Ulrika, very adept on her feet for such a small toddler, moved from the table to seize hold of the poker beside the fire. Even though it was summer, every house lit a fire and kept it smoldering through the day to cook food.
Brown curls bouncing, Ulrika staggered beneath the weight of the iron, her little hands fisting determinedly around the rod.
“Linnea!” I shouted, my body lifting up from where I sat as Iglanced anxiously toward the annex where my friend had disappeared, urging her to return and take her child in hand. “You need to get back in here!”
Linnea didn’t return.
I watched helplessly as Ulrika toddled closer to the hearth, using the poker to clumsily nudge aside the screen, as she had doubtlessly seen her mother and father do countless times when tending the fire.
Her brother laughed and clapped his chubby hands at her antics in approval, jiggling against his strap, clearly wishing to be free to join her.
“Ulrika!” I shouted futilely as the child squeezed past the screen and leaned in precariously close to take a stab at the flames in a weak imitation of Linnea stoking the fire.
The girl’s giggles bubbled up delightedly as she attacked the flames that crackled higher than her tiny body. She brandished the unwieldy metal stick with gleeful determination, plunging it into the fiery nest until it caught on a burning log. The tip snagged on the crumbling wood and Ulrika lost her balance, pitching forward so easily, so quickly in that way top-heavy toddlers do when unbalanced.
I screamed, lunging forward even as I knew there would be no reaching her, no getting to her.
No saving her.
I could touch nothing. Make no contact.
The small body fell forward and instantly became one with the fire in a great gust of spark and flame.
The child’s anguished shrieks were like nothing I had ever heard before. The sound vibrated in my ears as red-orange flames that snapped blue at the center devoured Ulrika.
And I could do nothing but watch.
Watch and unleash my silent scream.
14
The Funeral
Day 2,502
Before Ulrika’s tragic death, I hated my invisibilitybecause of how it affected me. Because of everything it took fromme. Because it made me feel lonely and lost, bleak and miserable—a ship adrift on an uncharted course. Like an insidious thief creeping through the dark, it stole from me all the things I watched others get to have.
Such hatred was a selfish kind of thing. It was about me. My feelings. My loss. And yet it fed me and kept me going these many years. It warmed me and put me on a path, directed me on a quest to find the creature who did this to me and make her pay.
I’d walked the woods every night without fail, with purpose, the routine as embedded as breathing, determined but apprehensive of facing a creature with the power to steal a life, to take it without ending it. Only powerful magic could do that, and fear pounded hard inside me, as constant as my own heart beneath the wall of my chest. Only a fool wouldn’t fear a witch with the power to turn me into this: nothingness, a void, dead space.
I’d always sensed her presence. She was close. So close. I clung to the belief that it would happen eventually. I’d find her, and the spell would be broken.
But now the damage went beyond me. It wasn’t just me.Iwas no longer solely affected.
The spell that ruined me had ruined another. Several people, infact. Lives irrevocably destroyed. Because a witch had decided to toy with me, I watched helplessly as Linnea’s daughter fell into the fire. I could do nothing to save the child.
The fear of that witch out there, lurking, watching, left me then. There was no more apprehension.
I no longer feared her.
She needed to fear me.
I grieved alongsideLinnea, staying with her, telling myself she needed me, but it was really me that needed her to survive this heartbreak.
I needed her to make some effort at life. I knew it was soon, only a couple days since the accident, and she was allowed her grief, but the way she didn’t react to anything or anyone around her was alarming. She simply sat and stared, unblinking, not speaking, not drinking, not eating.
Linnea’s mother had suffered a malady a year ago and was not very strong on her feet anymore. She was bound to bed or a chair, so Linnea’s cousin, Skadi, stayed with her, helping with the children and tending Linnea’s wounds. She had badly burned her hands trying to pull her daughter from the fire. Maretta had been sent for, and I’d watched as the healer examined the damage. I could tell from her grave expression that the burns were not merely superficial. They were serious.
