Like mother like daughter, they said.
I’d prove them wrong.
I made with renewed vigor for the wood basket and stuffed the hearth’s cold belly to the brim. I set the kindling with utmost care and I brought a candle to it. When the fire refused to catch, I tried again. I tried again and again, until my hands wore blisters from dripping wax and the candle’s flame licked at my fingers. I tried until I fainted from the strain of sorrow and fear.
The cold remained.
For six long winters, the fire in our hearth did not return—but death did.
He became a midnight visitor, draped in rotten leaves, broken bones, black mud. He knocked in the dark hours on our crooked door and he did not bother to conceal his sinister, striking face. He had no need to hide his wicked deeds. We all knew him as the lordling of the swamp and as the vilest faerie to live on this side of the Sunken River.
He came to our threshold, and he whispered into my father’s ear, and my father allowed him, for a copper piece, to help himself to the cursed magic my mother had so recklessly asked the spirits to bestow on me, that night beneath the ribbon-hung elm.
Hello, little bird, the lordling would sing and take me to the forest to poison the berries, to parch the creek, to speak death into the roots and into the wind. He coveted the thorn-wrought crown on his sister’s head, the one queen among kings, and since he could not have it, he contented himself instead with bringing ruin upon her lands, her people.
He was the sculptor of decay and I, under the weight of his glamour magic, his ever-willing tool.
I was seventeen when I escaped; terrified and disturbed, and with nothing on me but the tattered clothes that hung from my spindly frame. I leaped from the broken window of the blackstone castle in the swamp, mouth foul with a taste of the lordling’s blood, and I ran with the wind—swifter even than his hounds.
I laughed all the way down to the moonlit riverbank.
Perhaps I was a little mad after all.
ONE
Let me see a tear, brittle-bone.
It was late winter when the madness came.
I was stumbling through frostbit heather in the pale shade of a cliff when I heard it: The wet sound of breath drawn through spit-covered fangs.
Its echo clanked in the stale air that had been trapped for an age in the chasm. It came from behind and it travelled on legs much swifter than mine.
I hissed as I quickened my step, nettling my blistered feet and the muscles stiff from a fortnight of travel.
Had I not been careful? Had I not seen to it that I left no traces in the tavern by the moorlake? Had I fled to this horrid wasteland just for the hounds to find me?
I panted, chest tight from the strain of running. Rocks came loose beneath my boots wherever I treaded, slowing my frantic steps. A howl came from afar and one from terribly near.
If they found me… If they took me back… I could not let them catch me.
Not alive.
I pinched the knotted scar on my palm as I made deeper into the chasm, desperate to fend off the terror rearing its head. I needed to be sharp and awake, sharp and awake. Dark memories sprawled like weeds over my thoughts. I plucked one to find ten more in its place. A forest of black-veined roots and dying beasts. A village sick from the poisoned creek. A mane of tar-black hair pooling in festering mud, claws coiling around my throat—
Make them bleed, the lordling whispered.Make them hunger.
The rockscape faded and I was back in the swamp, trapped in a blackstone castle where shrill cackles danced between lichen-bearded trees. Fervid breath dampened my neck as the hounds hovered over me.
Hello, little bird.
I sobbed as I tumbled into a tangle of withered winterberries. A furious howl whipped past me, lashing my cheeks with dirt-caked curls. I had not realized, in my panic, that clouds darkened the wan skies. There were no hounds. No swamp and no castle. Just the relentless breath of late-winter wind, a barren wasteland, and the heat of shame that came whenever I failed to quell the madness before it took hold. I fought for breath, heart aflame with lingering fear and from the strain of forcing my weary limbs to a run.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
The words chimed like a bell through me as I untangled my garments from spindly twigs and huddled against the cliff to weather the gale. Pallid winter light shrouded the rockscape in sickly white and threw grotesque shadows over my aching feet. If I looked at them wrong, they shifted into the cruel faces of lesser faeries, flickering as if to laugh at my lostness. Few things pleased these wicked creatures more than human misery.
There were those who lived in remote caves and delighted in luring travelers astray. Two mornings ago I’d set out to followfootprints in the dirt only to find them gone when I glanced back. A few times I’d caught a glimpse of a hunched figure walking ahead, but it dissolved into glittering dust whenever I drew close. Just this morning I’d left a pretty seashell at the mouth of a cavern to appease any faeries that dwelled nearby. It had yet to yield results. I was just as hopelessly lost as I’d been then.
