“I’m just Ginny,” I say, voice breaking. “I just didn’t want them to take the cookbook.”
Brigit shakes her head at me, as if she pities my stupidity. “Nothing happens because of ‘just.’ So, you’ll stay here until we work it out.”
“You can’t… I’m not just staying here,” I say shrilly.
“Oh, no one here just stays,” Brigit says. “Plenty of people here would kill for an extra pair of hands. It’ll be a nightmare deciding who gets to keep you.” She moves toward the tent flap to leave; I jump to my feet and sprint for the door. I’m running for it, I’m fast, I can make it somewhere. I burst past Brigit, stumbling from the darkness of the tent into the bright white world outside. My feet hit the snow, I don’t care, I step forward—
And realize there’s nowhere to go.
We’re in a clearing surrounded by trees, tall, bare oaks that stretch their fingers to the now-dark sky. There are campfires everywhere, and I hear someone playing an instrument, a guitar maybe, backed by a harmonica. But mostly, I see people. People everywhere, dressed in worn but colorful clothes, smoking cigarettes and fighting, laughing, and singing. Hundreds of them, spread out among dozens and dozens of RVs and tents and campers.
Bracelets is in front of me, leaning against a post that holds the tent’s “porch” up. He looks at me warily, silently asking me not to make him chase me into the trees.
“You can run,” Brigit says, “but see those people? They’ll stop you. And if they don’t—” She points into the distance, to the line of trees. “See the forest?”
I nod.
“Those trees are full of teeth and claws. Run in there and see if Grohkta-Nap protects you from the Fenris a second time. She may be a goddess, Ginny, but I’d rather not test her patience, especially after questioning her power.”
I sink to my knees.
“My parents will be looking for me,” I hiss at Brigit. “They’ll find me.”
Brigit studies me for a minute, then brushes past me, walking out into the snow. As she moves away, she calls over her shoulder, “Don’t lie to me, Ginny Andersen. No one’s looking for you.”
They’ve given me a pair of shoes to wear, and the fire is warm, at least. Everyone is gathered in a circle around it, a sea of smudged cheeks and bright eyes. A blonde girl with bright cheeks is wearing Mora’s coat proudly, modeling it so other children can admire her. Across the fire from the girl, Brigit and a dozen boys my age talk. The boys have thick muscles and tanned faces, and old T-shirts peek out from behind scarves and coats. I feel as if I’m trapped in a movie, a play that isn’t my life.
“Listen up,” Brigit calls out. The crowd quiets, and all faces turn to her. “This buffer is staying with us for a bit, till I work out what to do with her.” She pauses while two dogs get in a squabble, waiting for them to be calmed by their masters. When they are, she continues, sounding annoyed. “Name’s Ginny. Don’t know if she’s any good at cooking or cleaning, but she’s young, she’ll learn. One from each family who can afford another mouth, winner gets her. No knives, no chains, no brass knuckles. Clear?”
Her words are blunt, though I’m still not quite clear what’s about to happen. I look at her—she made no mention of the Snow Queen, of Grohkta-Nap, and from the way Brigit glares at me, I can tell I’m not to bring it up. I suppose that, if she ends up thinking I’m a curse, she’ll want to get rid of me easier, and if I’m a blessing, she’ll want to keep me without a fight. My lips firm—stop thinking like that. You aren’t staying here either way.
“Let’s get on with it then!” a portly man says loudly, and the crowd cheers raucously. Brigit motions for me to rise; I back up toward her, but Bracelets and Dreadlocks are once again blocking any escape route I might have taken. Boys from around the fire step out, tossing down their coats and hats. A dozen or so total, with a few stragglers opting in at the last moment, pushed by their mothers, who eye me greedily. The boys size one another up, rock back and forth on their heels. I see money being dug from pockets, exchanged between the crowd; small children push through the legs of adults to get a front-row seat.
Someone grips my arm, and I turn to see that it’s Bracelets. “You’ll want to step back,” he says. “These things take up a lot of space.”
“Ready!” Brigit shouts, voice ringing through the clearing. The boys vying for me tense. “Fight!”
They explode into motion, a flurry of hands and fists. The thick, slock sound of punches meeting heads resonates over the roar of the crowd. People are screaming, shouting, encouraging the boys that fall quickly to get back up, to grow a pair and keep fighting. A boy’s shirt gets ripped in half; another boy almost gets thrown into the fire.
I look over to Brigit—she’s watching patiently, as if this bores her, even as a pair of wrestlers tumble forward and narrowly miss knocking her over. A few boys are staying down now, heaving into the ground with bloody noses and mouths red from busted lips. The crowd changes pitch, from cheers to gasps and laughter. I snap my head around, hearing Bracelets chuckle behind me. I can’t see what’s happening through the fire, and my eyes start to water from trying to stare through the flames. Finally I see something—I don’t know what, but something—someone moving fast, darting around the boys’ arms, ducking under their swings.
“Who is that?” I ask Bracelets.
“That,” he answers, looking smug, “is Princess Flannery.”
My eyes widen; I look to Brigit, who, though still, I can tell is seething from the stiff, hard angle her jaw has taken. The men are booing, yelling at Brigit, throwing their arms into the air in frustration. She ignores them, her eyes narrowed and trained on the fight—on her daughter.
I rise to my toes and finally see some of what’s happening on the far side of the fire. Flannery moves fast, flickering around the boys as they wail on one another like clumsy giants. She ducks under a boy’s arm, black hair flowing behind her, then rises up behind him to bring her elbow down hard on his head. He falls, and she sprints to another boy, sliding into the mud and taking a knee to her nose. It bloodies instantly, but she doesn’t seem to notice, moving around the fire as she stoops and causes one of the boys to trip over her.
There’re only a few boys left now—most are stumbling back into the crowd, enveloped in a sea of men slapping their backs and offering them flasks. Flannery dives toward the two boys closest to Brigit; they turn and see her, alarmed, and duck out of the way as she swings a fist at them. One of the boys grins, catches her hand, and flips her to the ground. Bracelets makes a growling sound that ends when she springs back up, leaps onto the boy’s back, and wraps her arms around his thick neck. He flails and punches at her legs awkwardly, trying to shake her off, but she grits her teeth and holds tight.
The other boy runs at them both, hand clenched into a fist. He strikes the boy Flannery’s holding on to, forcing him to stop fighting off Flannery and focus on his male opponent. The two exchange fruitless blows—one, two, three punches that sail through the air. Finally, Flannery’s boy succumbs to the pressure she’s putting on his neck and drops to his knees, red-faced and wheezing. Flannery releases him and looks up at the other boy, and I can tell he’s thrown—he doesn’t want to be the one to hit her, the princess.
She clearly has no such hesitation; she punches him, so fast he doesn’t have time to flinch. He stumbles backward, rubbing his jaw, but before he can recover she’s landed a solid kick to his stomach, then another, then a stomp to his instep. The boy falls to the ground and holds up his hands in surrender as she runs at him, foot drawn back, ready to strike again. She freezes just before making contact—there’s no need. It’s over.
The crowd erupts in a chorus of cheers, of boos, of conversation and dog howls. People are milling around; men are shouting over the wagers they placed. No one seems to understand what just happened, what this means—least of all me. Finally, an older man lifts his hands into the air in celebration and laughter.
“Take that, mugathawns! Flannery
Sherlock is the winner!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I have no idea what this means, and am a little relieved to see no one else does, either.
Flannery, for her part, is grinning through the blood running down her nose. I’m finally able to get a good look at her face. She resembles Brigit, at least in her eyes, though her body is both curvier and shorter, something like a gymnast’s. She runs past the crowd, encouraging them to cheer for her, but the people seemed mixed—the younger members are ecstatic and the older ones are scowling.
Brigit is talking furiously to an ever-growing mob of men, all yelling over one another. People start to take notice, quieting down so they can eavesdrop. Flannery, now on the other side of the fire and high-fiving a group of children, turns and cocks her head, listening.
“You’d better get control of your girl, Brigit. No man is gonna put up with this,” one man growls.
“We’ll handle it—”
“And what about my boy?” a man I recognize from Brigit’s tent shouts. “God help me if his nose doesn’t set right, Brigit. And besides, who gets the buffer now?”
“I get the buffer,” Flannery shouts, storming toward her mother. “I won. I get her.”
“Flannery,” Brigit warns under her breath.
“What’re you gonna do, add her to your damn menagerie?” an old man asks.
“You’ll watch the way you speak to your princess,” Brigit snaps.
“Maybe someone should’ve spoke to you that way, Brigit!” another says.
The crowd gasps, a murmur of threat, of indignation ruffling through them. Brigit purses her lips together and makes herself look taller, more regal than the man who last spoke. He seems to know he’s said the wrong thing, shrinking back a little, casting his eyes downward.
“Flannery?” Brigit says, voice steely. Flannery steps closer, cowed by her mother’s intensity. “Find Ginny a place to sleep. We’ll figure out a way to handle this when Jameson apologizes. Make sure you watch her—she’ll try to run.” Flannery walks over to me, her gait bold, confident. Bracelets pushes me toward her, and Flannery grabs hold of my wrist tightly. She leads me away, out of the crowd; I look over my shoulder to see Brigit walking back to her tent, proud, as if she’s uninterested in whatever squabbles the crowd of men might have.
“Where are we going?” I ask. Flannery doesn’t answer. “Hey,” I say again, more forcefully. “What are we doing?” She doesn’t answer, so I repeat the question again and again as we weave around RVs, generators, and charcoal grills.
“God, you don’t shut up, do you?” Flannery finally says. We reach an RV close to Brigit’s tent, a big, impressive one. Flannery walks up the steps, shoulders the door open, and leads me inside.
“I’m not… look, I’m not, like… yours or… I’m not going to be your…” I stumble across the words, embarrassed and confused.
“My own personal buffer?” Flannery asks, grinning wickedly. She laughs, loud and strong and a little lewd. “You are. I dunno what you’ll do. Maybe you can help me—nah. Never mind. You’d just mess that up.”
“I don’t… I don’t understand.”
“What’s to understand?” she asks, opening a cabinet and pulling out a bag of crackers, the fancy, name-brand kind speckled with seeds. “I fought, I won, so you’re with me.” She continues to mutter under her breath, in the language I don’t understand. She tucks the bag of crackers under her arm and walks down the RV steps. I consider standing my ground, refusing to follow, but I reason that the more we walk around, the more of the camp I see—and the more likely I am to discover a way to escape.
People are heading back to their RVs and tents; fires are reduced to embers, and a haze of smoke covers the area. A few people congratulate Flannery, and a few others cuss at her; she unleashes a string of expletives back without hesitation, which usually results in her and the other person laughing together. Children watch us from inside tent doors, clustered together like nesting animals, eyes admiring Flannery while regarding me with a sort of wary fear. We’re getting closer and closer to the edge of the camp, away from the bonfire light. The snow on the ground is still thick here, though there’s a trail, as if Flannery has walked this path many times before. I turn my eyes to the tree line, wondering how far I’d make it if I got away and ran right now. After seeing the Fenris, the forest is infinitely more frightening, especially in the dark. Flannery looks over her shoulder at me.
“Afraid of the forest?”
“Yes,” I mutter.
“You should be,” she says. “Go in there and they’ll eat you up.”
“I know about them,” I say. “The Fenris. And the Snow Queen—your mother doesn’t want anyone to know, but—”
“Quiet,” Flannery says, teeth flashing in the dim light. “You won’t make it far here if you go prying into our secrets before you’ve earned them. And besides, I heard all about you. Talking trash about Grohkta-Nap, questioning her power.”
“It’s not that,” I say, trying to pander to her a little. “I’ve just always thought she was the queen of the Fenris. But you say she protects your people from them.”
“If she sees fit,” Flannery says, pushing her hair over her shoulders—though there’s so much and it’s so thick that the curls flounce back across her face in seconds. “The snow slows the Fenris down,” she continues. “She brings it down on us, tries to keep them away from our camp.”
“And you don’t care that she turns boys into wolves.”
“That work for her,” Flannery says, a spark of admiration in her voice. “And they don’t back-talk and question her the way the men here question my mother. The Snow Queen has real power.” I’m about to say more when up ahead, something near the trees moves. I jump, afraid, but no, this is small, thinner, lankier than a Fenris. We grow closer, closer, and I realize it’s a deer, held captive by a fence made of chicken wire on one side and a very beaten VW bus on the other.
“Hello, menthroh,” Flannery calls out; her voice is calmer now, as if the frenzy of the fight is falling away. The deer’s ears flick toward us, and she immediately backs up to the far side of the pen.
“She’s afraid of me,” Flannery tells me, though she doesn’t seem too sad about this. She reaches into the bag of crackers, tugs out a few, and throws them to the ground at the deer’s feet. I see her silhouette and wide, eerie eyes flicker as she drops her head and sniffs, then ignores them.
“You feed her crackers?”
“I feed her whatever I can find that she’ll eat,” Flannery says, and turns. “Don’t tell my mother. She gets pissed when she hears I’m giving them our food.” I’m about to ask what she means by them when it becomes abundantly, ridiculously clear.
The fence holding the deer goes on for several yards, divided every few feet, and there’s an animal in every section. The deer, then a fox, then a dog—no, not a dog, a coyote.
“I had an elk once,” Flannery says forlornly. “But he trampled me and ran away.”
“I’m… sorry?” I say, trying to keep the shock from registering in my voice. She’s crazy. Not just strange, not just eccentric, but actually crazy.
“Nah. Good for him, being strong enough to break out,” Flannery says, tossing some crackers into a pen with a badger. “Besides, now I have room for a bear, if I can catch one. It’s hard—I need a really old one or a baby, and both are hard to come by. Especially since women aren’t allowed to go into the woods. Gotta wait for them to wander close to camp, see one by the highway, that sort of thing.”
Crazy.
“Why do you want a bear?” I ask, unable to keep the alarm from my voice this time.
“Because,” Flannery says, drawing a knife from her waistband and running it across the chicken wire so it makes a tinkling sound. The animals’ ears spring up and they begin to pace. “Wouldn’t you be afraid of a girl who can catch a bear with her hands?”
I nod—though really, I’m fairly afraid of her as is; she doesn’t need to catch a
bear to scare me, though I’d believe Brigit and the rest of the camp might be harder to convince. We get to the end of the pens and walk to the back of the bus. It was once pale red—I think. Maybe blue, or green—the paint is chipped and reveals that it’s been many colors in its lifetime.
“This is Wallace,” Flannery says, sounding pleased with herself.
“Why Wallace?”
“That’s what it says,” she answers, as if I’m stupid to not realize. She points to an assortment of faded bumper stickers on the rear door. Only one is still legible, the one that reads WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT in red, white, and blue.
Flannery opens the rear doors and climbs inside. There’s a table and a few benches, and the pop-top roof makes it possible to stand up straight in certain areas. There’s not room to do much else, though, because on every seat, every ledge, and every little table are cages, their occupants hidden in the darkness. Flannery reaches over and flicks on an electric lantern, temporarily blinding me. When I manage to open my eyes, I can’t stop a gasp.
Possums. Raccoons. Squirrels. Some sort of mink, and, in a pen by what used to be a bed, a beaver. They scramble for food, and I’m overwhelmed with pity—they look well-fed, cared for, but something about seeing a wild animal in a cage unsettles me.
Flannery reaches into the passenger seat and comes up with several boxes of cornflakes, which she dumps into the animals’ bowls; they eat hungrily, the raccoons far more brazen than the deer outside.
Flannery raps on Wallace’s wall fondly. “It runs and everything. My friend Callum and I stole it together last year. Took us six months to get it working. And another three to get my mother off my back about having a van just for my collection.”
“She doesn’t like it?”
“She says I’m greedy, wanting more while others have less.” She casts a hand toward the camp, fingers lingering in the direction of the smallest tents. “Says it’s not our way, that I’m acting like a buffer.”