“What in all of Verloren are you doing?” Anna’s grandmother hollered, the first to find her voice. “You say she’s been taken by the wild hunt, and now you think … what? That you’re going to get her back?”
“Precisely,” said Serilda. Pressing her foot into the stirrup, she cracked the reins.
The horse bolted from the yard.
As she passed through M?rchenfeld, she saw that nearly everyone had emerged from their homes and were gathered near the linden tree at the town’s center, talking in frightened whispers. She spied Gerdrut’s parents, her mother’s belly round with child, crying while her neighbors tried to comfort her.
Serilda’s lungs squeezed until she thought she would not be able to breathe at all. This road did not travel past the twins’ home, but she did not have to see their family to know that Fricz and Nickel would be missing, too.
She lowered her head and urged the horse to run. No one tried to stop her, and she wondered if any of them would guess at her guilt.
This was her fault.
Coward. Fool. She wasn’t brave enough to face the Erlking. She wasn’t smart enough to trick him out of this game.
And now five innocent children had been taken.
The road blurred beneath the horse’s hooves as she left the town behind. The morning sun glistened off fields of wheat and rye, but ahead of her the Aschen Wood loomed, dense and unwelcoming. But she wasn’t afraid of it anymore. There might be monsters and forest folk and creepy salige, but she knew the true dangers lurked beyond the wood, inside a haunted castle.
She was nearly to the woods when the birds caught her eye. At first she thought it was more nachtkrapp, an entire flock of them swarming above the road. But as she drew closer she could see it was just crows, cawing and screeching at her as she approached.
Her gaze fell.
Her lungs sputtered.
A figure lay half across the road and half in the ditch.
A child, with two dark braids and a pastel-blue nightgown streaked with mud.
“Anna?” she breathed. The horse had barely slowed before she was jumping out of the saddle and racing toward the figure. The girl was lying on her side, facing away, and she might be merely sleeping or unconscious. That was what the wild hunt did, she told herself, even as she was falling to her knees at Anna’s side. They lured people from their homes. Tempted them with a night of wild abandon, then left them cold and alone on the edge of the Aschen Wood. So many had woken up disoriented, hungry, maybe embarrassed—but alive.
It had been a threat, that was all.
Next time would be worse.
The king was toying with her. But the children would be all right. They had to be—
She grabbed Anna’s shoulder and rolled her onto her back.
Serilda cried out and fell backward, pushing herself away. The image seared into her mind.
Anna. Skin too pale. Lips faintly blue. The front of her nightgown painted red.
There was a ragged hole where her heart had been. Muscle and sinew gaping open. Bits of cartilage and broken rib bone visible in the thick, drying blood.
This was what the scavenger birds had been feasting on.
Serilda staggered to her feet, backing away. Turning, she braced herself on her knees and heaved into the ditch, though there was little to come up but bile and whatever remained of the witch’s potions.
“Anna,” she gasped, swiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m so sorry.”
Though she didn’t want to see it again, she forced herself to look Anna in the face. Her eyes were wide-open. Her face frozen in fear.
She had never stopped moving. Always with her acrobatics and her tricks. Always dancing, fidgeting, rolling through the grass. Madam Sauer had chastised her nonstop, while Serilda had loved it about her.
And now.
Now she was this.
It wasn’t until she palmed the tears from her eyes that she saw the second body, a little farther up the road, half buried in the brambles that grew wild in the summer.
Bare, muddied feet and a linen nightshirt down to his knees.
Serilda stumbled closer.
Fricz was on his back, his chest as cavernous as Anna’s had been. Silly Fricz. Always laughing, always teasing.
Tears streaming fast down her cheeks now, Serilda dared to look past him. To take in the full stretch of road between these two murdered children and the Aschen Wood.
She saw Hans next. He had grown so tall this spring, and she’d barely been around to notice. He had always idolized Thomas and his other brothers. He had so yearned to grow up.
His heart had been ripped clean out of him.
Or—eaten out of him, for Serilda wondered if this was the work of the nachtkrapp.
Perhaps a gift for their loyal service to the hunt.
It took longer, but finally she found Nickel, too. He was lying on his stomach in a tiny creek that would eventually meet up with the Sorge. His honey-colored hair was dark and matted with blood. He had lost so much of it that the downstream current was tinted pink.
Sweet Nickel. More patient, more empathetic, than any of them.
Weary and heartbroken, Serilda returned for the horse before she continued her search. She held it by the reins so it wouldn’t run off as she walked slowly along the road, searching as far as her eyes could see.
But she reached the shadows of the trees, having found no one else.
Little Gerdrut was not there.
Chapter 50
She blindfolded the horse so it would not spook as they entered the Aschen Wood. To take the long path around the forest was unthinkable—and besides, this was clearly the way the hunt had gone. In the daylight, they would have vanished back behind the veil, but what if Gerdrut was still here in the woods? Serilda’s eyes darted back and forth along the edges of the road, searching the brambles and weeds, the thick overgrowth crowding onto the dirt path. Looking for signs of scavengers and blood and a tiny, crumpled body abandoned in the wild.
For once, the forest held no allure for her. Its mystery, its dark murmurs. She paid them no heed. She did not search the distant trees for signs of forest folk. She did not listen for whispers calling to her. If any apparition waited to dance upon a bridge, if any beast wished to coax her into their realm, they were disappointed. Serilda had thoughts only for little Gerdrut, the last missing child.
Could she still be alive? She had to believe. She had to hope.
Even if that meant the Erlking was holding her, a treasure to coax Serilda back to his domain.
She emerged from the trees with no answers to her questions. There was no sign of the child, not in the woods, not at the edge of the forest as Adalheid’s wall came into view.
By the time she was riding through the city, Serilda was certain that she would not find Gerdrut. Not on this side of the veil. The Erlking had kept her. He wanted there to be a reason for Serilda to come back.
And so, here she was. Terrified. Desperate. Full of a guilt almost too painful to bear. But more than that, a rage had begun to simmer from her fingertips to her toes, building inside her with suffocating force.