Weeks later, in the coldest part of winter, Jutta had finished the cage for the little weres. She left the castle before dawn, her leather armor and favorite boots oiled so they wouldn’t creak. She normally loved the sound of her equine feet—a heartbeat against the earth. But silence was her ally now.

She left the cart and the cage at the edge of the woods, along with a pair of single-natured horses she’d hooked to it, expecting a heavy load. She walked quietly enough that she could hear her own pulse. She loved this part of being outside. What was the world but a web of beating hearts, hers and those of others?

She slipped through the white mist that hugged the ground. It was darker in the woods, and the red branches stained the air. But her eyes adjusted, even as her skin tingled. This was where foes lived. Animals with strong jaws and sharp teeth. Animals as fleet of foot as she. The woods had always scared her. They scared her more now.

She pitied the trees. They were coated in something sickening and red, and there was nothing they could do about it. They had no hands. They could not move. They couldn’t help one another.

She passed the spot where Hans had clawed her, where her own blood had seeped into the earth. Already the forest had erased evidence of that. Even if the trees stood still, life itself moved swiftly in the woods.

Jutta loved Albrecht. She always had. She could still remember him as a boy, the softness of his limbs, the downiness of his hair, the dimpled knuckles of his perfect little hands. Even as she loved him, she did not wish to hunt the children for him. This was too far, too much, too cruel.

She could not harm a child. She knew this now. She would warn the children. Warn Ursula. She would take whatever consequences came. She was afraid of what might happen. But she was more afraid of what might happen if she did as Albrecht commanded.

On the path ahead, something round and white caught her eye. She knelt and picked it up. A hole had been drilled through its center. She rolled it around her palm. She’d seen something like it before on the queen. No one else in the kingdom could afford such a thing. Greta had worn a necklace of those very gems on her wedding day. Jutta knew, deep in her bones, that this was where Greta had been taken.

Jutta walked on, keeping an eye out for more gemstones. They might just lead her to Greta, or at least to her remains. They should be burned. Returned to the soil. To do less was inhumane, and no matter what Albrecht thought of Jutta—that she was not fully human—she was. She was human. She was not lesser. If anything, her animal aspect made her more. This was something Jutta had never considered. It stopped her in her tracks. That being a were was something she could take pride in.

The deeper into the woods she went, the louder the music grew. She didn’t even need to walk quietly now. No one could hear a thing above the din.

Her keen eyes zeroed in on a broken branch. She moved closer. Then she spied another stone, and another still, as though they’d been laid out in a trail. This must have been the way Greta fled, although she could not imagine how it had been possible, given the red shoes King Albrecht had bestowed. She must have had help. Not from Ursula. Not from Hans. From the other one—the werebear with her boots.

Deep in the forest, the trees had become enormous. Jutta was a large woman, every bit as big as Ursula, but many of these trunks were wider than she was tall. Bare branches scraped against one another, making mournful notes. She stopped to listen. A few yards ahead rose the biggest tree she’d ever glimpsed. This one made the rest, even the giants, look like saplings. The earth around it was disturbed, a handful of white stones scattered among the roots.

Jutta recognized where she was. Near the edge of the campsite, and not too far from the cottage. She’d been here earlier. How had she missed this tree? She moved closer, intending to look for Ursula from its shadow.

The music was unbearably loud now. Her skin hummed. Her teeth ached. She pulled a dagger from her boot just in case. She spotted another gem and scooped it up. This one had something brownish on it. She scraped it. Blood, long dried now.

She looked again at the tree and its strange, glistening bark. She slid her knife into it, aiming to carve away a specimen. The substance was too hard, too sticky. It took all her strength to free her knife.

Jutta wanted to flee. Every instinct in her told her to run. But where? If she returned without the children, Albrecht would conduct his experiment on her. She did not wish to harm children, but neither did she wish to be sliced open herself.

Her best option, her only option, was to throw herself at Ursula’s feet and ask for mercy. She knew she shouldn’t count on it. Jutta had always favored Albrecht. But perhaps if she warned Ursula what Albrecht planned to do … perhaps that would be enough to regain Ursula’s favor. Maybe that would earn her safety. A place among the refugees.

She peered from behind the tree. People sat around fires. Children, most in their were form, played on logs. Ursula was nowhere to be seen. In the cottage, perhaps? That would be like her, to choose the sturdiest structure for her own. Something enormous cracked behind Jutta. She turned to face it and was swept up in a storm of branches.

Jutta lashed out. She felt herself rise. She kicked, but her legs were useless off the ground. Higher and higher she traveled, swinging her limbs, accomplishing nothing. She became her horse self, to use her great strength to defeat the ravenous branches. Her clothing split and dropped. Somewhere below, her knife hit the forest floor. So did her boots.

The music grew louder. She would have covered her ears if she’d been able to. Her eardrums were splitting. They felt wet and heavy. But her legs were pinned now, and she could do nothing.

She fought and whinnied, clacking her teeth against each other, her eyes wide, her skin coated with sweat. She felt … not herself. She was dizzy. And then nauseated. She could no longer move. It felt as though something heavy was pressing her skull. Her face. This was not good. Trees. A strange danger. She had always considered them a source of wood and nothing more. Wrong. She had been wrong. A flicker of thought, nothing she would have been able to put to words, but it was this: Had she remained true to her horse aspect, had she listened to her fear, would she have survived?

Her long tongue shriveled, and the world went dark as her eyeballs were consumed. She was no longer aware of what was happening when her skin was flayed and when her tendons and muscles turned to powder. Her sense of hearing was the last to leave.

The music became everything.