She banged her boots on the side of the house to rid them of snow before going inside. Snores greeted her. Her father was still sleeping like a groundhog, utterly oblivious.
Serilda slipped off her cloak and sat with a sigh before the hearth. She added a block of bog peat to keep the fire smoldering. In the light of the embers, she tilted forward and peered down at her rewards.
One golden ring.
One golden locket.
When they caught the light, she saw that the ring bore a mark. A crest, like something a noble family might put on their fancy wax seals. Serilda had to squint to make it out. The design appeared to be of a tatzelwurm, a great mythical beast that was mostly serpentine with a feline head. Its body was wrapped elegantly around the letter R. Serilda had never seen anything quite like it before.
Digging her thumbnails into the locket’s clasp, she pried it open with a snap.
Her breath caught with delight.
She’d expected the locket to be empty, but inside there was a portrait—the tiniest, most delicate painting she’d ever seen—showing the resemblance of a most lovely little girl. She was but a child, Anna’s age if not a little younger, but clearly a princess or duchess or someone of much importance. Strings of pearls decorated her golden curls and a collar of lace framed her porcelain cheeks.
The regal lift of her chin was somehow completely at odds with the impish glint in her eyes.
Serilda shut the locket and slipped the chain over her head. She slid the ring onto her finger. With a sigh, she crawled back beneath her covers.
It was little comfort that she now had proof about what had transpired this night. Probably, if she showed anyone, they would think these things were stolen. Bad enough to be a liar. Becoming a thief was the logical progression.
Serilda lay sleepless, staring up at the golden patterns and creeping shadows on the ceiling rafters, gripping the locket in her fist.
Chapter 6
Sometimes Serilda would spend hours thinking about evidence. Those little clues left behind in a story that bridged the gap between fantasy and reality.
What evidence did she have that she’d been cursed by Wyrdith, the god of stories and fortune? The bedtime tales her father had told her, though she’d never dared to ask if they were real or not. The golden wheels over her black irises. Her uncontrollable tongue. A mother who had no interest in watching her grow up, who left without so much as a goodbye.
What evidence was there that the Erlking murdered the children who got lost in the woods? Not much. Mostly hearsay. Rumors of a haunting figure that stalked through the trees, listening for a child’s frightened cries. And long ago, once every generation or so, a small body discovered at the forest’s edge. Barely familiar, oft picked clean by the crows. But parents always recognized their own missing child, even a decade later. Even when all that was left was a corpse.
But that had not happened in recent memory, and it was hardly proof.
Superstitious nonsense.
This, however, was different.
Quite different.
What evidence did Serilda have that she had rescued two moss maidens who were being chased by the wild hunt? That she had outwitted the Erlking himself?
A golden ring and a necklace, warm against her skin when she awoke.
Outside—a square of dead grass revealed where she had shoveled away the snow.
An open cellar door, left unlocked, the wood still smelling of raw onion.
But not, she noted with bewilderment, hoofprints or tracks left in the fields. The snow was as pristine as it had been when she’d come trekking home the night before. The only footprints she saw were her own. There had been no mark left behind of her midnight visitors, not the delicate feet of the moss maidens nor the clomping hooves of the horses nor the lupine tracks of the hounds.
Just a delicate field of white, glittering almost cheerfully in the morning sun.
As it soon turned out, the evidence she did have would do her no good.
She told her father the story—every word a singular truth. And he listened, rapt, even horrified. He studied the seal on the ring and the locket’s portrait with speechless awe. He went out to inspect the cellar door. He stood a long time, staring out at the empty horizon, beyond which lay the Aschen Wood.
Then, when Serilda thought she could stand the silence no longer, he began to laugh. A full belly laugh tinged with something dark that she couldn’t quite place.
Panic? Fear?
“You’d think by now,” he said, turning back to face her, “I’d have learned not to be so gullible. Oh, Serilda.” He took her face into his rough palms. “How can you speak these things without so much as a hint of a smile? You very nearly had me fooled, yet again. Where did you get these, truthfully, now?” He lifted the locket from her collarbone, shaking his head. He’d gone pale while she recounted the events of the night before, but color was now rushing back into his cheeks. “Were they a gift from some young lad in town? I’ve been wondering if you might be sweet on someone and too shy to tell me.”
Serilda stepped back, tucking the locket beneath her dress. She hesitated, tempted to try again. To insist. He had to believe her. For once, it was real. It had happened. She wasn’t lying. And she might have tried again, if it hadn’t been for the haunted look lurking behind his gaze, not entirely covered up by his denial. He was worried about her. Despite his strained laughter, he was terrified that this one could be true.
She didn’t want that. He already worried enough.
“Of course not, Papa. I’m not sweet on anyone, and when have you ever known me to be shy?” She shrugged. “If you must know the truth of it, I found the ring stuck around a fairy’s toadstool, and I stole the necklace from the schellenrock who lives in the river.”
He guffawed. “Now that I’d be closer to believing.”
He went back inside and Serilda knew in that moment, in the deepest corner of her heart, that if he wouldn’t believe her, no one would.
They had heard far too many tales before.
She told herself it was better this way. If she wasn’t beholden to the truth of what had happened under the full moon, then she would have no qualms about embellishing it.
And she did dearly love to embellish.
“Speaking of young village lads,” Papa called through the open door, “I thought I should tell you. Thomas Lindbeck has agreed to help around the mill this spring.”
The name was a kick to her chest. “Thomas Lindbeck?” she said, darting back into the house. “Hans’s brother? What for? You’ve never hired help before.”
“I’m getting older. Thought it’d be nice to have a strapping young man to do some of the heavy lifting.”
She scowled. “You’re barely forty.”
Her father glanced up from stoking the fire, chagrined. Sighing, he set down the poker and stood to face her, brushing off his hands. “All right. He came and asked for the work. He’s hoping to earn some extra coin, so that …”
“So that what?” she prompted, his hesitation making her tense.
His look was pitying in a way that turned her stomach.
“So he can be making a proposal to Bluma Rask, is my understanding.”