I set my lips together. Probably some villager.
No. Something about the light wasn’t right: it was neither the flickering gold gleam of a lantern nor the steady, otherworldly blue radiance of a Lumen light. It looked, in fact, as though the stranger were wearing gloves of moonlight, a steady silver glow limning his hands and spreading up his arms. I’d never seen a Luminate illusion like that—and it seemed odd that a spell-caster would waste magic on that kind of illusion rather than the simpler Lumen light.
I inspected the dancers and the crowd beyond. Mátyás and Noémi still danced with the others. Herr Steinberg stood at the far edge of the crowd, a drinking mug in hand, while János sat at Grandmama’s far side. The squire was there too, though I noticed the villagers made a wide berth around him.
Whoever the light-bearer was, he was not one of the local Luminate. Likely, it was a Luminate stranger passing through, wandering the fields on foot. I edged toward the field, my curiosity piqued.
He might be a ghost, Noémi’s voice whispered in my ear. I brushed the idea away as one might a bothersome gnat. Ridiculous.
I glanced around once more. No one paid the least attention to me: even Grandmama was enthralled by the dancers. I slipped into the shadows, hiking my skirts up to an unseemly height as soon as I reached the field beyond the houses. The light bobbed in the distance, silver against the tree line.
I frowned. Something about the situation nagged at me, a piece that would not fit. Why should a Luminate nobleman skulk about a relatively insignificant field at night? Why not call on the local landowners? Surely, he was up to nothing good.
An improbable idea struck me, momentarily robbing me of breath. What if the man in the field were not Luminate at all? Mr. Skala said people from all classes had once practiced magic. What if someone had found a way around the Circle’s restrictions? It seemed impossible—and yet I could not shake a growing hope.
Whatever the source of this light, I had to know for certain.
I stepped into the field. In the spring night, the plants—whatever they were—had not yet achieved their full growth, for which I was grateful. Even so, in my dainty dancing shoes, I slipped and lurched on the loose earth.
For a moment, I lost the moving light. I stood motionless in the quiet field. Overhead the stars shone and the moon cast a faint tracing across the ground like hoarfrost. In the distance, the echo of the fiddles sounded plaintive, almost lost. I considered going back.
But no, there was the light again, in the copse of trees ahead. I plunged forward, weaving my way through the trees, my eyes fixed on the soft glow. My skirts caught on some kind of thornbush, and I wasted several moments trying to free myself without ripping the delicate fabric. At last, my patience at an end and fearful of losing my way, I simply tore free.
To my right, I could hear the gurgle of water. Between the dark bars of trees, silver moonlight glinted off the surface of the stream. My mind filled with images of drowned maidens, their hair spread like a veil across their faces. I touched the rough bark of a nearby tree and looked up, but the canopy of new leaves was so thick it blotted out the stars from the night sky. My shoulders tensed as I moved forward; if a rusalka or lidérc crouched in the tree above me, I would not know it till she sprang upon me, her nimble fingers tearing at my face and throat.
I cursed Noémi under my breath. If she had not succeeded in scaring me earlier, she had succeeded now.
I lost the light-bearer again. In the fitful darkness, I felt the first real stab of terror—not the almost-pleasant frisson of alarm that came from scaring myself with fancies, but gut-wrenching fear. I could feel my shadow self stirring in panic and let her rise. What did it matter now if I were less than perfectly behaved?
Something seemed to snag in the air around me, as though I had walked into a spider’s web. But when I batted at my cheeks, I could feel no silk filaments. I shuddered, imagining the creature somewhere on my body, skittering beneath my clothing.
I could not see the way forward; behind me, the trees were closing ranks and I could not see the way back either. I could still hear music, distantly, but it seemed to come from all sides.
A soft hissing like wind in the trees sounded behind me—but there was no wind. I froze, hardly daring to breathe. My heartbeat thrummed in my ears. I glanced around, squinting into the gloom.
There.
Something stirred, a subtle difference of shade on shadow. Something with a sinuous, nonhuman movement. I stepped forward, setting my foot down with the precision of a dancer, trying to stay silent. One step, then two, then three.
The shadow-that-was-not-a-shadow crept forward too.
I took a few more steps, and the thing kept pace with me.
It was following me.
I had lost the glowing stranger entirely now. The darkness gathered around me like a living thing, waiting to spring. I pressed forward, keeping the gliding shadow in the edge of my vision. I knew, somehow, with the certainty one gets in moments of high emotion, that I had far, far more cause to be frightened of the thing behind me than whoever was before me.
By the time I’d made it out of the trees, into the comparative brightness of a moonlit meadow, I was ready to weep. The thing following me was still there, though it had made no attempt to draw closer. As I moved out into the meadow, I watched the rim of trees. A shadow detached itself from the grove and crossed into the moonlight. The vaguely human shape had no features I could make out, only a mouth like a gaping wound.
“Free us.”
A breeze caught the words and tossed them against my ears, tangled them in my hair. Then the shadow multiplied into one, two, three, four shadows, all of them melting toward me in the meadow, with tendril-like arms outstretched. But there were no hands on these arms, and no fingers.
“Free us.”
I screamed then and began to run. I slipped and stumbled across the field, dragging at my skirts, and staggered up a slight hillock. I continued to run even as the earth dropped away beneath me.
As I fell, I glimpsed a young woman emerging from a thread of silver water with a face straight out of my nightmares: immense dark eyes studding moon-pale flesh, dark hair clinging in drowned clumps to the sides of her face.
Rusalka.
I tumbled down the far side of the hillock. Small and not-so-small rocks banged against my body as I slid, coming to a gasping halt at the water’s edge. My throat hurt from screaming.
The creature by the water cried out too, her voice eerily human, the way a cat’s cry at midnight sounds like a baby.
More lights blossomed along the bank. Dark shapes massed and ran toward us.