Molly and I’d gone maybe ten miles through Goncourt when the foxes began to howl. At first it was nothing more than yips in the distance. High pitched barks.

  “Probably nothing,” Molly said. We were at a rest area along a forest road that was barely more than a wide path with deep wagon ruts.

  We’d been taking turns riding Baubles. Molly was better at it than I was. She was able to sit up straight like some noble queen, while the lack of a saddle meant that I kept nearly falling off one side or the other, and I’ll state for the record that it’s uncomfortable to repeatedly slam your balls into a rhino’s back with every step it takes. I was just starting to learn how to balance myself, and to have my balls become numb to the pain, when we heard the first yip.

  “Fox,” Molly said. Nothing more than that. We made eye contact and she gave a grim smile. Hearing a fox probably meant nothing. Not all foxes are a mixture of magic and the supernatural. Better foxes exist. Regular foxes, I mean. Charming and mischievous and harmless. Molly was holding Baubles’ leash, urging him along. We’d earlier found some sort of sweet fruit, halfway between apples and peaches, and the rhino was proving agreeable to being ridden as long as he got a few of the fruit every mile or so.

  When the sounds of the foxes began, Baubles perked up, his ears twitching in almost cat-like manner. I have no idea what range of senses rhinos have. Was he seeing things we weren’t? Smelling the location of the foxes? Hearing the soft crunch of their paws in the fallen leaves? His ears swiveled like radar dishes, homing in on the sounds. I slid off the rhino and Molly took my place. My ears strained for the sounds of the foxes. My balls strained to recover from the ride.

  Molly urged Baubles into a soft trot. I jogged alongside, keeping up. The forest smelled like fresh earth with an undercurrent of water. Molly smelled like sweat. Baubles smelled like the inside of a barn. I probably smelled like fear.

  The trees around us were thick with oaks and a type of tree I’d never seen before, possibly native only to Goncourt. They were like overfed willows. Leaves likes dangling vines. The forest floor was rife with their fallen leaves, like coiled ropes strewn all over the thorny bushes and forest loam.

  We’d spotted all manner of wildlife, including a herd of deer that’d slipped through the dense forest in an almost supernatural manner, barely a snap of a twig or a rustle of leaves.

  We’d also seen a dead man, with half his skull caved in and three arrows in his back. He was in light armor, with pieces missing. The forest animals and insects had both considered him as a resource. He had a piece of paper clutched in one hand, but he’d been dead for weeks at the very least, and the paper had faded into nothing. He was a story we would never know.

  We hoped we wouldn’t become similar mysteries.

  “You have to slow down,” I told Molly. “I can’t keep up.”

  “We can’t slow down,” she said, reaching out a hand for mine. She pulled me up onto Baubles, putting me in front of her. I almost slid off seven or eight times during the process, and Molly kept hauling me back, like I was some sort of whimpering yo-yo.

  “You watch the front and the left,” Molly said. “I’ve got the right and the rear. If you see any movement or anything out of the ordinary, let me know. And don’t forget to look up.” I nodded with a movement that was likely lost on her, since my head was bouncing up and down with every step Baubles took, along with my liver and lungs and nuts.

  Baubles trotted at good pace. Not quite a full jog, but a speed he could sustain for a long while. Birds chattered their complaints at our intrusion. Squirrels raced across the path. A badger held ground for almost two seconds, and then made way.

  “Shit,” Molly said, and then an arrow whooshed past us. It came from the right and slammed into a tree on the other side of the path.

  “What the fuck?” I blurted.

  “Keep your head down!” Molly hissed. She pushed me down, her hand on the back of my head, a thumb digging into my ear. At the same time, she kicked with her legs and the rhino sped up, a sudden battering ram as we moved our way through the forest. I hunched all the way forward, like one of those Tour de France riders, except instead of trying to lessen wind resistance I was trying to present a smaller target for whoever was in the woods.

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  Even over the beating thumps of the rhino’s feet on the hard dirt path, I could hear men’s voices. Fierce shouts. Orders being given. There was also the barking of foxes, less distant than before. I was bleeding from my mouth, having taken a blow from the rhino’s back as I tried to hold tight. I heard the hiss of more arrows, and then a clang. I turned enough to see that Molly had drawn out her double-bladed axe and was holding it behind her to act as a shield.

  Another arrow clanged off the steel with enough power that the axe twisted in her grip. A following arrow struck through her shoulder, passing wholly through. Impact thrust her forward, so that she slammed down into me, her hand grabbing at my cloak for purchase.

  “Fuck,” she hissed. I felt her wobble, nearly tumbling off, and then she was laughing. But there was a hollow bubble in the laughter that I didn’t like at all.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’m fine. We need a Lightning Bolt, though.”

  “Okay. Where?” My fingers were already sizzling with arcs of electricity. I clutched the chains around Baubles’ neck with one hand, holding my other hand out, like the cowboys in those bull-riding competitions, except those guys only need to stay in place for eight seconds, and nobody shoots fucking arrows at them.

  “Doesn’t matter!” Molly yelled. “Just blast the shit out of something behind us! We need them to back off!” I turned, leaning as far as I could to one side to see past Molly. She leaned in the other direction so I’d have a better view. I decided to target a couple trees on one side of the road, but just before I gave the mental command for my Lightning Bolt to fire, two archers stepped out into the wide path, maybe fifty feet behind us, preparing to fire.They had the look of forest bandits, men who’d be incredulous at the existence of shaving razors or showers.

  If I’d had an entire second to decide, I’d have likely aimed to one side or the other, but in the moment they appeared, pulling back their bowstrings to loose arrows, I reflexively targeted on them.

  I hit the man on the right. He burst like a meat balloon. His friend, beside him, was caught by a thick lashing arc of the bolt that’d almost atomized his companion. It sliced him apart. There was the crack of the lightning but also a terrible sound like when you drop a large rock into deep water, played at a lower pitch.

  Baubles stumbled for a moment, with shit spraying from his ass and his little tail whipping around. There were two arrows stuck in his rump. The surrounding voices from the woods were uncertain for a moment. Then they redoubled, full of rage.

  “Shit,” Molly said. “Hardasses. I was hoping they’d back off, but they’ll be out for blood, now. Well, fuck it. They were out for blood before. We have to get off the road.”

  “Go into the woods? But, the bandits are in the woods.” It didn’t seem like a smart idea to me.

  “They’re trying to herd us. Something’s waiting ahead. Likely an ambush. If we stay on the road, we’ll die.”

  “We should definitely go into the woods,” I said, now seeing the genius of her plan. But I was also seeing the problem of navigating a rhinoceros through a forest. I was thinking of the deer and of how they’d almost magically made their way through the trees, like ghosts. We would not be like ghosts. We’d be like cannonballs. There was no hope of evading pursuit. The men could track us by noise alone, and we couldn’t move fast enough to lose them, not without leaving Baubles behind, and that wasn’t an option.

  Molly nudged the rhino and he turned off the road and we plunged into the trees, with branches whipping at us from all sides, as if punishing our decision. We crashed through the underbrush, leaving an unmistakable path that could be easily followed. Molly, I realized, was smart enough to understand we couldn’t lose the bandits. She was doing something else.

  “We’re choosing a place to fight, aren’t we?” I asked, ducking low, not because of arrows, but because of branches.

  “We’re choosing a place to fight,” Molly admitted, guiding Baubles. We were veering to the left. I couldn’t see any difference in where we were going. Everything was just trees. My legs were scraped and bleeding. Branches slapped and whipped at us from every direction. Everything was chaos. I could hear the men in pursuit. A chorus of whoops. Shouts. Rallying cries.

  “When I start to sing,” Molly said, “stay well back.”

  “What?”

  She reached around to grab my chin, twisting me to look at her. Her face was inches from mine, and with the galloping romp of the rhinoceros we were repeatedly touching, almost like kisses, but instead more like our heads were being knocked together.

  “When I start to sing… stay well back.” Molly put extra emphasis in her words.

  “Okay?” I said, not meaning it to sound like a question, but what the hell was she talking about?

  I began catching glimpses of rock through the trees. I barely registered them before we burst into an odd sort of clearing that wasn’t very clear. It’s true there weren’t many trees, but only because there were several boulders strewn around, ranging from the sizes of cars to as large as houses. Blankets of moss covered wide portions of the boulders, with struggling trees dotting their tops. A flock of birds left their shit-covered roosts, exploding into the air in a flurry as we ourselves exploded from the forest in a burst of broken branches and trampled bushes.

  There was a pool of water between two of the boulders, burbling up from a fresh spring, creating a stream that ran off into the forest, following the path of least resistance, which seemed like a good trait that I should acquire. Molly jumped down from Baubles and carefully backed him between two of the larger boulders, like she was parking a car between houses.

  “Remember what I told you,” Molly ordered me. “Stay well back when I sing.” I nodded and began to ask what the hell she was talking about, but at that moment the men were on us.

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