To her surprise, he swung his leg over the horse and before Serilda could gasp, he had landed on the ground before her.
Serilda was tall compared with most girls in the village, but the Erlki—the hunter dwarfed her by nearly a full head. His proportions were uncanny, long and slender as a water reed.
Or a sword, perhaps, was a more appropriate comparison.
She gulped hard as he took a step toward her.
“Pray tell,” he said lowly, “what is your work, at such an hour, on such a night?”
She blinked rapidly, and for a terrifying moment, no words would come. Not only could she not speak, but her mind was desolate. Where normally there were stories and tales and lies, now there was a void. A nothingness like she’d never experienced.
So much for spinning straw into gold.
The hunter craned his head toward her, taunting. Knowing he had caught her. And next he would ask her again where the moss maidens were. What could she do but tell him? What option did she have?
Think. Think.
“I believe you said you were … harvesting?” he prompted, with a hint of lightness to his tone that was deceptive in its gentle curiosity. This was a trick—a trap.
Serilda managed to tear her gaze away from his, to a spot in the field where her own feet had trampled the snow when she’d rushed home earlier that evening. A few broken pieces of yellowed rye were poking up from the slush.
“Straw!” she said—practically shouted, so that the hunter actually looked startled. “I’m harvesting straw, of course. What else, my lord?”
His brows dipped in toward each other. “On New Year’s night? Under a Snow Moon?”
“Why—surely. It’s the best time to do it. I mean … not that it’s the new year, exactly, but … the full moon. Otherwise it won’t have quite the right properties for the … the spinning.” She gulped, before adding, somewhat nervously, “Into … gold?”
She finished this absurd statement with a cheeky smile that the hunter did not reciprocate. He kept his attention fixed on her, suspicious, yet still … interested, somehow.
Serilda wrapped her arms around herself, as much as a shield against his shrewd gaze as the cold. She was starting to shiver in earnest now, her teeth newly chattering.
Finally, the hunter spoke again, but whatever she had hoped or expected him to say, it was certainly not—
“You bear the mark of Hulda.”
Her heart skipped. “Hulda?”
“God of labor.”
She gaped at him. Of course she knew who Hulda was. There were only seven gods, after all—they weren’t difficult to keep track of. Hulda was the god mostly associated with good, honest work, as Madam Sauer would say. From farming to carpentry to, perhaps most of all, spinning.
She had hoped that the darkness of the night would have hidden her strange eyes with their embedded golden wheels, but perhaps the hunter had the keen sight of an owl, a nocturnal hunter through and through.
He had interpreted the mark as a spinning wheel. She opened her mouth, prepared, for once, to tell the truth. That she was not marked by the god of spinning, but rather, the god of lies. The mark he saw was the wheel of fate and fortune—or misfortune, as seemed to be the case more often than not.
It was an easy mistake to make.
But then she realized that being thus marked added some credibility to her lie of harvesting straw, so she forced herself to shrug, a little bashful at this supposed sorcery she contained.
“Yes,” she said, her voice suddenly faint. “Hulda gave their blessing before I was born.”
“For what purpose?”
“My mother was a talented seamstress,” she lied. “She gifted a fine cloak to Hulda, and the god was so impressed that they told my mother her firstborn child would be gifted with the most miraculous of skills.”
“Spinning straw into gold,” the hunter drawled, his voice thick with disbelief.
Serilda nodded. “I try not to tell many people. Might make the other maidens jealous, or the men greedy. I trust you’ll keep the secret?”
For the briefest moment, the hunter looked amused at this statement. Then he took a step closer, and the air around Serilda became still and so very, very cold. She felt touched by frost and realized for the first time that there was no cloud steaming the space before him when he breathed.
Something sharp pressed into the base of her chin. Serilda gasped. Surely she should have sensed him drawing the weapon, but she had neither seen nor felt him move. Yet here he was, holding a hunting knife at her throat.
“I will ask again,” he said, in a tone almost sweet, “where are the forest creatures?”
Chapter 5
Serilda held the hunter’s soulless gaze, feeling too brittle, too vulnerable.
And yet her tongue—that idiotic, lying tongue—went right on talking. “My lord,” she said, with a tinge of sympathy, as if embarrassed to have to say this, for surely such a skilled hunter would not like appearing the simpleton, “the forest creatures live in the Aschen Wood, to the west of the Great Oak. And … a little to the north, I think. At least, that’s what the stories say.”
For the first time, a flicker of anger passed over the hunter’s face. Anger—but also uncertainty. He couldn’t quite tell whether she was playing games with him or not.
Even a great tyrant such as he couldn’t tell if she was lying.
She lifted a hand and laid her fingers ever so delicately on his wrist.
He twitched at the unexpected touch.
She started at the feel of his skin.
Her fingers might have been cold, but at least they still had warm blood coursing through them.
Whereas the hunter’s skin had quite frosted over.
Without warning, he jerked away, freeing her from the imminent threat of his blade.
“I mean no disrespect,” Serilda said, “but I really must tend to my work. The moon will be gone soon and the straw will not be so compliant. I like to work with the best materials, when I can.”
Without waiting for a response, Serilda picked up the shovel again, along with a bucket overflowing with snow, which she promptly dumped out. Head lifted high, she dared to walk past the hunter, past his horse, into the field. The rest of the hunting party backed away, giving her space, as Serilda began scooping away the top layer of snow to reveal the crushed grain underneath; the sad little stalks that had been left behind from the fall harvest.
It looked nothing like gold.
What a ridiculous lie this was turning into.
But Serilda knew that full-hearted commitment was the only way to persuade someone of an untruth. So she kept her face placid as she began to pull the stalks up with her bare, freezing hands and toss them into the bucket.
For a long while, there were only the sounds of her working, and the occasional shuffle of horse hooves, and the low growl of the hounds.