“Oh, baby,” she said, and knelt down to Howling’s level, squeezed his hands.
Feral watched his mam and sibling carefully, braced. “Why don’t you make yourself some medicine, Mam?” he asked, and the naivete of the suggestion made Vern smile and almost tear up simultaneously. “Or tell me how to do it if you can’t. I’ll do exactly what you say. Tell me what to gather. I’ll memorize the list. I’m good at memorizing,” he said.
“There’s no medicine for this,” she said. “Not here.”
Feral barreled into Vern’s embrace, and she wrapped her arms around him. “You will survive this. You and Howling both. My strong, strong children.”
“I like the woods,” he said. Sweet child, so did Vern. Not even the fiend had ruined its magic.
“Where is it?” asked Howling, tasked with being the brave sibling, the one who’d sort the details.
Vern pointed. “We’ll walk.” She tried to sound resolved. She wanted to be someone worth following into the dark.
“Are there hawks there?” Feral asked, sniffling.
“Yes, baby,” said Vern. “And there are things there that aren’t in the woods. New things. Lions.”
“What’s lions?” asked Feral.
“They’re animals, big and ferocious like a bear. They’re in Africa.”
“Is that the name of the place we’re going to?” asked Howling.
Vern shook her head. “You may get there eventually, if that’s where you want to go to. There’s rhinos, tigers, gazelles, gorillas, and flamingos, and that’s just the beginning. There’s millions of species of animals. You hear that now? Millions. That’s a big number.”
“Bigger than a hundred?”
Vern picked up one of the nuts Feral had shelled. “If this nut was worth one hundred,” she said, “you could make a line of them from here all the way down to the riverbank and back probably twenty times, and it still wouldn’t be as big as nine million.”
“Is the world that big?” Howling asked.
“Bigger,” said Vern. She pulled him to her so that he could share her embrace with Feral. She wanted to see his face. “It’s bigger than all your imaginings. You could run forever and not get close to the end of it.”
Howling cried along with his sibling, but they were silent tears. The wet coiled down his cheeks with each slow blink of his eyes.
“How will I find you? How will I ever find you?” He sucked in breath after breath, but he could not get ahold of himself. His little sobs escaped his throat, where he tried to keep them captive.
“You will survive this, my brave, brave babies,” she said.
“When we leave?” Feral asked, his voice a croaky whisper, still caught with mucus.
Vern wanted to spend a few more weeks preparing the children for what they’d find out there, but she hardly knew herself. They would learn it the same way they’d learned the woods. They’d climb its trees, swim its waters.
Perhaps it was foolish to leave on a whim after all this time, but it was the same impulse that had made her leave Cainland. Sometimes, one’s feet knew best, and it was better to ignore one’s reasoning mind.
“We leave at nightfall.”
PART TWO
KINGDOM FUNGI
9
VERN HAD HOWLING AND FERAL walk the journey to the road. She wanted them exhausted enough that they’d sleep through the excitements of the coming evening. Her children had never seen a streetlight, heard a car’s sputtering engine, or been blinded by its searing headlights.
“Soon we’ll come upon something called a road,” Vern explained. “It’s hard and gray. Sometimes black. There’s white lines and yellow lines painted on it. You must never go in it without holding my hand, you understand? You stay far to the side of it, either in the dirt or on something called a sidewalk, which is also gray and hard, but it’s separated from the road by a curb. The sidewalk is higher than the road part. Usually. That’s the part you walk on. Feral, now, you might not be able to see the distinction between—that’s why, no matter what, you hold my hand.”
The twins weren’t used to hearing her talk this much. She hoped the rarity of her lectures meant they understood that when she did give them, they needed heeding.
“What the road for?” Feral asked.
“Cars,” said Vern.
“Them those big hard things you talked about?” asked Feral.
“Yes. Bigger than the biggest beast you ever seen, and faster, too. They’ll trample you right down.”