She stood in the center of the bridge and looked toward the other side, where Heike had found Tomas’s clothes. Liesel allowed herself a moment to imagine him there, to imagine him broken and bloody and splayed, and then she shut the image away and continued walking.
There were bloodstains on the stones. The lantern hanging there seemed like it should have been brighter or hotter than the others, but it wasn’t. She turned in a circle and peered into the gloom between the trees. Underbrush clustered around the roots and up against the side of the road near the lantern, so thick and wild it was a wonder it hadn’t yet grown over the stones.
She kneeled near the bloodstains. The children of Greymist Fair were not unaccustomed to blood or death, but it was not the same knowing this was Tomas’s blood. She took a few deep breaths. There—on one stone, so faint it might go unnoticed, were signs of smearing. The marks headed toward the right side of the road, where several branches had broken off a bush. Liesel got to her feet and went to investigate.
She didn’t want to find Tomas. She didn’t want to see what his body looked like now. But she also couldn’t leave him for theanimals and the elements. He deserved to be buried beside their parents. She slipped between the trees, forgetting the forest, forgetting the wargs, forgetting herself.Far enough that no one would come looking.
She found the spot by smell. It was a shallow indent in the forest floor, crusted with congealed blood and surrounded by a strewn mess of branches and leaves. There was evidence of more dragging, but this was erratic with no attempt at camouflage. The animals had beaten her there. By now, there would not be enough of Tomas’s body left to recover.
Liesel raised a hand to wipe her eyes and found she wasn’t crying. Her emotions were still there inside her, but walled off. She was alone. What was she without her family? Even Hans didn’t care about her, if he ever had.
A wink of light in the brush caught Liesel’s eye. Half-hidden beneath the leaves and dirt was a small knife. The handle was made of oak, and the blade had been freshly sharpened. It appeared to have been hastily cleaned because blood still smeared it. In the metal, so small she almost didn’t see it, was a small flourish—theGthat Godric etched in all his metalwork.
The wolf had dropped his claw.
Liesel turned the knife over in her hands, thinking of a wolf that walked on its hind legs with a belly like a pig, thinking ofHans rolling his eyes in front of the butcher shop, thinking of Jürgen helping her break the cold ground for Tomas’s grave.
Jürgen had lost a knife made by Godric.
Liesel sat by the well in the town square, watching the other villagers go about their business, Jürgen’s knife hidden in the folds of her skirts. Jürgen kept his knives in his shop; anyone could have stolen it.
A crowd was gathering outside the bakery. Ada Bosch was there, sobbing into her hands. Consoling her were other women, many of whom Ada did not normally speak to. It took Liesel a moment to see the connection; those other women had also lost children. Some very recently, others over the years.
Lost children were not uncommon in Greymist Fair. Even if they knew not to venture into the forest, they could not stop the forest from taking them. This was the way it had always been.
Liesel thought it was a little premature for Ada Bosch to believe her son had been taken, but maybe it was easier that way. The longer you held on to hope, the more painful it became.
The door to the butcher’s shop burst open, and Jürgen stomped out like a great fuming boar. When he saw Ada and the other women, he seemed to withdraw a bit in the face oftheir grief. Then he cast his gaze around, like he was checking to see if anyone had noticed his outburst, before he lumbered back inside his shop.
Liesel turned the knife in her hand.A great big belly like a pig.Jürgen had the biggest belly in town, and the comparison to a pig couldn’t be a coincidence—not because of his stomach, but because of his face. No one else in Greymist Fair fit that description. What if Jürgen had complained of his stolen knife to cover himself?
Why would Jürgen have been chasing her brother through the forest?
Four
Liesel did not wait for Tomas to appear in his shroud. When the moon was high, she tied her hair back, laced up her boots, and slipped out into the windy night.
The woods roared. Windows rattled in their frames, and the water bucket clattered and snapped against the well’s stone walls. Liesel worried fleetingly about the roof of her cottage, which had been leaking and would very likely tear off in a gale like this. But the worry fell away as quickly as it had come; she didn’t much care what became of her house.
She kept the knife concealed in her skirts, even though there was no one to see her. Anyone who lived near the center of town had barricaded themselves in for the night, and most lights were out.
The butcher’s shop was dark, as was the attached residence. Hans slept like the dead, even during storms, but Liesel wasn’t as sure about Jürgen. She paused in the shadows, trying to decide how to get in. Finally, she settled on the shop. But whenshe crept around to the door, she found it locked. Jürgen’s knife was thin enough to slip between the door and its frame and lift the latch. The creak as the door opened was lost to the wind.
The shop was dark and reeked of salt and copper and sawdust. Jürgen’s business was one of opportunity: when hunters brave enough to venture into the woods came back with a kill, they gave it to Jürgen to butcher in exchange for the best cut of the meat. The remainder went to the first customers to arrive for it. Everyone traded and bartered in Greymist Fair. Everyone wanted meat, so Jürgen never lacked anything. Eggs, milk, wool, clothing, repairs to his shop and his house, new knives. Liesel had once heard Dagny joking that Jürgen must have gotten his wife in a trade, because there was no other way anyone would have married him.
Once upon a time, Liesel had thought this was unfair. Just because Jürgen was blustery and prone to anger didn’t mean he didn’t have something good inside him.
Now she thought she had been too charitable.
Behind the shop counter was a door. Next to the door, Jürgen kept several small candles. Liesel set the knife down and lit one, then realized with a breathy curse she was going to have to keep the knife in her pocket so she could cup her free hand around the flame and dim the light. She pocketed the knife,paused to listen for any noises in the house, then continued through the door behind the counter.
The reek intensified. The room was long and lined with butcher’s blocks stained nearly black, meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. The floor was dark. Jürgen’s many knives hung from the walls and seemed to grow out of wooden blocks; there were so many knives that Liesel wouldn’t have known one was missing if she didn’t have it in her pocket right at that moment. She crept into the room and jumped as the candlelight fell on a gaunt face on the floor.
She clapped her hand over her mouth to hold in her scream. Not a face. A skull. Maybe a deer. It was clean, stripped completely of flesh. On the long shelf above her, a row of similar clean skulls leered up at her with empty eye sockets. Perhaps the deer skull had fallen off. Liesel stepped gingerly around it.
There was a door to the left and another to her right. The one on the left led to the house. She’d seen it from the other side, knew where it would be in relation to everything else. The door on the right, though, she didn’t remember. She knew the first floor of the house ran right up against the back of the shop, but there was a jut of the wall where this door should be, pushing up against the fireplace. Like a cutout for a stairwell.
There was no handle on this door. Hanging from it was ajumble of hooks and rope, thick and heavy, as if the door wasn’t supposed to be a door at all but just part of the wall.
