She kicked her door open, tossing her sack of coin onto the rickety table.
“More than we even suspected, Goose,” she said to the pheasant mounted to a shelf on the wall. Her very first kill, and most constant companion these twenty years. “He did want to keep the pelt. It was a beauty; you should’ve seen it. Practically walked right up to me. Almost too easy, all things told.”
Kicking her muddy boots to the floor, she shut the door and set the basket of eggs gently on the table.
“You’re not long for this world,” she said to the hole over her stove, roughly patched with mud and large, flat maple leaves.
She loosened the laces of her jerkin and removed her quiver with its lone arrow. “Nor are you,” she said to an egg plucked from the basket. “But since it’s your last night, I’ll give you a vote: soft-boiled, or hard?”
If Perrine was there, and not a hundred miles away, she would roll her eyes at Anya for wasting a perfectly good egg on something so dull when there was wild garlic outside and flour in the cellar for a fine, simple quiche. If Johanna was more than a ghost on Anya’s shoulder, she would tell Anya soft-boiled was for hard days and hard-boiled for soft.
“Soft-boiled, then,” she said, then frowned. It was not a hard day. She had won a victory. A victory demanded celebration.
She glanced at the stuffed bird on the wall. “You’re quite right, Goose. Wedohave a bit of butter.”
She turned to the egg. “You’reoutnumbered. Fried.”
Johanna would scold her for wasting the butter, but if she was at the lodge, she would celebrate, boast all night of her success. Johanna had never understood it, the boasting, the self-congratulation.Meat is for eating, hide is for selling, and pride is for fools, she always said, using or selling every scrap of each of their kills, with the exception of the trophy of Anya’s first kill mounted onto the wall.
But Anya lived for those winter nights. The others would jeer, cast doubt on every inch of her story – some of which would be fluffed up, of course, but only the details – and then pour her a beer anyway.
“I do think there’s a bit of beer left in the cellar,” she mumbled, feeling around her nearly empty cabinet. “If the mice haven’t gotten into it, little topers.”
Still holding the egg, she pulled out the plain white butter dish. She lifted the lid. Completely empty. Not even a smear of grease on the chipped porcelain.
“Oh.” Carefully, she set the lid back in place. “Maybe there’s some in the cellar. But…no, that’s right. I used the last in my oats the other morning.”
That had been her first mistake. If you had fine things at all, you didn’t waste them on ordinary occasions. You saved them for when it counted. Otherwise, when it counted, you were left with less than nothing – a lack.
You oughtn’t worry for fine things at all, really. Fine things made you soft, dulled your edge. Or, like a fox’s pretty pelt gleaming in the twilight, made you a target for something sharper.
“But you do get tired of dreary oats,” she rationalized dully to the stuffed bird on her wall.
The bird did not answer.
For some reason, this caused a lump to form in her throat.
“Bite and beetle, it’s only butter.” She forced a laugh at her foolishness, wiped at her dry, burning eyes. “What’s wrong with me?”
As if in answer, a soft wind tickled the back of her neck.
Wind? Frowning, she turned. The door had swung open. “Am I to pay for a new door, then, as well?” she grumbled as she went to close it.
Someone sniffled. “Did that stingy farmer pay you enough for that?”
The egg shattered with a wet, sickeningsplaton her floor. Automatically, Anya reached for the knife kept strapped to her belt and spun around.
A young woman stood at her table. Anya nearly gasped. Aside from her sudden appearance, she was stunningly beautiful. Her smooth, autumn-gold hair was braided downher back. Her sleeveless dress was midnight blue, almost black, and it clung to her every smooth contour elegantly, particularly where the deep neckline plunged. Her shoulders were wrapped in ermine. Dusty rose lips pouted beneath shining blue eyes. She may have been the most beautiful woman Anya had ever seen.
And beautiful women were just about the last thing you wanted to see in the Lichtenwald.
She looked pitifully sad. She held a fox skin, still wet and red inside, in her hands. An uncommonly pretty fox skin.
Her own skin prickling in warning, Anya brandished her knife. “Get out of my house.”
The woman fell dramatically into one of Anya’s kitchen chairs. “Don’t you want to know why I came? Or even my name?”
But Anya had a gnawing suspicion she already knew this woman’s name. She wondered if she would have time to grab and load her shotgun – and knew, if her suspicion was correct, she would not.
