Six

Hilda almost tripped over the body. The beautiful face was gone. The dress was torn, strewn about in the foliage. The ribcage spread like spiked petals of a gruesome flower. They liked doing that, the wargs—they liked prying the ribcage open. They didn’t eat any part of the body, because they didn’t need to. It was the fear they fed on.

There would be a new warg soon, and the only evidence that Katrina had been in the woods would be the scraps of her dress and her shoes.

Hilda backed up. Scanned the woods. The wargs had ignored her when there was ripe prey on the run, but they were coming back now, scenting her fear on the air. Because she did have fear. Even when she knew how to get home, she couldn’t make it if she couldn’t run fast enough. She didn’t regret giving Heike her boots. She only wished she had waited a little longer, so she could tell Heike the other things she would need to know.

Her fear wasn’t all-consuming. She had known Death would catch her eventually. In the parts of her fear could not reach, there lived a deep, final annoyance:

This was how she went? After all this time, after everything, because a stupid boy had almost unwittingly unleashed Death on himself and Katrina? And poor Katrina had died anyway. There was no way to get a message back to town. Not to Heike, but to Luther. He was visiting Falk the fisherman and making his rounds of the village. She wished she could tell him what happened, tell him how little Heike knew. He wouldn’t be able to teach her much, but he could do something. He could tell her the truth.

Well, she thought grimly, I can’t let myself die without having even tried to get home. So she squared a thought of Heike in her mind and started running.

The laughter began again.