"Don't be ridiculous. You don't kill kits for fur. The Princess would be appalled." The poor kits were nearly out of their minds with fear now. He whistled for the bird, which flitted through the trees and landed on a bit of the debris at eye-height. "Can you find the mother and coax her back?" he asked her. "Tell her I'm getting the kits out." He chirruped at them, but they ignored him. Even though they should have understood him, they were too terrified to think. They couldn't go much longer without feeding; their eyes were beginning to look a little glazed to him.
"Of course!" The bird flitted off. Siegfried examined the problem in front of him. There were a lot of branches piled up, and one log as big around as his thigh. The best solution would be to cut all that up. He needed them to get away from the debris-choked entrance, because once he started chopping, an inquisitive nose in the wrong place could result in tragedy. He went down on one knee next to the den to explain, but as soon as he approached, they squirmed as deep as they could manage under the big log all by themselves, cowering away from him. Assured now he wouldn't strike them with errant chips or his axe, he raised the axe over his head and began carefully chopping away the debris, checking now and again to be sure he wasn't making things worse.
There was a lot of brush here, and the branches were springy. He was about halfway through the obstacle, when the bird flitted back followed by a trembling vixen. The little fox looked up at him with a terrified face, cowering when she saw the axe in his hand as if she expected him to rain blows down on her at any moment.
"It's all right, little mother," Siegfried said soothingly, looking, not straight at her, but off to the side. "You've nothing to fear from me. Give me a little more time. We'll have your children out."
"I hope so," Leopold said, sounding a little cross. "If we're going to wander about the forest, I'd prefer to do so in the saddle. I'm getting eaten to death by midges and mosquitoes." But he waded into the brush and started pulling the stuff that Siegfried had already cut, hauling it away from the mouth of the den so that Siegfried could get more easily at that last barrier.
The vixen slowly got over her fear when she saw he was doing what he said he would do. Her ears came up, her tail came out from between her legs, and she darted in to seize branches in her teeth and haul them away for him.
A short time later, while the vixen danced with impatience, Siegfried made the last cut through the thick branch lying across the entrance, Leopold pulled the branch away, and the vixen dashed inside. From within the darkness of the den, suckling sounds emerged.
"There you go, little mother," Siegfried called. There was no answer, but he didn't expect one.
"What, no 'thank you'?" Leopold said mockingly. "All right, let's get back to the horses and the King's Arms."
"Are you sure you want to?" Siegfried asked. "It's cruel hot in the city. It's nice and cool here." He shouldered his axe and made his way hack to the path, listening to the life of the forest come back to normal now that he wasn't making all that racket anymore.
"It is cool here, as long as I don't have to chop wood or do some other insane thing you think you need to do. How can you tell where you're going in this maze?" Leopold asked.
"You weren't the one chopping wood, and I know where I am going because I follow the bird," said Siegfried with amusement. "All right, how about this. You were complaining that you couldn't find a gift for the Princess in the city that every other suitor would be able to duplicate. You will be much more likely to find something out here. As long as it doesn't require killing something that doesn't need to be killed, we stay here in the forest until we find something for you to give Rosamund to impress her."
He pushed aside some bushes, and there were the horses, waiting patiently, pulling up the few blades of grass they could find. Grass had a hard time growing where there was so little direct sunlight.
"What are we going to find here? It's a forest " Leopold asked incredulously. "There's no one out here!"
"That's where you are wrong, and that is why we'll find something. It's a forest. It's The Tra — " He stopped himself from saying "The Tradition" in time. "It's the way things work. Forests are full of magical things. The bigger the forest, and the more powerful the kingdom's Godmother is, the more magical things will be in it."
Leopold took up his horse's reins and fitted one boot into the stirrup. "Well if we find that frog who says he's a Prince in here, I am not bringing him back. I refuse to add to the competition."
They mounted, Siegfried cheerfully, Leopold impatiently, and Siegfried led the way deeper in.
They passed by the ruins of a cottage; it had once been carved and painted in a manner that was like nothing he had ever seen before. The door was off its hinges and on the ground, there were holes in the roof, and most of the trim had fallen off. They went inside and looked it over curiously, but could find nothing to tell who had lived there or what had happened to her. Her, Siegfried was fairly sure, because of the tattered remains of black dresses and skirts in a chest. Whoever it was had done a lot of baking, for there was an outsize oven in the yard. Maybe that accounted for why what was left of the walls and roof looked like a fancy wedding cake. It almost looked as if something else had been fastened over the wood, but whatever it had been was long gone.
"That place's almost morbidly cheerful," Leopold noted, as they left the cottage behind. "I think if I lived in a house that looked like you could eat yourself sick on it, I'd have to kill myself after a while." The path emerged from the woods and came out beside a pond. "Maybe that's what happened to the owner. She couldn't stand it anymore and jumped into her own oven. And why would you need a cottage to look like that out where no one could see it but you, anyway?"
"Maybe she used to be a baker in the city," Siegfried suggested.
If the cottage had been morbidly cheerful, this pond was just morbid. Despite the fact that the sun was high in the sky, there was no sign of sunlight here — it might have been twilight, not almost noon. It was surrounded by weeping willows that dripped their boughs morosely into the water, and a mist hung over most of the open area and wreathed in among the trees. The surface was covered with lily pads, but there were no lily flowers among the flat green leaves.
There was also no sound. Not a frog, not a bird, not even the plop of a fish.
Siegfried sensed something that he didn't like about the place. Something dark and dangerous. His skin began to crawl, and he felt the distinct urge to get away from there as quickly as he could.
And at that moment, the mist on the far side parted to reveal a beautiful, golden-haired girl, sitting with her legs dangling in the water, combing out her tresses. Except for the hair, she was absolutely nude. That was when Siegfried recognized exactly what the peril was.
"Now that's more like — " Leopold exclaimed, his eyes lighting up.
And Siegfried grabbed his friend's horse's reins, pulling them out of Leopold's hands, and spurred his own horse, plunging both of them into the green-scented forest gloom again. They needed to get away from there fast. Before she saw them and started singing.
"Siegfried!" Leopold snatched in vain for the reins, his face going red with anger. "Siegfried, what are you doing? What's wrong with you? That was a woman back there!"