“Then you think a person did it? Why leave the clothes?”
“Maybe they wanted to make it look like a warg killed him.”
Wenzel turned toward the fire. His frown deepened. “Warg or not, what if it’s still out there? What if it had hurt you, too?”
“It didn’t, and wondering aboutwhat ifs isn’t going to solve what happened. People go down that road all the time and they don’t get torn open. It’s not normal.”
“But the things in the forest—”
“There have always been dangerous things in the forest. The road is supposed to be safe.”
She caught Wenzel’s gaze over the rim of her mug. “What about Katrina?” he said. “And what about your mother?”
Heike went very still. The fire flickered low. “They weren’t on the road.”
“But they did die the way you said. Didn’t they?” Wenzel cleared his throat, fingers flexing against the arm of his chair.
“Ulrich was the one who found Katrina and my mother,” Heike said. “And all he found of them was tattered clothing and their shoes. No blood, he said. Maybe he’ll know if the samething did this to Tomas.” She stood and held her mug out for Wenzel. The strength had returned to her legs, and she had a sudden desire to be by herself to think. “I need to prepare this dye. I’ll be back once Ulrich returns—I’m sure he’ll have questions for me.”
“Wait.” Wenzel caught her arm. “Let me go with you. It’s so close to the forest.”
“I live plenty far from the trees. And nothing has ever come into the village before—why would it now?”
“Why would it attack anything on the road, either?”
Heike didn’t respond. Looking unhappy, Wenzel took the mug from her and let her go.
Heike’s cottage had once belonged to her mother, and to her mother’s mother before her. It sat on a hill just behind the inn, up a dirt path and beneath the wide branches of an old and twisted linden tree. Tied to the door was a bundle of sage, holly, and chamomile, something her mother had put up that Heike now kept out of habit. At the door, Heike could see the shepherd’s flock grazing beneath the gray sky, and past them, Ulrich’s home on its own hill in the north. To her right, in the south, was Elma Klein’s farm, where the winter wheat was poking from the ground in green shoots.
To the west was the edge of the forest. Wind ruffled the treetops. The trees seemed to loom up as if climbing the hillside. She shivered, wishing she’d taken Wenzel up on his offer, and ducked inside.
The cottage was one small room divided into two sections. In the smaller was the heavy iron washtub, the oak dresser carved by her great-great-grandmother, and the bed in which Heike had slept with her mother when she was a child.
The larger section held all her mother’s tailoring tools, some now largely unused. A tall, upright loom, the biggest instrument she owned, stood against the back wall. Heike had spent more time learning how to repair it than she had using it. Beside it on the floor was a pot where she kept her distaffs, and a smaller pot on the table nearby that had become a repository of spindles. She had baskets and baskets of wool and linen, a bit already dyed and a bit kept aside for times like these when she found rare colors. She had boxes of needles made of wood, iron, and bone, some of them warped so badly she couldn’t use them; boxes of pins of different shapes and sizes, some plain and easy to lose in the fabric, others fixed with bright but chipped jewels on their ends; boxes of thimbles, some so old the dimples had near worn away. There was a fireplace where she boiled water to make dyes, and beside that, the worktablewhere her mother had kept her tools for shoemaking.
Heike’s mother had taught her how to make shoes by having her make them for Wenzel. He’d been raised by the previous keepers of the inn, a kind elderly couple who had no children’s clothing. Heike’s mother had provided them with everything they’d needed in exchange for food and someone to watch Heike when she went into the woods, and she’d used the making of Wenzel’s clothes to teach Heike what she knew.
Her mother had done the best work in the village, but there were others who knew how to spin, weave, sew, and cobble, and so most villagers avoided the witch-speaker who lived so near to the trees. Her mother had kept food in Heike’s stomach by doing work for the innkeepers and by selling goods to the traveling merchants and adventurers who came to Greymist Fair. Her remains—the tattered clothing, her old boots—had been found in the forest, close to those of Katrina, a girl who had been Heike’s age. They were killed by the wargs of Greymist, everyone said; spirits of the forest, loyal to the witch, that preyed on any who entered their domain. The wargs would make sense, because anyone who died of violence in Greymist Fair became a warg themselves, leaving no corpse behind.
Heike sat at the worktable by the empty fireplace and did her best to gather herself. Her mother had died four yearsago, but it felt like today. It felt like it had been her mother’s clothing she’d found on the road. She’d never seen the scene herself—Ulrich wouldn’t let her. She’d only seen the small gravestone with her mother’s name carved on it, marking a grave with no body.
Preparing the berries and her dye pot took away some of her nerves, at least for a short time. She’d already cleaned the wool she planned to use, and it had been tucked carefully away in a linen bag she kept below the worktable. While the berries boiled over the fire, she took the prepared wool from the bag and ran her fingers over it, then held it close and smelled it. Her mother had smelled like wool and berry dyes and bone needles. She’d never cursed her lack of work, or how far they felt from the village. Heike rested her head on the edge of the worktable and looked down at the muddied toes of her boots. Her mother could make boots that lasted twenty years, but she couldn’t make the village accept her.
Boiling the berries seemed to take a lifetime, and as she finished straining the dark crimson water, shouts from the village came in through the open window. She dumped her wool into the pot with the dye, left it over the fire, and took off running back toward the inn.
Three
Ulrich had returned. Sitting up on his horse, he looked like a man carved from stone, his eyes shadowed and his thick beard masking the stern set of his jaw. His cart was empty. Gottfried, with his gun and his Great Dane, and Jürgen, the butcher, had followed Ulrich into the forest and now trailed behind the cart. Gottfried looked paler than usual, and Jürgen’s ruddy face was unreadable. Ulrich rode through the center of the village and past it, toward his cottage.
Heike stood with Wenzel outside the inn. As Ulrich passed, he’d looked down at them and said, “Find Liesel, please. Bring her to me.”
Liesel was Tomas’s older sister. They’d lived together in the home that had belonged to their parents, like everyone in Greymist Fair, but while Tomas had never shied away from playing where Heike was, Liesel had heeded her parents’ wishes and stayed away. Liesel was already outside in the road, watching the villagers congregate, when Heike and Wenzel found her. Her gaze snapped to Heike.
“It’s Tomas, isn’t it?” she said. Her voice was stronger than Heike had expected, though her eyes were red. “He didn’t come home yesterday.”
“Ulrich asked for you.”
Liesel followed them north to Ulrich’s. Ulrich and Gottfried were outside the barn, staring into the back of the cart. Ulrich’s wife, Gabi, stood nearby with one hand on her forehead and one on her hip, looking flustered. Jürgen waited by the barn doors, arms crossed over his expansive stomach, with his son, Hans, who was Heike and Wenzel’s age. Hans mimicked his father’s posture, though where Jürgen could have taken up the entirety of the barn door, Hans could have slipped through them while they were closed. None of his clothes had ever quite fit his thin and reedy frame. His gaze fixed first on Wenzel and then on Heike as they came up the hill.
