On the way back to the bike, I caught my reflection in a puddle. The eyes that stared back were gold, not brown, and they glinted in the dawn.
I grinned, wiped the blood from my mouth, and said, “Next time, I’m coming through.”
The woods shuddered, as if they’d heard me.
Scarlette
The forest was a mouth of frozen teeth, biting down with every breath. I learned quickly not to stand still too long; the chill worked its way up from the mud and through my ruined slippers, burrowing into bone, and would not be evicted by will or wool. My hands, wrapped in the hem of my own dress, had cracked in three places by noon. The bright beads of blood that leaked from the skin froze into iron pellets before I could even taste them. I licked at the cuts anyway, more for spite than for healing. Hunger sharpened every sense, made the pain almost pleasant, a way to know that I was still alive.
I’d drifted two valleys west since dawn, keeping low under the yew and holly, and careful not to leave a straight path that could be tracked by dogs or worse, by men who thought like dogs. The last food was gone from my belly. The bundle of apples and bread, the secret kindness from Mother, had lasted two days, rationed cruel as penance, and now I lived on nothing but frostand the old animal faith that if I kept moving, I might live to see the river thaw. My reward was a mouth that tasted of blood and moss, and a mind that could not remember what warmth felt like. Or kindness.
I knelt by the hollow of a fallen elm and scraped at the dry wood, picking splinters for fire. The frost had worked deep, but I found a vein of rot, black and friable, that would burn if I coaxed it hard enough. I filled my skirt with shards, working blind and quick, then pressed my palm to the bole and left a print of sweat and blood on the bark. There was a desperate kind of beauty in the color, almost cheerful, as if the tree had chosen to blossom early just for me.
I did not allow myself to weep, though it would have been easy. The trees were indifferent to tears. They watched me from their dark crowns, the only witnesses to my decline, and I thought—briefly—of the story where a girl becomes a tree, her hands rooted in the mud, her voice turned to leaves. It would be better than dying cold and small, wouldn’t it? Better than what waited if Sir Aldric found me. Or worse, if Brother Tomas did.
The snap of a branch behind me was so sharp, I thought at first it was inside my own skull. I froze, heart slamming a hole in my chest. There was no way to run; I’d left myself exposed in the dead clearing, nothing between the enemy and me but a few yards of rotting snow. Instinct said to drop flat and pray, but I had never been good at praying. Instead, I edged myself into the curve of the elm, clutching the bundle of firewood to my stomach, and willed myself invisible.
The voices came next. They were not the calls of a search party, not the staccato panic of men driven by urgency. These voices were careful, measured, the way you spoke in places where the woods might be listening.
“—don’t fancy the business, not in daylight. She’s gone wild, that’s what’s happened. Like as not, she’s dead already.”
A laugh, too loud for comfort. “If she’s dead, then why are we shivering our arses off looking? He’s not paying for a corpse.”
Another voice, rough with cold or drink. “You’d take the coin either way, if you found her. Sir Aldric’s not particular what comes back, so long as it’s proof.”
The first voice again, closer. I could see the shadow of a head, a shape moving through the brush, barely an arm’s length from where I hid. I pressed my back hard against the wood, feeling every splinter bite.
“She’s not right,” said the shadow, low and urgent now. “Brother Tomas says it’s witchery. She vanished from the house, and nobody saw, not even the dogs. There’s talk in the village, says she flew, or turned herself to air.”
“She’s not a witch,” said the second, but it was half-hearted, a thing you said to fill the silence. “Just stubborn as all the Ashburn women. Would have made a right terror of a wife.”
The third voice was new, unfamiliar. Young, maybe, or else scared. “Witch or not, the Brother’s got the Lord’s men digging up every byre and hayrick east of the river. Even the Widow Thorne’s got them poking around, and she’d never open her door to a soul before now.”
I risked a glance. Three men, cloaked in the black-and-red livery of Sir Aldric’s house, though the trim was muddy and their boots worse. Not soldiers, exactly—too careless in their posture, too quick to reach for the comfort of a flask—but dangerous in the way of men who had nothing to lose but their own wretchedness. The tallest of them stopped and spat into the snow, then knelt, examining something at his feet. A print, maybe, or a blood-stain.
“She’s near. I’d swear it.” His breath steamed in the cold. “See here? Fresh. If she makes it to the river, she’ll freeze before the current takes her.”
The second man, broader in the shoulders, nudged the first with his boot. “So what? We chase her across the water? Not for what he’s paying.”
“Brother Tomas says she’s to be brought back for trial. Not for wedding. The church’ll want her head, if they can’t have her soul.”
A silence at that. The men shifted, uncomfortable. Even in the new century, the word “heretic” was a blade you did not handle lightly. They stood there, snow up to their calves, looking everywhere but at one another.
The third man, the nervous one, shivered and hiked his collar. “Did you hear what that merchant’s man—Trent, his name—what he offered for any news about the old oaks? Says he’s looking for strange lights or weirdness in the woods. Double for a living girl who’s seen the circle.”
The first man snorted. “The circle’s for stories and piss-scared children. I don’t buy it.”
But I did. The circle was real; I’d felt it, the pull of the trees, the way the air thickened and bent around the stones. It was the last place I’d been seen. The place I’d run from, if running was the word for what had happened. If the merchant’s man wanted to know about the circle, it was not for the comfort of stories. It was for something else, something that paid in blood or secrets or both.
I tried to steady my breathing, but every word caught like a fishhook in my throat. I imagined their hands on me, the roughness of their grip, the sneers and jibes. Worse, I imagined the silence after. The judgment, the church, the execution block. They would not just kill me; they would make an example of me. A lesson for every other girl who thought she could run.
The men started moving again, their boots crunching the frost, the sound receding only to swing wide around the clearing anddouble back, as if circling prey. I pressed myself flatter, not daring to blink.
Then, just as suddenly, they were gone. The woods swallowed them, their voices trailing away until nothing remained but the pulse in my ears and the taste of old fear on my tongue.
I waited, counting heartbeats, until I was sure they would not return. Only then did I let the firewood slip from my arms. The sticks tumbled to the ground, scattering like bones. My hands, blood-streaked and shaking, would not unclench. I stared at them, hating them for being so weak.
The cold was worse, now. It bit through the dress and into the marrow. I realized, with a kind of distant clarity, that I had left my only hope of warmth on the forest floor. The firewood was useless to me, even if I could find the flint. There would be no fire tonight. No sleep, either. Not with the men so near, or the memory of their words echoing through every hollow.
