He stared at the mud, heaving great breaths of the blackened swamp cake. He began to feel feverish. The girl’s singing buzzed in his ears. Was her song in the breeze? Under the soil? In the puddle-wet patches? The lilting notes hovered everywhere.

He felt a pond of emptiness inside him.

“The frogs are all gone,” whispered a voice by his side.

The nightclothed boy again. The king, fuming, glared down at him, but the little boy did not seem to notice.

“They drained all the water and burned all the brush, but I saved a few. See?” He held out his cupped palms. Inside, a tiny, damp-bodied creature sat, pale belly pulsing. “I keep them in a little house I made for them with my mother.”

The small creature croaked, a delicate tthhhrrrp.

The croak seemed the sound of the king’s cracking brow. Tthhhrrrp. He touched his fingers to his eyes. His cheeks. How hot he was. Burning, almost. He blinked. He could not seem to see. “My carriage,” he said, striding away from the boy and the no-longer-a-pond. “My carriage!” he demanded as he reached the front door. “MY CARRIAGE!” he howled as the servants rushed from their rooms as though prodded with sticks.

All the trip back to the palace, the king held his head. He kept his eyes shut. For hours and hours, he smoldered. He could not silence the singing.

LIV

THE UNPICKING

The wolf had begun to blur. When Rae looked at him, she was not sure she could see him as he was. Was it the light? Her eyes? Her clouded mind? Or was it the wolf himself with his dull coat sagging about his bones? His shape did not seem right. His color did not seem right. She rubbed her eyes and tried again. He was a hazy form of wolf.

As cloudy as Rae felt, she had stayed firm: She would not eat until the wolf was fed. Beyond this firmness, though, she found it difficult to do anything else. She sang, sometimes, to the wolf to settle him; she sang, sometimes, to remind herself of Mop and Ness and the sun that rose somewhere. When she slept, she dreamed of them, and she dreamed, too, of Alba, who held her hand and showed her writing—words scratched into clay. When she woke, she found the wolf’s bowl covered with markings. Had she done this in her sleep? She followed the unfamiliar shapes with her fingertips. To her, the strange lines seemed little more than the markings carved by insects—larval etchings eaten out of leaves and bark—faint tracings of their search for sap and sustenance. Lines of nourishment.

Perhaps it was all imagined nonsense, perhaps it was really nothing but a dream, but she was comforted thinking she held Mop’s words.

“Wolf.” His breath was shallow beneath her palm. She could hardly feel any wolf left at all.

She sang to him.