Hans and Angela entered the abandoned cemetery.
“Keep low,” Hans said. “It’s almost dawn.” He led her to an embankment far from the road. “People hereabouts used to put concrete on top of their coffins to ward off grave robbers, so Papa dug across from behind slopes like this. He pulled off the end of the box, and took what he wanted. Then he covered his tracks by plugging the entrance with dirt and sod.”
“How will you know where to look?”
“It’s not the sort of thing you forget.” Hans stopped. He pressed his foot against a clump of dried weeds covering a small hole. “This is the spot. It seems some animal’s been here before us.” He scooped away the remains of the plug and peered up the tunnel. Two ribs and a kneecap littered the passage. “I need to do some housecleaning. Close your eyes.”
Hans took a deep breath, imagined spring meadows, and entered the hole. In a few minutes, he crawled out. “After you, milady.”
Angela knelt by the entranceway. “It stinks!”
“True enough,” Hans said. “But after a day in a tomb and a night on the road, you don’t smell so good yourself.”
The day passed slowly.
In the village, gossip flowed as freely as the river by the mill; no one took heed of the grubby boys who loitered in the square and outside the shops. But on the road north, farmers paused in their fields and barns, as did their wives at wash pumps and chicken coops. There was a feeling of eyes and ears behind the sheaves, the sheds, the tubs, and the raspberry bushes: a feeling of something that watched what they did, and heard what they said.
Before the sun began to set, their animals were in their pens, their laundry was off the lines, and they were safe indoors with the shutters barred. Tonight would be a night of prayer; something evil was in the air.
At Castle von Hoffen-Toffen, the night watchmen took their positions as darkness filled the surrounding valleys, stretched across the count’s fields, and swept up the drive to the castle gate.
There was a furtive scurry from behind a bank of rosebushes. One of the sentries raised his torch. The other gripped his musket. “Who’s there?”
A tall, thin stranger stepped out of the shadows. His empty eye sockets were packed with gold teeth.
“I would speak with the count,” the stranger said, holding up a parchment with the royal seal. “I’m told you’ve had visitors.”
Up the road, Hans and Angela scrambled out of their coffin tunnel. They’d spent a sleepless day. Whenever Angela’s eyes had drifted shut, she’d imagined skeletons stroking her hair. Hans, too, had spent the day alert, gripping his wooden shovel.
Hans put weeds over the entrance to their hiding place. “We mustn’t leave clues we’ve been here. And we need to avoid the village ahead. Too many eyes in taverns.” He motioned to the fields behind them. “If we stick to where the farmhands have walked, our tracks will be lost in theirs.”
“That’s clever,” Angela said.
“I know about escapes,” Hans nodded proudly. “Three final dodges: We’ll walk backward to the fields, so our footprints will look like they’re coming into the cemetery. I’ll step in your tracks so we’ll look like we’re only one person. And we’ll keep our hems high so they don’t bend the grass.”
By the time the pair had skirted the village and returned to the main road, twilight had given way to night. A wolf howled in the distance. Another answered its call.
“The great forest must be near,” Hans said. “We can take cover in its trees.”
“And expose ourselves to those beasts?”
“Better to beasts with four legs than with two,” Hans replied. “Besides, wolves stay to themselves, except in stories.”
“It’s more than the wolves. I don’t want to get lost.”
“We can’t if we keep to the tree line by the road,” Hans said. “Trust me.”
The Necromancer also heard the wolves as he and his Weevils left Castle von Hoffen-Toffen. He pictured them, too—he who’d been born without eyes—for he saw with his ears, his nose, his tongue, and his mind. What visions they’d brought him tonight.
The count had been brave, but the Necromancer had seen the terror beneath the calm: heard the rustle of the man’s gown as his knees shook, and tasted the fear in the air from his short, quick breaths. Nor did he need eyes to see when the Weevils set the count’s clothes alight. The smell of burning velvet had painted a picture; so did the splash when the count leaped down the well to douse the flames. It was so dramatic, the Necromancer had burst into applause.
There’d been other sensations as well: first, the sound of the servants’ tongues as they’d flapped about the castle’s visitors, and now the caws of his crows, as he entered the boneyard. His skin was prickling; the prey was near. For where but in a cemetery—his second home—would a grave robber’s apprentice hide? And where in a cemetery but in a coffin tunnel?
The Necromancer prowled the back of the graveyard while his Weevils searched for tracks and his crows pecked for toads and other dainties. Soon, he’d found the slope and the entrance, the cover of weeds surrendering to his staff. He inhaled the tunnel’s odor, caught the scent of the Little Countess. He flicked his tongue. They hadn’t gone far. He could taste them in the air.
The Weevils ran up. “Master, they’s vanished. No footprints leaves the cemetery. The only ones what enter comes from a single pair of boots arriving from the fields.”
The Necromancer knew the tricks by heart. He lolled his head. “I see our prey walking backward in each other’s steps,” he droned. “I see them racing through the farm fields to the road north of the village.”
The Weevils gasped.
The Necromancer chuckled. While he awed the mortal world with his second sight, his secret was plain. Imagination and common sense: What else did one need to see both past and future?
“Our friends will be nearing the great forest,” the Necromancer said. “They’ll seek cover in its trees. Look to the muddy ditches. You’ll see footprints where the pair has crossed over. Follow the trail of broken twigs and upturned leaves. Move quickly, my pets. Before dawn, they shall be ours.”