“Some monsters speak, child,” said the beast. “The very best monsters speak like kings and queens, eloquent and alluring, and the trick is learning not to listen. If you listen to those monsters, they’ll have your heart out before you realize how much danger you’re in.”
“Do you have a name?”
“They call me the Bumble Bear, because I am big as a bear, and hatched in a hive among all the other bees. It was golden honey and golden afternoons, when I was young; it was all sweetness and nectar. But the Queen of Swords had need of a monster, and so she plucked me from the honeycomb and breathed vastness onto me, took my wings and traded them for teeth and claws and hunger. I am what I am because she wanted me so, and I love her for seeing the potential in me, and I despise her for taking me away from my family. She’ll change you if she catches you, little human children. She’ll make you over into her dearest desires, and not understand why you might want anything else, even for a moment. Queens are cruel monsters. They eat and eat and are never full, and they leave lesser beasts in their wake. So I ask again, for my stomach aches and my temper shortens: what will you give me to let you pass?”
“We don’t have anything,” said Avery. “We’re children.” Because Avery, of course, had been allowed the luxury of thinking that childhood was somehow sacred: that it somehow compelled the world to be kind. There had always been people who criticized his parents for the way they raised him, who said that he was an adult in miniature, with his starched shirts and his sensible shoes, but he had never once worried about where dinner was going to come from, or what would happen if he trusted an adult’s word.
Zib, however … her parents had done their best, and they had never been bad parents, not intentionally, not exactly. But they had been little more than children themselves when she was born, and her father was always tired from driving buses and being a parent to other people’s children, while her mother made her living with dreams, and sometimes forgot that children needed things like lunches and snacks and shoes without holes in the bottoms. They did their best. Their house was filled with love. That didn’t mean Zib had ever, for an hour, for an instant, had the casual faith in the difference between childhood and adulthood that Avery clung to so fiercely.
“What do you want?” she asked, cautiously.
“Something good,” said the Bumble Bear. “Something you’ll remember. Something you’ll regret. I could take the freckles from your cheeks, or the frizzes from your hair. They would look very fine in my fur.”
Zib clutched the sides of her head, horrified. Her freckles were her own, and she didn’t want them to be gone, but more, her hair was the one part of her that had never listened to anyone else, not ever, not since she was born. She had been told to be good, be quiet, sit still, behave, and she had done her best to listen, over and over again, even when the people speaking didn’t have her best interests at heart. Like most of us, Zib had only ever wanted to be loved, and had always been willing to compromise to make it more possible. Her hair, however—her hair knew no compromise, gave no quarter. It was wild and dizzy and ecstatic, like lightning striking the same patch of sand over and over again for nothing more than the joy of kissing the world. Without it, she would be someone else. Maybe someone who people would like better, listen to more; maybe someone who had more friends, whose parents were better about making breakfasts and buying clean socks. If her hair finally calmed down, maybe she could be Hepzibah after all.
She didn’t want to be Hepzibah. She wanted to be Zib, Zib, Zib, for as long as she could, and she certainly didn’t want to give Zib to a beast of the brambles, however cruelly that beast had been treated by a queen.
“Not those,” she said.
“What, then? The contents of your pockets? The shine from your eyes? You have to give me something, or I’ll never let you pass, and wherever it is you thought you were going will have to wait forever to have you.” The Bumble Bear considered its own claws. “The choice is yours. I can stand here as long as anything.”
Shine … “The shine from Avery’s shoes,” Zib blurted, not seeing the horrified, betrayed look Avery gave her. “Could you take that?”
“I can take anything,” said the Bumble Bear. It looked at Avery for a moment. Then it nodded, apparently satisfied. “Yes. That will do. Come here, children, and do not be afraid. We’re bound by a bargain now, you and I, and that makes us the next best thing to brothers, at least until that bargain is fulfilled. I could no more do you harm than I could pluck the eyes from my own head and still see the sky.”
“I don’t want—” began Avery, and stopped as the Bumble Bear looked at him.
“Do you wish to challenge the bargain?” it asked. “You can say the girl has no right to deal for you, of course you can say that, and then I will have to treat her as a thief.” It smiled, showing all of its teeth, as the crows in the brambles cawed fury and fear. “It would be my pleasure.”
“N-no,” said Avery. “She has the right to deal for us both.”
Zib looked at him with gratitude and joy. Avery didn’t look at her at all.
“Then come, children, and continue,” said the Bumble Bear.
They descended the last of the stone steps side by shaking side, and when they reached the beast, with
