Chapter Two
The Ball of Thorns
It was small.
It was brown.
It was snuffling along under the leaf litter with its nose down and its whole back covered in what looked, to a fox, like a great many small brown thorns.
Ember stopped dead. His ears came up. His tail came up. Every single hair on him came up with delight.
A new creature.
He had met rabbits and squirrels and mice and the toad and one extremely unfriendly goose, but he had never in his life met whatever this was, and it was rummaging about in his own Hollow, and it was small and busy and interesting, and Ember’s heart went off like a firework.
“HELLO!” he shouted, and he pounced.
He did not pounce on it — he would never have done that. He pounced beside it, the way you might land in front of a friend to surprise them, all four paws hitting the leaves at once with a tremendous crashing rustle, his face bright and his tail going like a whip.
“HELLO! HELLO! What ARE you? I’ve never seen you! Are you new? Do you live here? I’m Ember! I live over there! What ARE you?”
The small brown creature did not answer.
The small brown creature had vanished.
Where it had been there was now a ball.
It was a perfect ball, about the size of Ember’s own head, and it was covered all over — every part of it, top and bottom and both ends — in stiff brown spines that stood straight out in every direction. There was no face on it. There were no legs. There was no nose and no tail and no eyes and no ears. It was as though the creature had folded itself away entirely and left a small angry chestnut behind in its place.
Ember stared at it.
“…Hello?” he said.
The ball said nothing.
Ember walked all the way round it. He put his head down low and looked at it sideways. He looked at it from the other side. He sat down in the leaves and studied it.
“That’s a good trick,” he said, with real admiration. “How do you do that? Can you come out now?”
The ball did not come out.
A cold little wind came over the ridge and went through the leaves, and somewhere up above them a whole flock of birds went south in a long ragged line, and the afternoon light slid a bit further down the slope. And Ember sat in the leaves in front of a ball of thorns that would not talk to him, feeling — for the first time in a long while — completely at a loss.
