Serilda was half icicle by the time she spotted the cabin’s light across the field, illuminating the snow in a halo of gold. The night was well-lit by the full moon, and she could clearly make out her small house, the gristmill behind it, the waterwheel on the edge of the Sorge River. She could smell the wood smoke, and this gave her a new spark of energy as she cut across the field.
Safety.
Warmth.
Home.
She yanked open the front door and stumbled inside with a dramatic sigh of relief. She fell back against the wood frame and began tearing off her soaked boots and stockings. She tossed them halfway across the room, where they landed with wet plops beside the hearth.
“I … am so … c-cold.”
Her father jumped up from his seat beside the fireplace, where he’d been darning a pair of socks. “Where have you been? The sun set more than an hour ago!”
“S-sorry, Papa,” she stammered, hanging her cloak on a peg by the door and peeling off her scarf to join it.
“And where are your mittens? Don’t tell me you lost them again.”
“Not lost,” she breathed, pulling the second chair closer to the fire. She crossed one foot over her knee and began working some feeling back into her toes. “I stayed late with the children, and didn’t want them going home in the dark alone, so I walked with each of them. And the twins live way over on the other side of the river, so I had to go all the way back, and then—oh, it does feel good to be home.”
Her father frowned. He was not an old man, but anxious wrinkles had become permanent fixtures on his face long ago. Maybe it was due to raising a child on his own, or fending off gossip from the rest of the town, or maybe he’d always been the sort to worry, whether it was warranted or not. When she was little, she’d made a game of telling him stories about the dangerous mischief she’d gotten herself into and delighted in his utter horror, before laughing and telling him she had made it all up.
Now she could see how that maybe wasn’t the kindest way to treat the person she loved most in this world.
“And the mittens?” he asked.
“Traded them for some magic dandelion seeds,” she said.
He glared at her.
She smiled sheepishly. “I gave them to Gerdrut. Water, please? I’m so thirsty.”
He shook his head, grumbling to himself as he stepped over to the pail in the corner where they gathered snow to be melted nightly by the hearth. Taking a ladle from above the fireplace, he scooped out some water and held it out to her. It was still cold, and tasted of winter going down her throat.
Her father returned to the fire and stirred the hanging pot. “I hate for you to be out all alone, on a full moon at that. Things happen, you know. Children go missing.”
She couldn’t help smiling at this. Her story today had been inspired by years and years of her father’s doom-filled warnings.
“I’m not a child anymore.”
“It isn’t just children. Full-grown men have been found the next day, dazed and muttering about goblins and nixes. Don’t be thinking it isn’t dangerous on nights like this. Thought I raised you with more sense.”
Serilda beamed at him, because they both knew that the way he’d raised her was on a steady stream of warnings and superstitions that had done more to ignite her imagination than they had to inspire the sense of self-preservation he’d been striving for.
“I’m fine, Papa. Not kidnapped, not ferried away by some ghoul. After all, who would want me, really?”
He fixed her with an irritated look. “Any ghoul would be blasted lucky to have you.”
Reaching over, Serilda pressed her frigid-cold fingers against his cheeks. He flinched, but didn’t pull away, allowing her to tilt his head down so she could press a kiss against his brow.
“If any come looking,” she said, releasing him, “I’ll tell them you said that.”
“It is not a joking matter, Serilda. Next time you think you’ll be late on a full moon, best you take the horse.”
She refrained from pointing out that Zelig, their old horse who was more vintage decor now than useful farm stud, had no chance whatsoever of outrunning the wild hunt.
Instead, she said, “Gladly, Papa, if it will ease your heart. Now, let’s eat. It smells scrumptious.”
He pulled two wooden bowls down from a shelf. “Wise girl. Best to be asleep well before the witching hour.”
The witching hour had come and the hunt surged across the countryside …
These were the words shimmering in Serilda’s mind when her eyes snapped open. The fire in the hearth had burned down to embers, emanating only the faintest glow over the room. Her cot had been in the corner of this front room since she could remember, with her father taking the only other room, at the back of the house, its rear wall shared with the gristmill behind them. She could hear his heavy snores through the doorway and for a moment she wondered if that was what had startled her awake.
A log in the fire broke suddenly and collapsed, emitting a spray of sparks that singed the masonry before blackening, dying.
Then—a sound so distant it might have been her imagination if not for the ice-cold finger it sent skimming down her spine.
Howls.
Almost wolflike, which was not uncommon. Their neighbors took great care to protect their flocks from the predators that regularly came prowling.
But there was something different about this cry. Something unholy. Something savage.
“Hellhounds,” she whispered to herself. “The hunt.”
She sat wide-eyed in shaken silence for a long while, listening to see if she could discern whether they were coming closer or moving farther away, but there was only the crackling of the fire and the rowdy snores in the next room. She began to wonder whether it had been a dream. Her wandering mind getting her into trouble yet again.
Serilda sank back into the cot and pulled the blankets to her chin, but her eyes would not close. She stared at the door, where moonlight seeped through the gaps.
Another howl, then another, in rapid succession, sent her jerking upward again, her heart rattling in her chest. These had been loud. Much louder than before.
The hunt was coming closer.
Serilda once again forced herself to lie down, and this time she screwed her eyes shut so tight her whole face was pinched up. She knew that sleep was impossible now, but she had to pretend. She had heard too many stories of villagers being lured from their beds by the seduction of the hunt, only to be found shivering in their nightgowns at the edge of the forest the next dawn.
Or, for the unlucky ones, never seen again at all. And historically, she and luck didn’t get along well. Best not to take her chances.
She vowed to stay right where she was, motionless, barely breathing, until the ghostly parade had passed. Let them find some other hapless peasant to prey on. Her need for excitement was not yet that desperate.
She curled herself into a ball, clutching the blanket in her fingertips, waiting for the night to be over. What a great story she would tell the children after this. Of course the hunt is real, for I’ve heard it with my own—
“No—Meadowsweet! This way!”
A girl’s voice, trembling and shrill.
Serilda’s eyes snapped open again.
The voice had been so clear. It had sounded as if it had come from right outside the window above her bed, which her father had nailed a board over at the start of winter to help keep out the cold.
The voice came again, more frightened still: “Quick! They’re coming!”
Something banged against the wall.
“I’m trying,” another feminine voice whined. “It’s locked!”
They were so close, as if Serilda could reach her hand through the wall and touch them.
She realized with a start that whoever it was, they were trying to get into the cellar beneath the house.
They were trying to hide.
Whoever they were, they were being hunted.
Serilda gave herself no time to think, or to wonder whether it might be a trick of the hunters to lure out fresh prey. To lure her from the safety of her bed.
She tossed her feet out from the blankets and rushed to the door. In a blink, she had thrown her cloak on over her nightgown and stuffed her feet into her still-damp boots. She grabbed the lantern off its shelf and fumbled briefly with a matchstick before the wick flared to life.
Serilda yanked open the door and was struck with a gust of wind, a flurry of snowflakes—and a squeal of surprise. She swiveled the lantern toward the cellar door. Two figures were crouched against the wall, their long arms entwined around each other, their immense eyes blinking at her.
Serilda blinked back, equally stunned. For though she had known someone was out here, she had not expected to discover that they were actually something.
These creatures were not human. At least, not entirely. Their eyes were enormous black pools, their faces as delicate as spindle flowers, their ears tall and pointed and a little fuzzy, like those of a fox. Their limbs were long and willowy branches and their skin shone tawny gold in the glow of the lantern—and there was a lot of skin to be seen. Despite being in the middle of winter, the collection of fur pelts they wore covered little more than what was necessary for the barest sense of modesty. Their hair was cut short and wild and, Serilda realized with a heady sense of awe, was not hair at all, but tufts of lichen and moss.
“Moss maidens,” she breathed. For of all her many tales of the dark ones and the nature spirits and all manner of ghosts and ghouls, in all her eighteen years Serilda had only ever met plain, boring humans.
One of the girls sprang to her feet, using her body to block the other from Serilda’s view.
“We are not thieves,” she said, her tone sharp. “We ask for nothing but shelter.”
Serilda flinched. She knew that humans bore a deep distrust for the forest folk. They were regarded as strange. Occasionally helpful at best, thieves and murderers at worst. To this day, the baker’s wife insisted that her oldest child was a changeling. (Changeling or not, that child was now a full-grown man, happily married with four offspring of his own.)
Another howl echoed across the fields, sounding as if it came from every direction at once.
Serilda shivered and looked around, but though the fields stretching away from the mill were brightly illuminated under the full moon, she could see no sign of the hunt.
“Parsley, we must go,” said the smaller of the two, jumping to her feet and grasping the other’s arm. “They are near.”
The other, Parsley, nodded fiercely, not taking her gaze from Serilda. “Into the river, then. Disguising our scent is our only hope.”
They grasped hands and started to turn away.
“Wait!” Serilda cried. “Wait.”
Setting the lantern down beside the cellar door, she reached beneath the wooden plank where her father kept the key. Though her hands were growing numb from the cold, it took her only a moment to undo the lock and throw open the wide flat door. The maidens eyed her warily.
“The river runs slow this time of year, the surface half frozen already. It won’t offer much protection. Get in here and pass me up an onion. I’ll rub it on the door, and hopefully it will disguise your scent well enough.”
They stared at her, and for a long moment Serilda thought they would laugh at her ridiculous attempts to help them. They were forest folk. What need did they have for the pathetic efforts of humans?
But then Parsley nodded. The smaller maiden—Meadowsweet, if she had heard right—climbed down into the pitch-black of the cellar and handed up an onion from one of the crates below. There was no word of gratitude—no word of anything.
As soon as they were both inside, Serilda shut the door and fitted the lock back onto the bolt.
Tearing the skin from the onion, she rubbed its flesh against the edges of the hatch. Her eyes began to sting and she tried not to worry about small details, like the pile of snow that had fallen from the cellar door when she’d thrown it open, or how the trail of the maidens would lead the hellhounds directly to her home.
Trail … footsteps.
Spinning around, she searched the field, afraid to see two paths of footprints in the snow, leading straight to her.
But she couldn’t see anything.
It all felt so surreal that if her eyes hadn’t been watering from the onion, she would have been sure she was in the middle of a vivid dream.
She threw the onion away, as hard as she could. It landed in the river with a splash.
Not a moment later, she heard the growls.