“He leaves no tracks!” cried the badger. “His rifle makes no sound! He is not natural, fox, and your clever mind is no match for him.”
“Stay,” said Koja. “He is a man, not a monster, and once I have robbed him of his magic, we will be able to see him coming. The wood will be safe once more.”
Badger did not look happy. He promised to wait a little while longer, but he did not let his children stray from the burrow.
* * *
“Boil them down,” Koja told Sofiya when he met her in the clearing to give her the dropwort leaves. “Then add the water to his wine and he’ll sleep like the dead. You can take the charm from him unhindered, just leave something useless in its place.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“Do this small thing and you will be free.”
“But what will become of me?”
“I will bring you chickens from Tupolev’s farm and kindling to keep you warm. We will burn the horrible cloak together.”
“It hardly seems possible.”
Koja darted forward and nudged her trembling hand once with his muzzle, then slipped back into the wood. “Freedom is a burden, but you will learn to bear it. Meet me tomorrow and all will be well.”
Despite his brave words, Koja spent the night pacing his den. Jurek was a big man. What if the dropwort was not enough? What if he woke when Sofiya tried to take his precious charm? And what if they were successful? Once Jurek lost the witch’s protection, the forest would be safe and Sofiya would be free. Would she leave then? Go back to her sweetheart in Balakirev? Or might he persuade his friend to stay?
Koja got to the clearing early the next day. He padded over the cold ground. The wind had a blade’s edge and the branches were bare. If the hunter kept preying upon the animals, they would not survive the season. The woods of Polvost would be emptied.
Then Sofiya’s shape appeared in the distance. He was tempted to run to meet her, but he made himself wait. When he saw her pink cheeks and that she was grinning beneath the hood of her horrible cloak, his heart leapt.
“Well?” he asked as she entered the clearing, quiet on her feet as always. With her hem brushing the path behind her, it was almost as if she left no tracks.
“Come,” she said, eyes twinkling. “Sit down beside me.”
She spread a woolen blanket on the fallen tree and opened her basket. She unpacked another wedge of the delicious cheese, a loaf of black bread, a jar of mushrooms, and a gooseberry tart glazed in honey. Then she held out her closed fist. Koja bumped it with his nose. She uncurled her fingers.
In her palm lay a tiny cloth bundle, bound with blue twine and a piece of bone. It smelled of something rotten.
Koja released a breath. “I feared he might wake,” he said at last.
She shook her head. “He was still asleep when I left him this morning.”
They opened the charm and looked through it: a small gold button, dried herbs and ashes. Whatever magic might have worked inside it was invisible to their eyes.
“Fox, do you really believe this is what gave him his power?”
Koja batted the remains of the charm away. “Well, it wasn’t his wits.”
Sofiya smiled and pulled a jug of wine from the basket. She poured some for herself and then filled a little tin dish for Koja to lap up. They ate the cheese and the bread and all of the gooseberry tart.
“Snow is coming,” Sofiya said as she gazed into the gray sky.
“Will you go back to Balakirev?”
“There is nothing for me there,” Sofiya said.
“Then you will stay to see the snow.”
“Long enough for that.” Sofiya poured more wine into the dish. “Now, fox, tell me again how you outsmarted the hounds.”
So Koja told the tale of the foolish hounds and asked Sofiya what wishes she might make, and at some point, his eyes began to droop. The fox fell asleep with his head in the girl’s lap, happy for the first time since he’d gazed upon the world with his too-clever eyes.
* * *
He woke to Sofiya’s knife at his belly, to the nudge of the blade as it began to wiggle beneath his skin. When he tried to scramble away, he found his paws were bound.
“Why?” he gasped as Sofiya worked the knife in deeper.
“Because I am a hunter,” she said with a shrug.
Koja moaned. “I wanted to help you.”
“You always do,” murmured Sofiya. “Few can resist the sight of a pretty girl crying.”
A lesser creature might have begged for his life, given in to the relentless spill of his blood on the snow, but Koja struggled to think. It was hard. His clever mind was muddled with dropwort.
“Your brother—”
“My brother is a fool who can barely stand to be in the same room with me. But his greed is greater than his fear. So he stays, and drinks away his terror, and while you are all watching him and his gun, and talking of witches, I make my way through the woods.”
Could it be true? Had it been Jurek who kept his distance, who drowned his fear in bottles of kvas, who stayed away from his sister as much as he could? Had it been Sofiya who had brought the gray wolf home and Jurek who had filled their house with people so he wouldn’t have to be alone with her? Like Koja, the villagers had credited Jurek with the kill. They’d praised him, demanded stories that weren’t rightfully his. Had he offered up the wolf’s head as some kind of balm to his sister’s pride?
Sofiya’s silent knife sank deeper. She had no need for clumsy bows or noisy rifles. Koja whimpered his pain.
“You are clever,” she said thoughtfully as she started to peel the pelt from his back. “Did you never notice the sled?”
Koja clawed at his thoughts, looking for sense. Sofiya had sometimes trailed a sled behind her to carry food to the widows’ home. He remembered now that it had also been heavy when she had returned. What horrors had she hidden beneath those woolen blankets?
Koja tested his bonds. He tried to rattle his drugged mind from its stupor.
“It is always the same trap,” she said gently. “You longed for conversation. The bear craved jokes. The gray wolf missed music. The boar just wanted someone to tell her troubles to. The trap is loneliness, and none of us escapes it. Not even me.”
“I am a magic fox…” he rasped.
“Your coat is sad and patchy. I will use it for a lining. I will keep it close to my heart.”
Koja reached for the words that had always served him, the wit that had been his tether and his guide. His clever tongue would not oblige. He moaned as his life bled into the snowbank to water the fallen tree. Then, hopeless and dying, Koja did what he had never done before. He cried out, and high in the branches of her birch tree, the nightingale heard.
Lula came flying and when she saw what Sofiya had done, she set upon her, pecking at her eyes. Sofiya screamed and slashed at the little bird with her knife. But Lula did not relent.
* * *
It took two days for Sofiya to stumble from the woods, blind and near starving. In time, her brother found a more modest house and set himself up as a woodcutter—work to which he was well suited. His new bride was troubled by his sister’s mad ramblings of foxes and wolves. With little regret, Lev Jurek sent Sofiya to live at the widows’ home. They took her in, mindful of the charity she’d once shown them. But though she’d brought them food, she’d never offered kind words or company. She’d never bothered to make them her friends, and soon, their gratitude exhausted, the old women grumbled over the care Sofiya required and left her to huddle by the fire in her horrible cloak.
As for Koja, his fur never sat quite right again. He took more care in his dealings with humans, even the foolish farmer Tupolev. The other animals took greater care with Koja too. They teased him less, and when they visited the fox and Lula, they never said an unkind word about the way his coat bunched at his neck.
The fox and the nightingale made a quiet life together. A lesser creature might have held Koja’s mistakes against him, might have mocked him for his pride. But Lula was not only clever. She was wise.