Page 53 of Wondrous

The hedgehogs were napping peacefully on the streambank in a lumpy pile, but I couldn’t see Grackle. Finally, I spotted him a few yards upstream, fluttering frantically.

“Oh, Grackle,” I said with a sigh. “I don’t want to eat water bugs, either. Leave them alone.”

But the moth only fluttered back and forth, making spirals over the water. Then he took off upstream.

“Grackle?” I called. “Grackle!”

I left the hedgehogs to follow me at their leisure and hurried along the bank. It wasn’t easy following a moth, particularly at night, but Grackle stuck to the moonlit stream.

“Grackle,” I called warningly after several minutes had passed, “if you’re leading me to another moth colony…”

I stopped. The stream went round a bend up ahead, and in the elbow of the bend, the underbrush was broken and the soil churned up, one of the trees having been overturned, as if something large had crashed into it.

Resting in the shadow of the dangling roots was a sinuous dark shape. The shape was breathing but in a labored rasp. A long feathered tail trailed off the creature and into the stream.

It was Jack.

Chapter 27

“Jack!” I cried.

I splashed through the stream, feet slipping on the slimy rocks. When I reached his side, a sob rose in my throat. He wasn’t moving, and he didn’t stir at the sound of my voice. His eyes were closed, and there was blood on the stones around him.

“Jack,” I kept saying. “Jack, it’s all right. I’m here, and I’m going to help you. I promise.”

With all the shadows around us, it was difficult for me to see him, let alone his wounds. I pressed my hands into the sides of his feathered body, searching for blood. The underside of him, I discovered, was mostly covered in smooth pearlescent scales, which made his resemblance to a dragon even more striking. He still clearly wasn’t a dragon, with his lack of fire and his wolflike head, but he was closer to the dragons I’d seen in storybooks than either of the mock dragons was.

I pulled my blanket from my knapsack and tore it into shreds, which I pressed against the wounds I found. But I’d never treated wounds before, and I had no idea what I was doing—the blood simply soaked through the blanket. It was several minutes before I realized my mistake.

“Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry.” My face was wet with tears, which kept muddling my vision. “You need food to heal—how did I forget?”

I scrabbled at my knapsack with shaking hands. But all I had left was half a stale scone—we’d eaten almost all of our provisions the previous day. I broke the scone into pieces and shoved them into his mouth. He swallowed them, but he still didn’t wake.

“More,” I murmured. “You need more. I’ll gather some—some berries.”

How I would see the berries in the middle of the night, I didn’t know, but I had to find something. I leapt to my feet and ran for the forest, but I had grown too heedless of the dark and tripped over a root. I fell, my shoulder slamming painfully into another root, and for a moment I could only lie there, the wind knocked out of me.

Suddenly, hands grabbed at my arm, pulling me to my feet. I shook the hands off with a shriek, whirling and nearly tripping again.

“It’s all right,” Alex said, raising her hand and stepping back. “It’s just me.”

I looked from her to Maria, who was at Jack’s side, her hand pressed tentatively to his forehead. “You followed me,” I said.

“Obviously,” Alex said, folding her arms. “You were acting strange last night, so we took turns staying awake to see if you would sneak off. I was only pretending to snore. Imitating Maria, who sounds like a millstone.”

“I volunteered at a hospital back home,” Maria said. “It’s common for ladies of royal blood to do charity work, and I picked up a few things. I can’t feel any broken bones, but that mock dragon must have raked him with her claws. He’s cut up pretty bad.”

“How can we help?” Alex asked me.

I was so relieved to see them that I couldn’t think of anything else, or even wonder at their willingness to help a jabberwock. “Food,” I said. “Jack needs food—he can’t heal without it.”

Alex nodded. “We only have a few ginger biscuits left, but there’s a grove of oak trees downstream. I’ll gather the acorns.”

She disappeared into the trees.

Maria said, “Alice, why don’t you build a fire? It will help me see what I’m doing.”

I obeyed unthinkingly, snatching up twigs and branches along the streambank. “Will he be all right?” I said.