Courage, I thought.
Inhaling deeply, I plunged into the shadows.
The road I followed was deeply scored and narrow, overgrown by weeds and choked with dead leaves. I imagined once it was a busy trade route, now abandoned. By whom and for what reason, I could not fathom. Unease nagged at me.
The woods were quiet.
Too quiet.
I heard no trills of familiar (or even unfamiliar) songbirds. No rustle of small animals in the underbrush. No distant cawing of crows. The falcon had disappeared above the trees. And though the silver leaves twitched and stirred, I heard no rushing wind through the branches. The only sound in all the shifting wood was the crunching of my feet against dry leaves. I told myself it was just the interior of a spell, but that was small comfort. In the millennium since the Binding was created, anything might have evolved within it.
A flashing movement tugged at the corner of my eye. I glanced over my shoulder, squinting into the darkness between the pale trunks. Nothing. But I caught a flash again from the other side, and my heart began to thump too strong and too loud against my breastbone.
I stepped forward in time to the pounding of my heart.
Thump, thump, thump.
Then I heard something. A faint, high keening to my left. A woman’s voice, caught in a perfect pitch of agony. The sound was picked up on my right, louder and closer.
My heart sped up. So did my feet.
Another flash of movement in the woods. This time I glimpsed a figure, moon white against the darkness, pale hair tangled around a ruined face. Rusalka? Or vadleány, a wicked forest sprite from Grandmama’s stories? Perhaps something nameless but equally horrifying. The creature kept pace with me, following but not yet approaching.
A thrill of fear shot through me.
A second figure joined the first, and then a third, even closer, on my right side. With cries that sent needles of pain into every pore of my skin, they converged on the road.
I picked up my skirts and ran.
My corset dug bone fingers into my ribs. Each breath sawed through my lungs.
The creatures with their curious loping gait were gaining on me.
I ran faster.
My shoe caught on one of the deep scars in the road and flung me forward, hands and face scraping against the hard dirt. My knife skittered across the road and was lost in the shadows beyond it.
At once the first of the creatures was upon me, her weight like a gravestone on my back. She wrapped her fingers in my hair and yanked, the sharp pain pulling tears into my eyes. A second creature crouched in the road before me. She smelled of wood rot and places damp with mold. Boszorkány. Wood witch.
She jabbed a long, waxy finger at my right eye, and I flinched. She flicked my closed eyelid with her finger and laughed.
“Poke her eyes out,” she said.
The first shifted on my back. I could scarce breathe under her weight, but when she released my hair and slipped her tomb-cold fingers around my neck, my heart nearly stopped. I struggled to throw her off me, but her body was a dead weight, her hands like stone.
“Choke the life from her,” the second said. The clasp of my necklace broke; the fine chain slithered down my neck.
“Tear the skin from her.” The third creature joined her sisters, kneeling at my side and scratching a jagged fingernail along the exposed skin at my wrist. Beads of blood followed the line of her finger. Gooseflesh prickled up my arm.
“No! Please.” I remembered Hunger had asked me to break the Binding, and the strange not-shadows I’d seen on Whitsun night had pleaded for freedom. “I’m here to break the spell. If you kill me, I can’t set you free.”
At once my lungs expanded with air. The creature on my back leapt off, joining her sisters before me. I pushed myself upright.
“Is she lying?” the second one asked.
The first, the oldest to guess by the deep grooves in her face, sniffed at the air. “She has the stink of magic on her.”
“No Luminate has come here for ages.” The third grinned, baring sharp teeth. “And we ate that one.”
“I’m no Luminate spell-caster. I’ve no magic of my own. But I can break spells.” I hoped I spoke truth.
“Let her try,” the first said. “If she fails, we kill her then.”
“Kill her then,” the others agreed.
I took a deep breath, as deep as my corset would allow, and tried to swallow the lump clogging my throat. “Do you know where the heart of the spell is?”
The three women shifted as if agitated. Were they afraid?
The first one muttered to her sisters, and the third pointed down the path. “We will take you as far as the end of the wood. But you must face the castle alone. We are not welcome there.”
I slid the broken necklace into my pocket and found my knife at the side of the road. I began walking again, flanked this time by my otherworldly guard. Now that I was no longer in imminent danger of dying, I found their presence curiously comforting. At the least, it meant all lesser predators would stay well away from us.
I tried not to think about greater predators, or whatever had spooked the sisters about the castle beyond their wood.
True to their word, the sisters left me at the edge of the wood and faded into the shadows. Before me stretched the great golden meadow I remembered from my first visit. The road from the wood continued, but it took a curving path around the edge of the field. Directly across the meadow the crenellations of the castle wall thrust toward the sky. With growing confidence—there was nothing here to threaten me—I strode forward into the waving grass.
And immediately drew back. The blades of waist-high grass were, in fact, blades—their edges strewn with serrated teeth. My skirt now in tatters and stinging cuts on my hands and forearms, I kept to the road.
There had been a creature in the meadow, I remembered, an incandescent being that made me think of unicorns, though it was unlike any unicorn I had seen illustrated. As I skirted the meadow, I watched the undulations of the deadly grass and hoped I would see the creature again. After the darkness of the woods, I needed a sign my mission was not foredoomed to failure. Something light would do.
The grass erupted.
There it was: a being of light, as if a ray of sunlight had suddenly become animate. It moved through the meadow with the muscular grace of a great cat I had seen in a London menagerie, with the speed of a long-limbed horse.