Two

Wenzel had always been afraid. When he was very young, in those earliest memories that surfaced in his conscious mind only rarely these days, he had been afraid of his father, and raised voices, and the leather sting across his back. He had been afraid of darkness, the calls of mourning doves, and the looks of exasperation and annoyance he got whenever he began to cry. He became afraid of crying.

But as he dressed and gathered what he needed to journey out on the road, he fought fear off with the thought of things that made him happy. New stories for his collection. The crackling of the fire in the inn’s common room. The excited squeals of children chasing each other across the village square on fine-weather days. The contentment on Heike’s face when he brought her a warm bowl or mug to wrap her cold fingers around. He was going on this journey to save those things. That would keep him brave. And when he returned, he’d have his own story to tell.

Gabi checked and rewrapped Wenzel’s bandages before he put on his shirt. The cuts weren’t deep, but he wasn’t looking forward to the pain he’d have if he burst Doctor Death’s stitches. He thought of the tall doctor, slumped against the wall. Disappearing. He wondered if the doctor was out in the forest now.

“You should be able to lift the sack of gifts onto the horse,” Gabi said, “but anything more strenuous than that and you’ll open yourself up again.”

He didn’t plan on doing anything more strenuous. It had always been a simple task, and he would think of it as that now. A nice ride down the road, the pickup, and the ride home.

Heike sat on the edge of his bed, looking peaky, while he dressed. She twirled the linden bloom between her fingers. “Not that one,” she said as he pulled a rough work shirt from the tall wooden armoire. “The one I made you last week.”

“But you just made it,” he said. “It’s so nice.”

“Wear it,” she said. “It’s for a reason.”

He returned the shirt and pulled out the other. Plain, bleached white, and still soft. He pulled it on over his head and immediately felt a little warmer. He finished dressing—coat, scarf, gloves, hat—and when he finally turned back to Heike, he found her, grabbing her boots from the floor.

“You need to take these, too,” she said.

“I think my feet are too big.”

She gave him a withering look and began tying the ends of the laces together. She motioned him closer and tugged his sleeve to get him to bend down, and then she looped the laces over his neck so the boots hung against his chest. “I know it’s strange. Just take them.” Then, before he could rise, she took hold of his scarf where it was knotted beneath his chin. Exhaustion hung under her eyes, but her gaze was intent, and her voice was strong. “I want you to do this, and I want you to return, and I want you to remember that when you desired to do something noble for Greymist Fair, I did not try to stop you.”

She didn’t let go of his scarf. The knuckle of her thumb was cold on his chin. He nodded and said softly, “I’m sorry, Heike. I was selfish.”

She pulled him closer and kissed his cheek, sending a chill down his neck. “I know why you did it, though,” she said. “If you get into any trouble, run straight ahead and think of home.”

Firelight, bright smiles, contentment, and warmth. This was what he thought of as he saddled his horse and set out. He had consented to waiting until the sun was rising, so at least the daylight—even if the sun was hidden behind clouds—would help ease any fear. The horses had calmed, too, as had the villagers in the inn. The village itself had settled into stillness. Wenzel did not look up at Greymist Manor as he passed through the town square and headed for the road into the forest.

Warm mugs. Spring berries. The roses blooming on the face of the inn.

He had first made this journey when he was only seven or eight. He had wanted to go so badly, but had known better than to ask, and the innkeepers—his adoptive mother and father—had finally relented. His father had taken him along for the ride and taught him why it was such an important duty. He hadn’t really needed to be told, though. He already knew why it was important to bring Yule to the village. Everyone needed a place and reason to celebrate, and people to celebrate with.

Before they had adopted him, he had only seen holidays from afar, either the holidays celebrated by traveling caravans or by the people in the villages and towns the caravans visited. His father—rather, the man who had been responsible for him—had never celebrated anything.

Johanna, the baker, had once asked Wenzel why he never seemed angry or unhappy. “Because there’s nothing so bad here to be angry or unhappy about,” he’d told her with a smile. It was the truth, but only part of it; he couldn’t bring himself to be angry or unhappy about anything that happened to him in Greymist Fair, because if he hadn’t been abandoned there, his life probably would have been miserable. If he’d had a life at all. His parents had saved him. The village had given him purpose. He was happy the day he chose a new name for himself, a name that had never been screamed at him, and he was happy every day he got to use it.

He hunkered into his scarf and coat. Heike’s boots rocked rhythmically against his chest. The road was obscured by snow, only visible because of the lampposts poking out of the drifts like crooked iron fingers. He told himself the road was as always: winding but safe. He told himself he didn’t feel the eyes of the forest following him, its fingers trailing over his neck and shoulders, through his hair. Every so often he glanced sideways into the trees, pretending that he was just curious and didn’t care if he saw a warg there.

There was nothing. He wondered how such a thick layer of snow had found its way down between the boughs of the evergreens.

What most people disliked about the road was that it always seemed to take a different amount of time to traverse it. Wenzel had never noticed this. He spent the time thinking about projects around the inn he had completed and what still needed to be done. He thought about things his neighbors had done for him, and how they could be repaid. He went through his mental catalogue of stories he’d collected from people who had visited Greymist Fair. In his mind, the world beyond the forest was huge and beautiful, with towering cities and sweeping oceans, mountain ranges that pierced the sky and opened gateways to the gods, magic that was even wilder and stranger than the magic that lived in Greymist Fair. Heike had long encouraged him to write these stories down, to make a book of them, and not so long ago he’d been sweeping the inn’s front walk, thinking he should do just that. He’d jotted down a few, but a whole book? Who would care about a book of his stories?

His horse huffed as it clattered over the Idle River Bridge. The river beneath, normally powerful and relentless even in the winter, was frozen solid. Wenzel noted this and looked away.

The singing of orioles. Cold, clear water on a hot summer day. The feeling of being clean after a long time being dirty.

He hadn’t even realized how dirty he was until his parents had taken him in. Sometimes one of the caravan members would dunk him in a river or stream when they said he smelled too bad, but he’d never had a proper bath until he was found on Elma Klein’s farm. The water had been cold, the soap rough on his skin, and he’d cried when they’d cut his matted hair off, but when it was over, he was dressed in a clean nightshirt and plopped in front of the fire with a meat pie and mead. He’d devoured the meat pie and chased it with mead, which he hadn’t recognized until he was almost done. He lasted only a short time after that. He slept for a whole day and woke up in a bed much bigger than him.

His life before waking up in that bed now seemed like a nightmare he’d had as a child, vividly real but at the same time nothing that could hurt him any longer. He didn’t want to be that scared little boy again.

When he reached the far edge of the forest, the trees dropped away suddenly, as if they had hit an invisible barrier they couldn’t cross. Foothills rolled away into the foggy distance. There was not another living soul as far as he could see, neither animal nor human, and the effect was what he imagined being a ghost might feel like. This was his favorite part of the trip, always. Standing on the edge of the forest, looking out into a world unknown.

Standing here, it seemed that the terror that gripped Greymist Fair was a world away. No one beyond the borders of their forest knew what was happening in the village. No one knew their fear, and no one would come to help them. There was only Wenzel.

The clouds cracked and parted; the sun was already high above, though Wenzel hadn’t felt like he’d been traveling all that long. Even his legs and back didn’t protest when he swung himself off his horse. He stretched a bit, testing his bandages, but all seemed well.

He began to hunt for the sack of gifts. It was the same every year: a tough, green-dyed sack nearly as big as Wenzel, tucked into the curling roots of a massive old oak that stood to one side of the road. The sack would be invisible to anyone who wasn’t expecting it to be there. No one in the village knew who left it, or when they had started riding down the road to retrieve it, but it came every year and every year they accepted it.

He tromped along the line of trees to the old oak. The snow covered everything, so at first he didn’t think much of not seeing the sack. But it was over half his size, and if there was anything buried beneath the snow at the foot of the oak, it wasn’t very big. In fact, as he drew closer, there was a noticeable disturbance in the snow. There had been something large sitting there, but now there was only a pit. And there were other footprints leading around the trees from inside the forest.

Wenzel tensed. The prints were his size. Booted. Fresh.

A voice spoke behind him.

“I was waiting, Grub.”