“Can’t he? His Darkness does not favor mercy,” said the ghost, his grip never loosening. He dragged her down a narrow corridor, then paused at a doorway to a steep staircase. He peered at her. “Will you walk on your own, or must I drag you the entire way? I warn you, these stairs can be treacherous.”
Serilda sagged, staring down the stairwell that spiraled fast from view. Her mind was spinning from everything the Erlking had said. Her head. Her father’s. A test. The dungeons.
She swayed, and might have fallen if the ghost’s grip hadn’t tightened on her arm.
“I can walk,” she whispered.
“Very convincing,” said the coachman, though he did release her. Taking a torch from a bracket beside the door, he headed into the stairwell.
Serilda hesitated, glancing back down the corridor. She felt confident she could retrace her steps back through the keep, and there was no one else in sight. Was there any hope of escaping?
“Do not forget who this castle belongs to,” said the ghost. “If you run, he will only further relish the chase.”
Swallowing hard, Serilda turned back. Dread settled like a stone in her stomach, but when the ghost started down the steps, she followed. She kept one hand on the wall for balance on the steep, narrow stairs, feeling dizzy as they descended.
Down some more.
And down again.
They must be underground now, somewhere amid the ancient foundations of the castle. Perhaps even beneath the surface of the lake.
They reached the bottom level and tromped through an open set of barred gates. Serilda shuddered to see a row of heavy wooden doors lining the wall to her right, each one reinforced with iron.
Cell doors. Serilda craned her neck to peer through the slitted windows, catching glimpses of manacles and chains hung from the ceiling, though she could not see enough to know whether any prisoners were dangling from them. She tried not to wonder if that would be her fate. She heard no moans, no crying, not the sounds she would expect to hear from tortured and starving prisoners. Perhaps these cells were empty. Or perhaps the prisoners were long dead. The only “prisoners” she’d ever heard of the Erlking taking were the children he’d once gifted to Perchta, though they wouldn’t have been kept in the dungeons. Oh, and the lost souls that followed the hunt on its chaotic rides, though they were more often left for dead by the roadside, not spirited away to his castle.
Never had she heard rumors of the Erlking keeping humans locked up in a dungeon.
But then, perhaps there were no rumors because no one ever lived to tell them.
“Stop it,” she whispered harshly to herself.
The coachman glanced back at her.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “Not you.”
A small critter caught her eye then, darting along the corridor wall before scurrying into a small hole in the mortar. A rat.
Lovely.
Then—something strange. A new scent collecting around her. Something sweet and familiar and entirely unexpected in the musty air.
“Here.” The ghost paused and gestured to a cell door that had been left open.
Serilda hesitated. This was it, then. She was to be a prisoner of the Erlking, locked in a dank, horrible cell. Left to starve and rot away into nothing. Or at least, trapped until morning, when she would have her head lopped off and hung up in the dining hall. She wondered if she would become a ghost herself, haunting these cold, dim corridors. Perhaps that was what the king wanted. Another servant for his dead
retinue.
She looked at the phantom with the chisel in his eye. Could she fight him? Push him into the cell and lock the door, then hide somewhere until she found a chance to escape?
Returning her look, the ghost slowly smiled. “I’m already dead.”
“I wasn’t thinking about killing you.”
“You are a terrible liar.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Go on. You’re wasting time.”
“You’re all so impatient,” she grumbled, ducking past him. “Don’t you have an eternity ahead of you?”
“Yes,” he said. “And you have until one hour to dawn.”
Serilda stepped through the cell door, bracing herself for the inevitable slam and locking of the grate. She’d pictured bloodstains on the walls and shackles on the ceiling and rats darting into the corners.
Instead, she saw … straw.
Not a tidy bale of it, but a messy pile, a full cartload’s worth. It was the source of the sweet aroma she’d noticed before, carrying the faint familiarity of harvest work in the fall, when all the town pitched in.
In the back corner of the cell there stood a spinning wheel, surrounded by piles of empty wooden bobbins.
It made sense, and yet—it didn’t.
The Erlking had brought her here to spin straw into gold, because once again her tongue had created a ridiculous story, meant to do nothing more than entertain. Well, in this case, to distract.
He was just giving her a chance to prove herself.
A chance.
A chance she would fail at.
Hopelessness had just begun to needle at her when the cell door slammed shut. She spun around, jumping as the lock thundered into place.
Through the grated window, the ghost peered at her with his good eye. “If it matters at all to you,” he said thoughtfully, “I actually hope you succeed.”
Then he yanked shut the wooden sash over the grate, cutting her off from everything.
Serilda stared at the door, listening to the retreat of his footsteps, dizzy with how quickly and completely her life had crumbled.
She had told her father it would be all right.
Kissed him goodbye, like it was nothing.
“I should have held him longer,” she whispered to the solitude.
Turning, she surveyed the cell. Her sleeping cot at home might have fit inside, twice side by side, and she could easily have touched the ceiling without standing on tiptoes. It was all made more cramped by the spinning wheel and bobbins stacked against the far wall.
A single pewter candlestick had been left in the corner near the door, far enough from the straw that it wouldn’t pose a hazard. Far enough to make the spinning wheel’s shadow dance monstrously against the stone wall, which still showed chisel marks from when this cell had been cut into the island’s rock. The flame might have been laced with magic, for it burned brighter than any candle she’d ever seen. Serilda thought of the wastefulness—a magic candle left to burn only for her, so she might complete this absurd task. Even normal candles were a valuable commodity, to be hoarded and preserved, to be used only when absolutely necessary.
Her stomach gurgled, and only then did she realize she’d forgotten the apple her father had packed inside the carriage.
At that thought, a stunted, panicky laugh fell from her lips. She was going to die here.