Page 32 of Wondrous

“I’m not answering to a human name,” he snapped from the darkness.

“But I can’t keep calling you Jabberwock,” I exclaimed.

“Why not?”

“It feels rude. How about we shorten it? I’ll call you”—I chewed my lip—“Jack. How about that?”

“How about you don’t call me anything?” He emerged from the trees behind me, making me start. “I don’t want to be on familiar terms with you. I intend to forget your existence the second you turn me back.”

“Jack is a compromise. It’s just Jabberwock with a few letters missing.”

He made an exasperated sound, but he wasn’t really paying attention to me—he was preoccupied with something he’d gathered in the forest that looked like small pale leaves. “Fine. Though I still don’t see the point.”

He came toward the fire, and I realized that he wasn’t holding leaves but a load of dead moths. I nearly dropped the teapot into the fire.

“You eat them raw?” I said, unable to keep the disgust from my voice.

“Yes, we like them as fresh as possible,” he said. When my expression didn’t change, he rolled his eyes and said, “Of course we don’t eat them raw. We roast them in oil over the fire, or sometimes grind them into biscuits.”

“I don’t know why you expect me to know when you’re joking,” I said. “Until yesterday, I thought you ate people. Roasted moths aren’t any less far-fetched than raw, from my perspective.”

“That’s the problem with you two-handers. You don’t bother to learn anything about jabberwocks before you barge into our woods and chop our heads off. We’ve never done anything to you.”

“That’s not what the stories say,” I replied, though I was getting tired of arguing with him, and I also wished he wouldn’t keep bringing up having his head cut off. But then, given his mother’s death, it wasn’t an unreasonable thing to hold a grudge about. In fact, it was difficult to think of a more reasonable grudge to have.

“Your stories are wrong,” he said flatly. “No, we’re not harmless, and we might attack one of you if we’re frightened or starving, but we’d much rather be left alone in our woods. We mind our own business.”

“You weren’t minding your own business back in the Jabberwoods.”

“I knew you weren’t in that tent,” he said, giving me a withering look. “I wanted to scare you into leaving.”

“Oh,” I said, and then the realization dawned on me. “Oh! You’re like bears.”

“What?”

“Well, bears attack people sometimes, and they certainly look menacing, but for the most part, they won’t hurt you if you stay out of their way. People in my world hunt them for their pelts, I think. They make them into rugs.”

“I can believe that,” Jack said. “I can believe two-handers would hunt anything they don’t like the looks of. Do you have a frying pan?”

“You are not frying moths in my pan!” I exclaimed, and we spent the next ten minutes arguing about it. In the end, we compromised: I cooked my supper first, which consisted of a roasted bean stew the Hatter had packed for me—every meal he prepared was vegetarian, in deference to the Hare. I scooped it into a bowl and handed him the frying pan so I wouldn’t need to get moth dust in my food.

He borrowed some of my cooking oil and soon had the moths sizzling away. I had to admit, they didn’t smell half as terrible as I thought they would.

“Thanks,” he said distractedly as I handed him a cup of tea, again doing him the favor of lending him the happy-memory cup, not that he seemed to appreciate it.

I paused, then said, “We should celebrate the occasion.”

“What occasion?”

“Well, I believe that was the first civil word you’ve said to me.”

He made no reply, merely gave me another scrutinizing look. Sometimes he looked at me as if I were the most irritating person in the world, and other times I could have sworn he was afraid of me.

We ate in silence, pausing only to refill our teacups—I was using the wisdom one again, because I obviously couldn’t use either of the other two. It was an uncomfortable silence, because of all the questions I wanted to ask him but didn’t dare to—questions that went beyond what jabberwocks ate, about how they lived and what they thought about the Queen, and whether they had a queen or houses or towns. And given the glances he kept darting at me, it was clear he had things he wanted to ask, and all our unspoken questions hung in the air like invisible thorns, making me unnaturally aware of my every movement.

Fortunately, the hedgehogs began trotting out of the forest then, and I had an excuse to break the silence by fussing over them. Several had been gathering tea ingredients during the day—an assortment of mulberries and tea leaves, for the most part, though Pigmy also had bark from a crumper tree on his spines. I removed the scraps and returned them to the woods, though I felt guilty doing it—I couldn’t carry any more on my quest. Then I fed them their supper.

“We’re low on crickets,” I muttered.