Tucked into a corner stood a throne of tangled roots, dull with a coat of dust. I slipped through a small door nestled into the wall beside it and up, up, up a winding staircase.
At the top of the tower was a warm reading room. Firelight painted long shadows over darkwood floors and velvet furnishings. Night had fallen quickly and there was far and wide no torchlight among the trees. Draped in a blanket, I opened the winged balcony doors and leaned in the frame, scanning the forest for movement.
Nothing stirred save two twisted elms at the far edge—
I tensed, aware for a horrid moment of what was about to happen. I strained against the urge to slip between the trees, to follow the curl of woodsmoke into the frozen forest. Something pulled me gently closer, closer—
I stumbled over a cracked rock. The wind hissed in my ears as if angered by my slowness. The little fox was quick and nimble, and though I was not yet old, I was not quite as sprightly as I used to be.
It was going to the far hill, that fox. To the pond amid reeds and birches. To the ancient oak. It would wait for me amid its roots.
I buried my hands in the bright moss draping the cliff like a soft, billowing cloak. The crevices in the stone shifted. It laughed at me, that stone, with whispering mouths full of sharp teeth. I chuckled as I pressed my hand firmly to the freezing rock. It hummed with dark pleasure. The stone-faces twisted into bearded men and cratered women.
Let me see you, they chanted. Let me taste you.
I sank my rigid fingers—coarse and cracked around the knuckles, wonderfully grey—deeper into the moss. I ached to join the choir of stone-faces in watching time slip past, forever unmoved and unchanged. The wind whispered lullabies into my stone-clad ears.
You have brought me whom I desire.
From the mist between the trees came a shrouded figure. A rider on a tall-antlered stag. The wicked King of the Forgotten Lands.
He had come for me.
Soon, I would come for him—
The world tilted and I slipped, tumbling onto polished floors. I shrieked, limbs and fingers stiff with cold and something else—
Just a dream. Just a vision.
I sat trembling on the floor, back pressed to the wall while I drew aching breaths. Down in the town, the lights began to fade one after another. Adrik was still deep in the forest, on the farthest hill beneath a moss-draped cliff, much too close to the churning mists. He was out there, and the wild hungered for him.
You have brought me whom I desire.
I flinched when torchlight spilled over the near hill; first one lone flame, then two, then four. I had not expected their return so soon. The group was slow to mount the final crest. As they passed under the lantern-lit towngate, relief swept like a summer tide into my veins, unfreezing the fingers I’d buried into the knotted scar. A great fox led his stag and his riders back into the town. He carried a lifeless figure on his back and he limped slightly on his hind leg.
I hastened to stoke the fire. Adrik would be freezing when he returned. To soothe my restlessness, I hurried down, down, down the winding stairs to find a kettle and glasses for tea. I learned quickly that this was a hopeless endeavour. I knew nothing about castles and though this was a small one, its stairs seemed always to end in a corridor I’d not discovered before, and its doors never led to the same chamber twice. I must have been somewhere near the kitchens—I’d just passed a store room brimming with sausages and smoked ham, ripe with the stenchof cabbage left too long to rot—when the sound of quick, self-important steps came from behind.
“Adrik!” I called with relief.
It was not Adrik who stepped from the dark.
I shrieked. For one dreadful breath, as I looked at the man before me, I feared death had come. He wore a stern, displeased face and where his eyes used to be were only two ill-healed wounds, as if carved from the sockets by a long-clawed beast; the work of a lesser faerie, perhaps.
“I apologize, miss,” he muttered. “I meant only to gather the king’s meal.”
He wore the deep red cloak of a servant, and though he held his head high, his back was bent with age. I did not know what had frightened me so—perhaps the mean tilt of his mouth or the ghastly wounds. A flush of shame came over me. I gave him a wavering smile. He smiled back, lips straining with effort.
“Oh,” I said meekly, pressing my back to the frigid brick wall.
The man stepped near, to hasten past me to the kitchen, I assumed. As he passed, his icy finger slithered over the flickering pulse of my wrist. He flinched and hurried off, leaving me to shiver with dread.
“Evana?”
A small sob broke from me. “Adrik!”
He leaned in the door at the shadowed end of the red-bricked corridor, and though he tried to appear casual, I noticed as I hurried to him that he was loath to put weight on his leg. I must have mustered him so warily, he laughed and bowed low to murmur, “Were you worried for me, Ana?”
I was about to fervently deny it, but I paused.Ana, he had said, tenderly. No one had ever called me such a thing, and I wished he’d say it again in that low, silken voice of his.
