Chapter Text
The Netherlands, September 1940
A chorus of whimpers and sniffles intertwined with the sounds of lapping water. It was a miserable tune considering it was a voyage purposed around hope. It was a sorry sight to see: families, huddled together on a small fishing trawler, looking back at the spot where Scheveningen faded off into the distance.
Cornelia squeezed her little brother’s hand, urging him to stay awake until they were closer to England and much, much further from whatever force was swallowing Europe. While the quick descent of brutality came as a shock to most of her peers, Cornelia herself was far from surprised. Her schoolmates and even her brother, Robbie, proclaimed that the Dutch neutrality would keep them out of harm’s way, but the tense looks on the adult faces around her always seemed to point to the contrary. She had spent her nights pressing her ear up to her bedroom door, listening in on her parents’ conversations about the German advances. It was safe to say that the Van der Meer family did not put much faith in the virtue of neutrality when the enemy was next door.
Robbie looked up at her and blinked away the sleep in his eyes, or at least that’s what Cornelia thought he was doing before the crocodile tears burst forth.
“Corrie.” Mrs. Van der Meer glanced down at Cornelia disapprovingly before scooping Robbie up in her arms and taking him for a turn about the crowded boat.
“Sorry, het spijt me...” Cornelia muttered her apology in the general direction of her mother. She was sorry; she hadn’t meant for Robbie to cry at all. Cornelia just knew that now was the time to be watchful—not restful. For all these Dutch refugees knew, a German ship could be on its way, scouting for a fleeing party just like the one on this ship. And she wasn’t about to put her trust in an idealistic escape route either, especially if something like the Rotterdam Blitz could happen so suddenly.
She fiddled with the ring she wore on her thumb, taking it off and shifting it between her fingers. Cornelia had bought this with her best friend Clara de Roos. The two had saved up just enough to buy this ring. It was no more Cornelia’s than it was Clara’s. Upon first seeing it, Clara declared that it was simply so charming—with its flowery metalwork and stone bearing the color of the House Orange—that it must be good luck. She had given the ring to Cornelia once she heard that the Van der Meers were fleeing to England.
Cornelia shifted the ring in her hands once more, remembering how Clara had removed it from her finger only a few days prior, saying, “Jan doesn’t like me anyway, making it to England is a better use of the luck.” Cornelia argued vehemently that staying in Holland required even more luck, but Clara refused to hear it. And so that ring found its place on Cornelia’s thumb that day. She had wished it would fit her middle finger as advertised in the shop, but she was too young, and her thumb was the only comparably sized finger.
Cornelia huffed out a rueful laugh. After all, what luck could a rock nestled in metal bring? Why didn’t Clara’s family come with them? Then the girls could share the luck.
Without warning, the trawler lurched beneath her feet, and the ring flung out of her hands and into the waters just yonder. Cornelia spied one last flash of the shiny metal before it was entirely enveloped by the wine-dark waters. Her boots knocked against the railing of the boat as she stretched her hand out in a delayed attempt to snatch it back. As the world in her head stilled, she considered whether that ring did harbor any luck despite her skepticism. And as far as the boat was concerned, it might as well have.
The whimpers and sniffles turned to silence and then to a cacophony of confused shouts and wails. The captain turned the ship a decisive 90 degrees with no warning or discernible reason whatsoever.
“Hou je mond!” Cornelia’s father cried out above the other voices, commanding them to be silent.
“Meneer van der Meer—” a woman holding a baby began before Cornelia’s father quieted her, signaling with his index to his lips that now was not the time to speak. The crowd watched with bated breath, hanging on every last twitch of his eye and quiver of his hand as he moved his finger away from his lips and instead used it to point at a light in the distance.
The light of a ship. Oh heavens no. The weight of the world seemed to be hoisted upon everyone’s shoulders. There was a universal sense of dread as they could not lift their feet off the ground or move to hide.
The first to break out of this trance was Cornelia. Luck had abandoned this ship, and decisive action was the only thing that could possibly rescue them now. She squeezed her way about the ship, rushing to the lamps illuminating their feet. If the light of the other ship was the only indication of company, then darkness on this ship might give them enough of a head start.
With the lights extinguished, there was nothing left for the refugees to do except find some place to hide and trust their rag-tag captain to find some discreet cover. The children and as many of the women as the boat would allow were ushered to hide in the cabin downstairs, while the rest resorted to lying flat on the floor of the boat, hoping that the lack of people would give the illusion of an abandoned boat floating about.
After what felt like years of waiting, they were permitted to emerge from hiding. Cornelia emerged from the cabin and—much to her surprise—was shepherded by the crowd off of the boat. Looking around her, she saw that they had stumbled upon a miracle. Somehow the captain had discovered a cavern that not only could fit the boat, but also had a strip of land for the crowd to collect on while they waited out the boat and planned a corrected route to England.
Cornelia whispered a quiet thank you to whatever luck that ring had given her before it was cast off the boat. With a new resolve, she set off through the crowd in search of her family.
“Corrie!” She heard a cry, and whipped her head around to face that direction. Instead of seeing her family—like she expected—she found herself staring deeper into the cavern. Then, her eye caught a brief glistening of light. And then another. Looking about her once last time for her family, she crept further into the cavern towards the light. Then, she saw it. The ring was pushed up onto the sand and then pulled back into the water. She ran for it. Just as she was about to grasp it in her hands, the ocean pulled it away from her and pushed it further into the cavern.
“Moeder? Mama?” her voice left her throat as a hoarse whisper. She tried again, willing her voice to be louder, “Papa!”
Cornelia glanced about the now surprisingly distant crowd once more to no avail. She tried for the ring once more, and once again it was similarly snatched away from her. In her focus, she failed to notice how with each step the air grew more frigid.
She resolved that she would try just one last time before giving up. She entirely expected to fail when her fingers finally gripped the metal of the ring. She tried to lift it up and out of the water, but it wouldn’t budge. She couldn’t hear the sounds of the water lapping against the shore anymore, nor did the water beneath her boots move so much as an inch. She examined the ring and came to realize that part of it was held firmly in place by ice. Unease blossomed in her gut as she looked about her. The harsh chill of her fingertips spread up her arms, and soon she was coated in a stinging cold. The mouth of the cavern behind her was a mere 10 feet deep with no sign of the boat she came here on, and the ground she was standing on was no shore but instead a frozen-solid lake surrounded by a snowy wood.
Cornelia turned on her heel to feel about the walls of the cavern, looking for where she could have possibly made such a wrong turn. After all, caverns hardly lead to entire lakes frozen solid in early September. She ran her palms across the stone of the cavern, silently praying that her hands would detect a curve in the stone leading to where she had entered while her eyes could only detect jagged rock upon jagged rock.
Soon, her breath became as jagged as the stone scratching at her fingers. Cornelia—as imaginative as she was—had grown uncomfortable with anything considered implausible following the war. And she could scarcely imagine a cavern spontaneously sealing itself shut to be “plausible” by any definition of the word.
“De ring, de ring…ring…ring…” she repeated under her breath, moving towards the pretty little thing. Her senses quickly began to conflate the chill encompassing her with the sensation of nervousness prickling up her spine. Cornelia didn’t believe in luck. Never did. She believed in good sense and careful decisions. However, she also believed in flexibility and a healthy dose of improvisation. Furthermore, as she saw it, either the implausible did happen and the cavern sealed itself shut, and in that case a lucky ring could be plausible, or she is panicked and there will be a perfectly obvious solution once she mellows out. If she could bring herself to believe in a lucky ring for even three minutes, surely she could calm her nerves enough to figure her situation out?
And so, Cornelia slid across the ice, skidding to a halt before the half-frozen ring. She resolutely squatted down, tugged at the ring with all her might, and prayed it wouldn’t snap in two.
She heaved in and huffed out large puffs of frozen breath as she wrestled against the grip of the lake. How could something freeze so solidly with so little time? Eventually, little Cornelia won the game of inanimate tug-of-war; the ring was wrenched free from the ice, and the force of the endeavor sent Cornelia sprawling on her back.
Labored breaths gave way into a bubbling giggle as she held the ring in her hands. She turned the ring over to look at the wet metal where the ring had been frozen. It bit at her fingers where she held it, and she could spy her own reflection in the metal. She saw a flash of orange in the reflection too, but how would the stone on the opposite side of the ring end up in this side's reflection?
She spun her body around and kicked off of the ice, sliding to the opposite end of the lake. Just behind where she once sat was a fiery orange fox cocking its head at her, with an expression she could only describe as a quizzical brow—if foxes could possess such a face.
She slowly rose to her feet. She mustn't appear scared. She may only be 13, but even her immature height was greater than the stature of a fox.
“Kst! Kst!” Cornelia shouted, deepening her voice. The fox did not budge despite her attempts to shoo it away.
The fox opened its mouth. She expected it to bare its teeth at her before it pounced. She drew her arms up around her face and squinted her eyes shut, heart pounding as if it were feverishly wishing for rescue.
“Good evening.” A voice sounded. A voice with a drawl that dripped like honey. A voice that spoke in very clear British English. The voice of a man.
Her eyes blinked open, and she peered through her arms. There was no one in front of her. She then quickly glanced about behind her, even though the sound had come from the front. Still, no one. She looked back at the fox, attempting to see if there was anything at all behind it.
The fox opened its mouth again, “Miss?”
The same voice. From the fox. A fox spoke to her. In English?
The implausible was most definitely taking place; There was no getting around it now. Cornelia dropped her hands to her sides and stared at the fox, as if challenging it to speak again.
The silence stretched on palpably. With no better use for this stretch of time, Cornelia raced through the series of events with a rattled clarity. She chased the ring through a seemingly endless cavern—in regretful retrospect, she remembered the crowd seeming too distant for how far she seemed to walk; the water in said cavern froze solid at a record-breaking pace; the beachside cavern led to a lake in a snowy wood; the cavern sealed itself up; and now a fox can speak. The next question Cornelia was faced with was this: Is this really happening, or did she hit her head on the way down into the cabin?
She contemplated this for a beat before deciding this was reality and not a dream. The primary piece of evidence for this being the language the fox spoke: She understood English well enough that if someone spoke to her in it she would be able to figure out what they were generally saying. However, she could not formulate a sentence herself. If this were her mind playing tricks on her, the fox would not be able to speak English half as well as this.
This time, it was Cornelia’s turn to break the silence. “Vossen praten niet.” she continued. She scrunched her nose—realizing that she should at least try to speak English—before pointing at the fox, “Fox talk.”
“Are you not accustomed to speaking with foxes?” the fox fired back in a gladdening tone.
“No.”
“Brilliant.”
“No.”
“Pardon?”
“Fox. No talk.” More English words slowly rose to the surface from the deep recesses of Cornelia’s mind.
“I dare say that’s the only thing you’ve seen me do. How can I not talk then?”
The two looked at each other expectantly.
“You speak like you were hardly born yesterday.” the fox asserted, “Are you quite well?”
“No.”
“Is ‘no’ all you can say?”
“No,” she stalled, realizing the irony, “I…am lost.” she flung her arms around her before wildly gesturing to the cavern from whence she came.
“Ah, I see. I would…love to help with that.” Cornelia detected a slight sardonic lilt to his voice, “Where are your parents? You do have parents?”
“Pear…end?” she asked, even though she knew full well what parents were.
“Mother? Father?” the fox insisted, an eagerness creeping further into his tone.
“Oh! Moeder en Vader! Ja.” she pointed at the cavern once more.
“Oh my, you really are lost.” his tail twitched for the briefest moment.
Cornelia pursed her lips, deciding how to respond and, moreover, if she wanted to respond at all. Perhaps the fox’s lips would be looser if he believed her to understand less? Her trepidation only grew as the fox hastily made his way over to her, encircling her feet much as a cat begging for food would.
“I know the way to a village where there are…” he scanned the trees briefly before continuing, “friends who can help you. In fact, I can be your friend too, on the way there at least.”
There it was again, Cornelia internally remarked, that duplicitous pause. She knew better than to wear her suspicion on her face, so she simply nodded in turn.
The fox took off at a jarring pace, leaving her to follow after him. The thick snow made the trek no easier. Cornelia could scarcely keep up with the tempo of the fox’s steps, let alone the galloping of her thoughts. The world around her was entirely obscured by white snowfall, and she couldn’t help but compare it to the clouds of flour that would pool in a room after dropping a sack. A crow sounds in the distance, and the flapping of wings fills the woods as the murder takes flight.
The fox came to a halt at the sight, which Cornelia was immensely grateful for as she was finally allowed to catch her breath. She was bone tired and now possessed a supreme regret for not sleeping as Robbie had on the fishing boat.
“I am Taron.” the fox turned to face her before continuing the walk. “We are but a short jaunt away from the village, but I figure it would still be pleasant to get to know each other in the meantime.”
“Hm.”
“Do you not have a name?”
“Name…” she trailed off. She knew what he was asking; “name” is awfully close to “naam.”
“Do you have any siblings? A brother, perhaps?” he pressed on.
“Broer.”
“Pardon?”
“Broer.” She decided to let him guess whether ‘broer’ was her name or if she meant that she had a brother.
Taron’s tail flicked once more.
Silence fell over the pair. Cornelia turned to deciding which melody she liked more: the sludge of the snow with every step, or the sound of waves beating against the side of the boat? She determined that neither possessed a pleasing quality when a shiver went down her spine. She shook her head, deciding that there were far more valuable expenditures of her time, like memorizing the journey. Mental notes were made about how many trees in succession had a knot in them, if one was particularly crooked, or shaped like a dragon, but that soon proved to be fruitless as the scenery was wholly monotonous. Instead, she looked to the sky, trying to spy the location and trajectory of the Sun through the wintry clouds.
“We’re here.” Taron stated glibly.
“Hier?” Cornelia was mystified; Taron had stopped the two in front of a collection of holes in the ground.
“I am a fox, after all.” he drawled wryly.
Foxholes, she realized.
She pointed to herself, “Big.” She pointed at the foxholes, “Small.”
“Yes, yes, dear. You wait here, and I will divulge the evening’s events to my friends.”
Taron dove into the biggest of the foxholes, leaving Cornelia to her own devices. While she knew it was impolite to eavesdrop, she also knew that she’d rather be alive and scorn her mother’s etiquette lessons than be a demure corpse. And so, she took slow, careful steps toward the foxhole and pressed her ear to the ground.
She heard two voices. For as much as Taron’s voice was silvery, the second voice was harsh and gravely. Cornelia decided she rather disliked the second voice; each syllable felt like a violent assault on her ear. As it turned out, eavesdropping through thick layers of soil proved to be far more of a challenge than eavesdropping through one’s bedroom door. The voices were clear, but the words themselves were muffled. Sometimes she’d be able to make out a sentence, but her English was far from qualified to make any use of those sentences.
However, she was confident that she heard the words:
“...North…”
“...queen…”
“...human…”
“...capture...”
These words collided in her mind with Taron’s every twitch and tone. At that moment, Cornelia knew only two things: she needed to go South, and she needed to run.
She took one step back. Then it was two. Then, she bolted to the trees.