Alas.

Not all their endeavors had been successful.

The pale, crouching thing, perhaps the frog-shaped soul of what had been once a boy, was gone.

LVII

TOO-HASTY SEAMS

Alba awoke to a noise.

She could not name it.

Something scurrying through the halls, rushing up and down the long corridors. Its claws ticked on the stones as it loped past her chamber. Sniffing, it paused and returned. Sniffing more, it began to scratch and dig, scraping at the wood. The hinges rattled as it threw itself again and again against the door, trying to find its way in.

Eyes wide in the dark, Alba backed into the corner. The thing outside ripped furiously at the wood, clawing at it, battering it with a horrible thudding. The planks began to splinter and crack. The thing was finding its way in.

No, it was in. It was already inside. Alba could not see it, not really, only a dark shape moving in darkness. Nowhere to go, she pressed her body into the stones, but the thing had found her—it was beside her, sniffing, sniffing, a hot muzzle nosing her arms, her hair, her face.

A keening—a sound full of sorrow and hunger—rose from its throat.

What was this creature? Trembling, scarcely breathing, Alba could think only wolf, but even deep in her fear, she sensed it was not. The sound it was making—guttural, empty—was not out of nature. It carried a smell, prickling, sour—sharp as spoiled milk—as it nosed over her body.

Desperate to see, she opened her eyes wider, and in the faint threads of moonlight, she saw a creature she still could not name. What was it? What was its shape? Her heart pulsed through her thoughts. The thing was brutish. Unnatural. It had fur, paws, claws, teeth, tail—but its form was twisted. Distorted. Not an animal. In a crooked mouth, its teeth flashed.

Muzzle feverish against her ear, the creature wailed again, a thick, eerie sound so full of loneliness that Alba, even in her terror, was stunned.

She knew that loneliness.

She recognized it across years and years.

For a moment, she saw not the distorted creature but the boy who had stood before her so long ago: the little boy who had been so hopeful when he’d first heard the word sibling.

This thing, whatever it was, was all the king’s emptiness bundled and stitched into animal skin.

Now that she was looking, she saw how the fur scarcely covered it; peering, she could see the few wild stitches that pinned it. The emptiness threatened to burst the too-hasty seams; it bulged and sagged and protruded and reshaped the animal hide into nothing recognizable. No form out of nature.

Though Alba hardly understood how a creature like this could come to be, knowing how desperate and dangerous it had become, she only trembled more.

Cringing, she waited to feel its misshapen mouth tear through her skin. She waited for its half-dangling claws to rip her apart.

Instead, the thing ran the odd crooked knob of its muzzle over her again, searching and searching, looking for something that would fill its vast belly. It sniffed and sniffed; then, with a wailing that threatened to rupture its poorly stitched fur, it tore away, loose claws clattering over the stones, out through the cracked door of her cell into the corridors, howls echoing through the halls.