CHAPTER FOUR

Rufus threw himself down on all fours and bolted for the trees across the clearing. Creaking footsteps sounded on the porch. They were coming closer.

But Lin’s legs wouldn’t move. The joints seemed to have frozen, and her feet were much too cold to lift. Before she could run anywhere, she stumbled and fell. Lying flat out in the snow, she looked over her shoulder and back at the cottage.

On the porch stood a crooked and hooded shape, black against the sparkling snow. It lifted its arm. Deep within the hood there was a high-pitched crowing.

Lin wanted to get up, but all strength had abandoned her. Why couldn’t she just wake up? She lowered her face into the snow.

The cold dunk didn’t wake her, but it brought Lin’s legs back to life. She gathered them under her and tore into a run, making her way across the clearing to Rufus, who waited for her at the edge of the woods. Under the shelter of the trees, the snow was shallower. Soon they were galloping like spooked horses, dodging branches and trunks, racing across cone scatterings and animal tracks until they struck a path.

Only then did Lin realize that one of her feet was bare. At some point during the frantic escape, she had lost a slipper, and now she was bleeding from a cut on the sole. She hobbled over to a tree stump and sat down.

Rufus doubled back to sniff her foot.

“A bad cut,” he said, wrinkling his snout. “We’ll get someone to fix it, but we have to get into town first. I think this is the old path to Tinklegrove. If I remember the maps correctly, the road should be just across this ridge. Can you make it?”

Lin stood up again and put her weight on the injured foot. The cut didn’t smart. Rather, it felt like standing on a lump of ice. “I think so.”

“Come on.” Rufus offered her his arm. “Lean on me.”

They left the path and headed up a rough little hill. It was slow and painful going. The mountains were hidden by a dense latticework of boughs, and only a faint blue light trickled through to twinkle in Rufus’s eyes as he urged her on. Behind them, the woods were silent. No creaking snow, no snapping twigs, and most importantly: no eerie, high-pitched crowing.

“Who was that? Did you see him?” Lin’s voice came out very small.

“I saw him,” Rufus said, bending back a rowan branch. “Or rather, it. I still can’t fathom that it was actually there, though. The Winnower’s Well is a tall tale, a legend they scare freshers with at the Burning Bird when they’re all new and skittish. It’s not supposed to be true.”

He lifted Lin over a fallen branch, and as he continued, he lowered his voice.

“The legend of the Winnower’s Well says that a long time ago, before the guard runes were carved and before the hedge had grown tall and dense, a Nightmare from the mountains came creeping through and settled in the Sylver Valley. Nightmares are monsters, vile creatures with bleak and hungry souls. And there are none hungrier than the Winnower, so named because it reaps its victims from unwitting Sylverings who walk the woods.

“Of course I thought it was just a story. But now it strikes me that everything was there, exactly as the legend says. The sagging roof, the creaky porch, the broken well . . . and the hooded Winnower.” Rufus’s voice was a whisper now. “It twists the paths near its cottage so they all lead back to the clearing, no matter which way you try to flee. And when it has caught its victims and eaten them, it throws their bones in the well.”

Lin felt numb. The cold was leaking into her, weighing down her mind as well as her arms and legs. Around her, the forest sighed and whispered, and for a moment, the ground really did feel like it was shifting under her feet. She shook her head to clear it.

“That’s what I thought, too, back in the cozy warmth of the mead house,” Rufus said, mistaking her reaction for disbelief. “It’s just that there aren’t any other wells in Sylver. Why would there be? The ground is always frozen.”

Lin didn’t answer. She didn’t want to think of the well and the hooded figure, but it was as if invisible hooks pulled her thoughts back to the clearing. So she tried not to think at all, concentrating instead on putting one foot in front of the other, past bushes and boulders, until they made it to the other side of the ridge. There the forest gave way to a cleared road that wound along the darkly gleaming river between tall shoulders of snow. Rufus helped Lin climb over the plow bank.

“The Caravan Road,” he said. “We should be safe now.”

Lin’s breath escaped into the evening as wispy clouds. She was quite exhausted. What warmth had come from running through the forest had long since drained into the snow. At the nape of her neck, sweaty curls were freezing into a crackly tangle. She lifted her left foot again to examine it. It was blue, and the cut looked ragged and inky.

Rufus stared at her, whiskers wide.

“You’re a little pale. But Sylveros isn’t far now. A mile or three along the road, and we’re there.” He tried to smile, but his eyes were brimming. “I’ll take you straight to the Burning Bird. Get you some starmead. And you can have my scarf . . .”

“Thank you,” Lin said. “I just need to rest a little bit first.”

She sat down with her back against the snowbank and hugged her knees tight inside the cardigan. Funny. The ground was pleasantly warm all of a sudden. She felt sleepy.

“Lin!” Rufus cried, “You can’t sit down! Get up!”

But Lin’s head was full of churning stars and a sweet chiming.

“I hear bells,” she mumbled. “We’re already there, I think.”

The snow grew black around her.