Page 9 of Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

Nadya kept walking until her legs began to ache. The forest seemed to go on forever, as wide as the river was long, and she hadn’t been able to see the end of the river in either direction, no matter how hard she squinted. Nothing moved in the trees. The frog was far behind her now, and she was safely alone.

Wrapping her arms around herself, Nadya sank into a crouching position at the base of the nearest tree, shivering and shuddering, trying to ride the fear as it swept over her in a crushing wave. She was alone. She was lost in this strange place, and she wasalone.No matter how far she walked, that wasn’t going to change unless she found other people, and to do that, she would have to find her way out of the forest, and what if there was another frog waiting to gobble her down, quick as the first one had swallowed her arm? She was tired and she was cold and her clothes were wet and sticking to her, uncomfortably, and her feet hurt and the stump of her arm hurt and she was hungry and getting hungrier. Soon, she’d be hungry enough for the mushrooms to start looking like food, and she knew enough about the wilderness to know that people who ate wild mushrooms didn’t have long lives ahead of them.

She was going to die here. There was no way around it. She shook and shuddered, trying to sob without making a sound. If therewasanything in this wood to attract, she didn’t want to meet it.

“Stop your weeping, human child,” said a voice, close to her ear. It was a thin voice, lacking substance somehow, like the lungs behind it weren’t very strong. Nadya jerked upright,taking her forearm away from her eyes, whipping around to see who had spoken.

The words were in English. Someone had found her, someonemusthave found her, she wasn’t lost anymore, she—

She was looking at a small fox with tawny reddish-gold fur and a white blaze across its chest and the lower part of its muzzle, sitting on a nearby tree root with its bushy tail wrapped securely around its paws. It tracked the motion of her head with its sharp golden eyes, and it was hard not to feel as if it knew exactly what it was looking at.

“Hello?” called Nadya, looking away from the fox. “Is there someone there?”

“I’mhere, and you were just looking at me, so you’d think you would know that,” said the voice, sounding less than amused. Nadya’s head snapped back around. She stared at the fox. The fox stared back.

Several long seconds passed like this, until the fox yawned enormously, showing a great many sharp white teeth, and hopped off the tree root to the marshy ground. “Fine,” it said, as it went. “If you aren’t interested in civil conversation, I’ll be on my way, and you can go back to watering the mushrooms.”

“No!” blurted Nadya, raising her hand in a beseeching gesture. The fox stopped and looked at her. “Please. Please don’t go. I just… Where I come from, foxes don’t talk.” Not outside of stories, anyway. She’d heard plenty of stories about talking foxes, and stories had to come from somewhere, didn’t they? Stories had to have beginnings, which meant someone had tobewhere they were beginning, or there was no purpose to them. She was just at the beginning of a story, that was all, and this was perfectly possible.

The fox continued looking at her for a long moment,seeming, in a sharp, vulpine way, to take her measure. Then it trotted back to the tree and hopped back up onto the root where it had been sitting before. “Very well, as long as you hold my interest,” it said. “Do you have a name, human child? And what has become of your arm?”

“My name is Nadezhda,” said Nadya, because here, it still could be; she had the feeling that no one in this vast and flooded forest would care what she called herself, or if that name felt foreign on their tongues. “The frog that came out of the river took my arm and swallowed it.”

“Dreadful things, frogs,” said the fox. “Mostly stomach, with just enough leg attached to fling themselves at the food. And for a frog, ‘food’ means whatever they can fit into their mouths, which are large outside of all reason. No, you were right to run away from a frog large enough to take a human’s arm. I would have run as well. We can’t all be heroes, after all. World’s not looking for one at the moment, so far as I’m aware.”

“What would a hero have done?”

“A hero would have found a way to fight the frog, to be sure it couldn’t take the arms off of anyone else. Can’t have a community without any arms at all. I mean, I have no arms, as you humans measure them, but I need my legs. I can get about just fine with one injured paw. Hurt two of them, and whew.” The fox whistled, long and low. “Two paws down and there’s nothing getting done.”

Nadya frowned. She’d been able to feed the frog a rock, but there hadn’t been anything else for her to fight the frog with, not once it had taken her arm away from her. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was better to be a person who at leasttriedto be a hero, as opposed to someone who didn’t try at all, and so rather than dwelling on it, she seized on whatseemed like the most important part of what the fox had said: “Community? Are there human people around here?”

Because the fox, while clearly a fox, was also quite clearly a person. People could talk and have opinions about things like frogs and heroes and manners. Animals could be nice—her turtles were animals, and she loved them very much—but they didn’t have any of those things. They were just animals. They couldn’t be blamed when they did things like scratch or bite or come out of the river and eat your arm. They weren’t doing it to be bad or mean. They were doing it to beanimals.

The fox looked at her thoughtfully before nodding in apparent satisfaction. “There are some, if you’d like me to take you to them. But we’ll have to go the rest of the way through the forest to reach them. It’s safe, as long as the rain doesn’t come before we get there. Still, you might prefer not to.”

Nadya couldn’t think of a single reason why she wouldn’t want to leave the forest and find people, unless… “Is it very far to the edge of the wood?” she asked a little anxiously. “My feet are tired, and I’m getting very hungry.”

“I’m assuming the frog came out of the River Winsome, since it’s the only one around here with frogs as large as you’re describing,” said the fox, and paused, presumably to give her time to confirm or deny the assumption. Nadya shrugged helplessly. If these rivers had names, she didn’t know them. The fox sighed. “If the frog came out of the Winsome, we’re halfway between there and the River Wild.”

Nadya blinked. “Wouldn’t that be the same if the frog came out of the Wild?”

“Yes, but the human people are by the River Wild this time of day, and not the Winsome at all. Plus, I’d rather not go to where there’s a frog large enough to think it can make a meal out of a human. I’d be a delicious little snack for a froglike that. No, thank you. If the frog is by the Wild, I’ll lead you to the Winsome, but that won’t give you people.”

“Oh.” Nadya frowned. “How do I know which river the frog came from?”

“What else did you see?”

“There were trees along the river’s edge, growing in the water, not on the bank, and— Oh!There was another river on the other side, but it was running in the wrong direction. I didn’t think rivers could be that close together and run in different directions.” Nadya frowned. “It didn’t make much sense.”

“That was the Winsome, then, and on her other side, the Wicked. Wild is one of the single rivers, and as she doesn’t have a sister, she runs a little harsher when the rains come down.” The fox hopped off the tree root again. “We’ll have to walk as far as you’ve walked already, and there’s no helping that, but I can tell you which berries are safe for humans to eat.”

“Thank you, fox,” said Nadya, hurrying to straighten up so she could follow the fox. “Um, you asked my name, but I forgot to ask yours. I’m sorry. What would you like me to call you, fox?”

“That’s a good way of asking, since I doubt your funny flat face could speak my name if it tried,” said the fox, not unkindly. “You can call me Artyom, if you would like.”

“Is that your name?”

“Among humans, yes. It means ‘beloved of Artemis,’ and all foxes are beloved of the Huntress, one way or another.”

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