* * *
Here under the mountain, the wolves were more than seasonal rumors. They ran two by two, remorseless, through ditch and over stile into the fallow farm beyond. A scarecrow watched them pass, withholding comment. Moments after, the first flakes of snow began to fall. The wolves killed quickly and fled, mouths full of meat, before the moon had time to blink at their efforts.
But they veered at the skirts of the forest, sensing something with whiter teeth than their own was already on its way.
* * *
As Carola reached the last tree, the hunger took her. It set her bones aflame and left her burning, jack-knifed into the dirt. She rolled and howled, scrabbling, beneath its weight. It ate her heart and mind in one gulp, then settled down to chew. She bit the loam and drooled earth, teeth black with rotten leaves. Her hair became knives, her eyes coals, and there was nothing to be done at all but suffer.
Then, as suddenly, it let her go.
She looked up from where she knelt, panting. Over the nearest fence, all grain had turned to mush, and webs obscured the farmhouse’s open door.
She dragged herself upright, and went on.
Carola followed the farm’s wall around to what had once been a garden. A few crab-apples still dangled, higher than it was worth the while to climb. Beneath the bark, a faint chitter of grubs. Beneath the earth, worms.
And under the trees, an old man.
He stood with his back to Carola, looking down at a raw little patch of earth. In one hand, he held flowers. And the sight of him made Carola pause in mid-step, confused, because—
—he was haloed. Head, arms, legs, and spine all ran with a light the dull folds of his clothes could muffle but not contain. It spilled over his collar, blazed against the sky. It set the tree’s bark shimmering with his hair’s heat. The wind licked his bouquet apart, petal by petal, and the man stared on, oblivious.
He smelled of ecstasy.
Carola’s empty stomach clenched, and growled. She shifte
d from one foot to another. Something broke beneath her heel.
The old man turned, and saw her. Her face—or his recognition of it, rather—made him sway back a pace, knees buckling slightly. The flowers fell from his hand, scattering.
Carola’s eyes met his, and held.
“You,” he said. “Oh, yes. Oh, you.”
She watched, too detached to be wary, as he fumbled with the neck of his shirt, ripping the ties apart. Beneath, a curve of throat exposed itself, sweet and slightly pulsing. She felt a note run through her at the sight, needle-sharp and thrumming; the first phrase of an old tune, once learned under duress, but never forgotten.
Carola felt her lips curl back, ready to sing.
The old man smiled up at her, bleary eyes half-frantic.
“You remember me,” he said. “Remember?”
And a flush lit the skin over his jugular, drawing her close, warming her like a flame’s stir under the screen of a quick-lit lantern.
She approached him on tip-toe—he was so much taller than she, after all, though drooping now toward her like a sapling in a high, cold wind. One hand went to his cheek, the other slipping to cup the base of his skull, and she felt her nails resharpen themselves at the touch of him. His warmth. His smell. The beat and tick of his breath. All of that. All. Until—
“Ah yes, my Lady, yes,” he hissed as she bore him back, as she fastened on him without mercy (though none was asked for)—as fresh blood washed the old cud from her back teeth, and the moon irised shut in that one hot jet like a burning rose.
* * *
Slowly, then, her eyes cleared. She was full again, quite stuffed sane. And it came to her that she knew this corpse, this ruined, elderly thing; that he had once been captain of her wedding guard—back when he was young and fine, that was, before prolonged submersion in the night had left him too crazed to do anything but cry aloud for his own death, and hug it close enough to kiss when it finally deigned to answer his call.
Carola glanced down at the patch of earth he’d wept by—the grave, word coming easy to her tongue—and saw with utter clarity a small, black stone, hidden in a covey of rotten bracken laced with dead moss, twisted by the cold into a spiky crown stiff with old spiderwebs. Where its shadow fell, the grass withered. And on it, in deeply-cut letters etched with rain—was her name.
CAROLA DE GUILDHADE.
She crouched there in her shroud, atop the ex-captain, frozen by the sight of it.