“How did you end up in the Otherworld?” Elric asked. Maybe Wynn could find a similar way to escape this place.
“There was a reaper in the woods. I hid in the ruins of the lost elf city, but was chased by the Grendel.” Osmund rubbed the back of his neck. “He surrounded himself with shadow and smoke and kept a fearsome striped beast at his side. I came upon the old portal that had been used by the elves. As soon as the Grendel stepped on the seal, it glowed, and I fell through to the Otherworld. It was a narrow escape.”
“Why would you want to see the other side of the shield?” Elric asked. “This place is terrible.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Osmund insisted.
“Of course I wouldn’t. The shield is there for a reason. It keeps everyone safe.” Sure, he had felt trapped while he was locked in his room, but now that he was beyond the shield, he wanted to run back inside it. Elric didn’t like feeling so exposed. There was a reaper somewhere in these woods. He had seen it.
“Yet here we are,” Osmund said, motioning around. “Wonderfully unsafe.”
“I had no choice,” Elric protested. “The queen forbade me from finding Wynn.”
“Well, maybe I didn’t have a choice either.” Osmund’s voice was tinged with a very old anger and frustration. He let out a sigh and shrugged. “I was a foolish kid, what can I say?”
“It had to be hard, when you discovered what the Otherworld was like.” Elric remembered how difficult it was to survive on his own with Wynn, with no one to look out for them. “The Otherworld has so many bad things.”
Osmund gave him that disbelieving look that he had given Elric when they first met, and Elric underestimated the man. “You can be truly terrible as seeing past your own nose.” He motioned to the woods with his glowing rock. “I liked the Otherworld. I had a home that I built with my own two hands that suited me, the woods gave me what I needed, and for the most part I endeared myself to people.”
Elric gave him a skeptical look.
Osmund bent to examine a broken stick. “What? No one can resist my sunny personality.”
If they were anywhere else, Elric might have chuckled. Here, he didn’t have the spirit to give Osmund anything more than an exasperated shake of the head. Osmund walked ahead. “When I lived here, I knew I was growing older, but I wasn’t sure if I was growing up. Make no mistake, I’m not glad to be back.”
He thought he knew what Osmund meant. Zephyr was over four hundred years old, and yet he seemed like any other young boy Elric’s age. He wasn’t changing.
No matter how Osmund felt about being here, Elric was sure of one thing. “I’m glad you’re back,” he said.
Osmund gave him a warm smile, then continued down what could barely be called a path. There was a pride in Osmund’s bearing. Elric thought about Osmund’s hut and how comfortable he had seemed in it. He had made himself his own world. “Will you return to the Otherworld when all this is over?” Elric asked.
Osmund bent to inspect a footprint and didn’t answer. “Let’s find your sister.” He took another step forward and pushed aside some brush with the handle of his ax. “Look at this.”
Elric ran forward, but when he saw that Osmund had found, he immediately took a step back. Lying on the ground in the small clearing was a large snake-like creature. Its enormous eyes had been clouded over by death. Stiff spines ran the length of the creature’s back. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” Osmund admitted. “I don’t know much about the creatures of this wood. I’m only familiar with the elves, and trust me, we don’t want to run into them.”
Elric knelt, picked up a twig from the ground nearby and poked at the dead snake. “It looks like its head was bashed in.”
“And the scales are ripped,” Osmund noted. “Claws, perhaps?”
More bird prints dotted the mud around the carcass; they were the right size and shape for an odd-toed hen. “Wait a minute,” Osmund said, inspecting one of the slashes in the snake’s skin. There was a distinctive wound to the eye as well, as if it had been pecked. “Did Mildred do this?”
A tiny flame of hope lit in Elric’s heart. He looked around and found a blunted stick sitting on top of a thick thornbush as if it had been hastily thrown there. There was a dark stain of dried blood on one end. “I think she did. I think they both did.” He glanced behind him and saw more prints leading away. Hope and the swell of pride mixed with his worry. Wynn had faced a darkling creature and she defeated it on her own.
Elric followed the tracks, with Osmund close behind. They came to a dry creek bed. Some branches of a nearby bush were broken. Elric took a closer look, and found a glittering thread caught on one of the thorns. Elric pulled the thread free; it glowed in the dim light. It must have come from Wynn’s dress.
“What are these prints?” Osmund was bent low near a thick tree trunk. Elric came to his side and saw long, thin rabbit-like prints in the shape of a V. Very different marks had been pressed in the mud where a rabbit’s front legs should be. They looked like miniature hands with long, bony fingers. Elric felt a jolt through his whole body. He knew a creature with rabbit legs and long, bony hands.
“Hob!” Elric said. He couldn’t contain his excitement. “Hob found her.”
“Who is Hob?” Osmund asked. “Or should I ask, what is Hob?”
“I don’t know what he is,” Elric admitted. “He’s a mix of a man, a rabbit, a fox, and a rat, I suppose.”
Osmund gave him a blank stare. “How does that work?”
“He’s the strangest creature I’ve ever seen, of that there
