Free Doll Bones by Holly Black Page A

it. Her going home would pretty much signal that they were doing something dumb.
    “Alice is right. We can bury the Queen next weekend or the weekend after that,” Zach said. “What’s the difference?”
    Poppy’s shoulders hunched forward as she got more tense. “If we don’t keep going now, we’ll never do it. We just won’t. You guys will make excuses and I’ll chicken out and Eleanor will find someone else to haunt, because I won’t be interesting enough to have a ghost talk to me. I won’t deserve to be the hero of a story, and I won’t be one.”
    “Everyone has a story,” Alice murmured. “Everyone’s the hero of their story. That’s what Ms. Evans said in English.”
    “No,” Poppy said, her low voice very fierce. “There’s people who do things and people who never do—who say they will someday, but they just don’t. I want to go on a quest. I’ve always wanted to go on a quest. And now that I have one, I’m not backing down from it. I’m not going home until it’s complete.”
    Zach thought she might be right. He thought of his dad, who wanted to do things and then didn’t. And he decided that even if it was dumb, he wanted to be the kind of person who was interesting enough to have a ghost talk to him. Even if the idea of the Queen being made of bones and filled with human ash grew more frightening the farther they got from home.
    Alice laughed a little, uncomfortably, like what Poppy said about being a hero had hit a little close to home for her, too.
    Leaving in the middle of the night and escaping from the bus station already seemed like the kinds of things that happened on quests, so from that perspective they were doing really well. And thinking that made his tired brain slip into playing mode, which led to thinking like William.
    “What if we don’t go back right away?” he asked suddenly. “If we don’t call anyone, we don’t get in trouble, right? No one will know what happened. So if you take the bus back tonight—not the one to East Liverpool, the one back home—then your grandmother will never know anything. Or maybe we could even make it to East Liverpool and take the bus back from there. There’s got to be a way for us to get there—we could walk if we have to. It can’t be that many miles up the river. And the quest would be completed, despite some slight setbacks.”
    “In the dark?” Alice asked.
    “We might as well try,” Poppy said, brightening. “And you don’t want to get in trouble, right?”
    “I’m tired and it’s the middle of the night,” said Alice. “I don’t feel like trying to follow some stupid map with a dying flashlight and the compass on my phone.”
    Zach thought about William the Blade, steering his ship by the North Star, and blinked up into the night sky. You were supposed to be able to find it by looking for the Big Dipper and then use that to find the Little Dipper. The North Star was the brightest of the Little Dipper stars, and the one at the very end of the Little Dipper’s handle.
    That’s the Polaris, he thought. If we can see that, we can’t get lost.
    “We’ll find our way.” When he spoke, he could feel William’s voice creeping into his own voice, which was strange because William was gone. “And figure out a place to make camp.”
    “Make camp?” Poppy asked.
    “Until break of day.” Maybe it was exhaustion, but it wasn’t that hard to think of what William would say. William always got into scrapes, so they didn’t bother him. Heck, he liked trouble. “We’ll eat the provisions we brought. Look, even according to the tiny map on the bus schedule, if we just follow the river, it should take us to East Liverpool. Our quest could still be completed.”
    “You want us to walk ?” Alice said. “Both of you have gone crazy.”
    “My lady, I want us to rest ,” Zach replied, offering her his arm. For once, he didn’t feel uncertain. “I want us to take our meager supplies and turn them into a feast.