both. Dangerous combination, that. The forest hasn’a decided what ta do with her yet.”

The queen’s brow furrowed. “Fable is not a danger to the Wild Wood.”

“Na?” Nudd countered. “There’s plenty would say that you’re the most dangerous thing in these woods, an’ she’s already more powerful than you are. Least you can control yourself.”

“She is not more powerful than I am.” But even as the queen said it, she pulled the bearskin cloak tighter around herself. She could take animal form, but only through the magic of the cloak. Fable had been able to transform at will since she was barely able to walk. Spark had been one of the most difficult spells Raina had learned to cast in her childhood. Snuffing a flame had been relatively easy—but creating one out of nothing had taken years to master. Little Fable had worked out how to do it when she was five. By seven she had nearly set the Wild Wood on fire a dozen times. Wild, unruly magic had always been effortless to Fable, yet structured magic—courtly magic—the queen’s magic—remained a brick wall to her. “She will learn.”

“When?” Nudd’s eyebrows rose. The pale scar that ran through one brow and down his cheek wrinkled. “Yer wee witchling was, what, twelve last summer when she tussled with the fabric o’ the universe itself? And won?”

The queen swallowed.

“She still makin’ flowers turn inta butterflies by accident?”

The queen said nothing.

“Mm-hm. What clever trick will she stumble into when she’s sixteen? Twenty? I’m na blind, witchy. I can see she’s gettin’ stronger. So can the rest o’ the forest folk. What will happen when she’s na some wee thing anymore? What will happen when her mother’s na around ta look after her—when the forest becomes hers ta protect? Or do ya think she’ll handle that moment smoothly when it comes?”

The queen said nothing.

Nudd relented, and the two of them listened wordlessly to the birds bickering and squawking at one another for a few minutes.

“She is a good lass, Raina,” the chief said at last, more gently. “She does have a lot of her mother in her.”

The queen nodded.

“We’re having the boy over,” the chief added, more lightly. “The changeling, Tinn. Poor lad doesn’a know the first thing about his own kind. Got ta learn about his heritage somehow.”

The queen arched an eyebrow. “Does he, though?” Tinn had been raised by humans his entire life—he looked human, acted human, thought of himself as human—but he was not human. A