Serilda had barely grasped the meaning of the king’s words before the coachman had taken hold of her elbow and was dragging her from the dining hall.
“Wait! The dungeons?” she cried. “He can’t mean that!”
“Can’t he? His Darkness does not favor mercy,” said the ghost, his grip never loosening. He dragged her down a narrow corridor, then paused at a doorway to a steep staircase. He peered at her. “Will you walk on your own, or must I drag you the entire way? I warn you, these stairs can be treacherous.”
Serilda sagged, staring down the stairwell that spiraled fast from view. Her mind was spinning from everything the Erlking had said. Her head. Her father’s. A test. The dungeons.
She swayed, and might have fallen if the ghost’s grip hadn’t tightened on her arm.
“I can walk,” she whispered.
“Very convincing,” said the coachman, though he did release her. Taking a torch from a bracket beside the door, he headed into the stairwell.
Serilda hesitated, glancing back down the corridor. She felt confident she could retrace her steps back through the keep, and there was no one else in sight. Was there any hope of escaping?
“Do not forget who this castle belongs to,” said the ghost. “If you run, he will only further relish the chase.”
Swallowing hard, Serilda turned back. Dread settled like a stone in her stomach, but when the ghost started down the steps, she followed. She kept one hand on the wall for balance on the steep, narrow stairs, feeling dizzy as they descended.
Down some more.
And down again.
They must be underground now, somewhere amid the ancient foundations of the castle. Perhaps even beneath the surface of the lake.
They reached the bottom level and tromped through an open set of barred gates. Serilda shuddered to see a row of heavy wooden doors lining the wall to her right, each one reinforced with iron.
Cell doors. Serilda craned her neck to peer through the slitted windows, catching glimpses of manacles and chains hung from the ceiling, though she could not see enough to know whether any prisoners were dangling from them. She tried not to wonder if that would be her fate. She heard no moans, no crying, not the sounds she would expect to hear from tortured and starving prisoners. Perhaps these cells were empty. Or perhaps the prisoners were long dead. The only “prisoners” she’d ever heard of the Erlking taking were the children he’d once gifted to Perchta, though they wouldn’t have been kept in the dungeons. Oh, and the lost souls that followed the hunt on its chaotic rides, though they were more often left for dead by the roadside, not spirited away to his castle.
Never had she heard rumors of the Erlking keeping humans locked up in a dungeon.
But then, perhaps there were no rumors because no one ever lived to tell them.
“Stop it,” she whispered harshly to herself.
The coachman glanced back at her.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “Not you.”
A small critter caught her eye then, darting along the corridor wall before scurrying into a small hole in the mortar. A rat.
Lovely.
Then—something strange. A new scent collecting around her. Something sweet and familiar and entirely unexpected in the musty air.
“Here.” The ghost paused and gestured to a cell door that had been left open.
Serilda hesitated. This was it, then. She was to be a prisoner of the Erlking, locked in a dank, horrible cell. Left to starve and rot away into nothing. Or at least, trapped until morning, when she would have her head lopped off and hung up in the dining hall. She wondered if she would become a ghost herself, haunting these cold, dim corridors. Perhaps that was what the king wanted. Another servant for his dead retinue.
She looked at the phantom with the chisel in his eye. Could she fight him? Push him into the cell and lock the door, then hide somewhere until she found a chance to escape?
Returning her look, the ghost slowly smiled. “I’m already dead.”
“I wasn’t thinking about killing you.”
“You are a terrible liar.”
She wrinkled her nose.
“Go on. You’re wasting time.”
“You’re all so impatient,” she grumbled, ducking past him. “Don’t you have an eternity ahead of you?”
“Yes,” he said. “And you have until one hour to dawn.”
Serilda stepped through the cell door, bracing herself for the inevitable slam and locking of the grate. She’d pictured bloodstains on the walls and shackles on the ceiling and rats darting into the corners.
Instead, she saw … straw.
Not a tidy bale of it, but a messy pile, a full cartload’s worth. It was the source of the sweet aroma she’d noticed before, carrying the faint familiarity of harvest work in the fall, when all the town pitched in.
In the back corner of the cell there stood a spinning wheel, surrounded by piles of empty wooden bobbins.
It made sense, and yet—it didn’t.
The Erlking had brought her here to spin straw into gold, because once again her tongue had created a ridiculous story, meant to do nothing more than entertain. Well, in this case, to distract.
He was just giving her a chance to prove herself.
A chance.
A chance she would fail at.
Hopelessness had just begun to needle at her when the cell door slammed shut. She spun around, jumping as the lock thundered into place.
Through the grated window, the ghost peered at her with his good eye. “If it matters at all to you,” he said thoughtfully, “I actually hope you succeed.”
Then he yanked shut the wooden sash over the grate, cutting her off from everything.
Serilda stared at the door, listening to the retreat of his footsteps, dizzy with how quickly and completely her life had crumbled.
She had told her father it would be all right.
Kissed him goodbye, like it was nothing.
“I should have held him longer,” she whispered to the solitude.
Turning, she surveyed the cell. Her sleeping cot at home might have fit inside, twice side by side, and she could easily have touched the ceiling without standing on tiptoes. It was all made more cramped by the spinning wheel and bobbins stacked against the far wall.
A single pewter candlestick had been left in the corner near the door, far enough from the straw that it wouldn’t pose a hazard. Far enough to make the spinning wheel’s shadow dance monstrously against the stone wall, which still showed chisel marks from when this cell had been cut into the island’s rock. The flame might have been laced with magic, for it burned brighter than any candle she’d ever seen. Serilda thought of the wastefulness—a magic candle left to burn only for her, so she might complete this absurd task. Even normal candles were a valuable commodity to be hoarded and preserved, to be used only when absolutely necessary.
Her stomach gurgled, and only then did she realize she’d forgotten the apple her father had packed inside the carriage.
At that thought, a stunted, panicky laugh fell from her lips. She was going to die here.
She studied the straw, toeing a few pieces that had drifted from the pile. It was clean straw. Sweet-smelling and dry. She wondered if the Erlking had ordered it harvested earlier that night, under the Hunger Moon, because she’d told him that gathering straw touched by the full moon made it better for her work. It seemed unlikely. Any straw gathered recently would still be wet from the snow.
Because, of course, the king did not believe her lies, and he was right. What he asked for could not be done. Or, at least, not by her. She had heard tales of magical ones who could do marvelous things. Of people who really had been blessed by Hulda. Who could spin not only gold, but also silver and silk and strands of perfect white pearls.
But the only blessing she carried was from the god of lies, and now her cursed tongue had ruined her.
How foolish she’d been to think for a moment that she had tricked the Erlking and gotten away with it. Of course he would realize that a simple village maiden could not possess such a gift. If she could spin straw into gold, her father would hardly still be toiling away at the gristmill. The schoolhouse would not need new thatching, and the fountain that stood crumbling in the middle of Märchenfeld’s square would have been repaired ages ago. If she could spin straw into gold, she would have ensured by now that her whole village prospered.
But she did not have such magic. And the king knew it.
A hand went to her throat as she worried over how he would do it—with a sword? An ax?—when her fingers brushed the slender chain of the necklace. She pulled it from beneath her dress collar and opened the locket, turning it so she could see the face of the girl inside. The child peered out at Serilda with her teasing eyes, as if there were a secret near to bursting inside of her.
“There’s no hurt in trying, is there?” she whispered.
The king had given her until one hour to sunrise. It was already after midnight. Here in the bowels of the castle, the only way to track the passing of time was by the candle burning in the corner. The persistent melting of wax.
Too slow.
Far too fast.
No matter. She was hardly one to sit still for hours, suffocating in her own self-pity.
“If Hulda can do it, why can’t I?” she said, grabbing a handful of straw from the pile. She approached the spinning wheel as if she were approaching a sleeping wyvern. Unclasping her traveling cloak, she folded it neatly and settled it in the corner. Then she hooked one ankle around the leg of the stool that had been provided and sat down.
The strands of straw were tough, the ends scratchy against her forearms. She stared at them and tried to picture tufts of wool like those Mother Weber had sold her countless times.
The straw was nothing like the thick, fuzzy wool she was used to, but she inhaled a deep breath anyway and loaded the first empty bobbin onto the flyer. She spent a long time looking from the bobbin to the fistful of straw. Usually she started with a leader yarn, to make it easier for the wool to wrap around the bobbin, but she had no yarn. Shrugging, she tied on a piece of straw. The first one broke, but the second held. Now what? She couldn’t just twist the ends together to form one long strand.
Could she?
She twisted and twisted.
It held … sort of.
“Good enough,” she muttered, running the leader yarn through the hooks, then out through the maiden hole. The entire setup was beyond precarious, ready to fall apart as soon as she pulled too tight or released those weakly connected strands.
Afraid to let go, she leaned over and used her nose to push down on one of the wheel’s spokes, so that it gradually started to turn. “Here we go,” she said, pressing her foot onto the treadle.
The straw pulled from her fingers.
The tenuous connections disintegrated.
Serilda paused. Growled to herself.
Then she tried again.
This time, she started the wheel sooner.
No luck.
Next, she tried knotting a few ends of straw together.
“Please work,” she whispered as her foot started to pedal. The wheel turned. The straw wound around the bobbin. “Gold. Please. Please turn into gold.”
But the plain, dry straw continued to be plain, dry straw, no matter how many times it slipped through the maiden hole or wound around the bobbin.
Before long, she had run out of knotted strands, and what had been successfully looped around the bobbin started to splinter as soon as she took it off the flyer.
“No, no, no…”
She grabbed a fresh bobbin and started over.
Pushing, forcing the straw through.
Her foot mashing against the treadle.
“Please,” she said again, pushing another strand in. Then another. “Please.” Her voice broke, and the tears started. Tears she’d hardly known were waiting to be released until they all flooded forward at once. She hunched forward, clutching the useless straw in her fists, and sobbed. That one word stuck on her tongue, whispered to no one but the cell walls and the locked door and this awful castle full of awful ghosts and demons and monsters. “Please.”
“What are you doing to that poor spinning wheel?”
Serilda screamed and tumbled off the stool. She landed on the ground with a bewildered grunt, one shoulder smacking the stone wall. She looked up, pushing away the strands of hair that had fallen into her face and stuck to her damp cheek.
There was a figure sitting on top of the pile of straw, cross-legged, peering at her with mild curiosity.
A man.
Or … a boy. A boy about her age, she guessed, with copper hair that hung in wild tangles to his shoulders and a face that was covered in both freckles and dirt. He wore a simple linen shirt, slightly old-fashioned with its generous sleeves, which he’d left untucked over emerald-green hose. No shoes, no tunic, no overcoat, no hat. He might have been getting ready for bed, except he looked wide-awake.
She looked past him to the door, still shut tight.
“H-how did you get in here?” she stammered, pushing herself upright.
The boy cocked his head and said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “Magic.”