To her right, from town, came a distant music. The moon was waning. Above the trees, the castle’s battlements stood suddenly plain against the lightening sky. But the tower room shone brighter and the road ran to an open gate, agape and lockless in the gloom.
Carola, unaware of her own movements, took up her train.
Someone keeps a lamp for me, she thought. Someone knows I am woken.
And her smile unsheathed again, unbidden. Teeth white as salt.
He shall not go unanswered.
* * *
It was almost dawn. A flush grew in the sky’s far corner. Purple, then plum. Then red.
Far below, golden thread began to rim the ragged crenellations.
* * *
Footsteps in the great hall. Skirts in hand, Carola passed the cracked and silent fireplace, leaving a trail of dust. Tapestries flapped in the wind. Behind the great chair, two ravens perched on a slain knight’s skull still fought over his remaining eye. Owls rose, shrieking, from the rafters. Carola ignored them, setting foot instead to the tower steps.
One, then another, and so on—up, higher and higher, into the coming dawn. Until the clouds were level with her knees. Until her chest rasped and burnt. Until—
—a door sprang up before her.
She paused for a moment, pressing her throat.
No lock left to open with a touch. It merely hung, rust-slicked ring poised for pulling. Between jamb and wall lolled a strip of room, widening with each new breeze. And—inside that room—a light, pale as a lit tuber, flickering at the table’s head. Five grey candles, of uneven size, bases melted together?
Behind her, a voice:
“No. Look closer, Lady.”
And the candles shrivelled, twisted. Grew nails. Became, at last, a grisly trophy shivering at the light’s core—a mummified hand, bleak with flame.
The Hand of Glory.
“It makes the living sleep,” said the voice, amused by its own expertise. Nearer now. “And, as I long suspected—the dead wake.”
Almost within reach.
But Carola stood still, thinking: Let him come to me, if he dares.
“Oh, but I do.”
And Carola spun—
—to find him, smiling, at her elbow.
* * *
Down in the valley, dawn broke now in earnest, chasing crows from the frozen shreds of the wolves’ kill. Townspeople began, tentatively, to unbar their doors.
* * *
But Carola and her husband stood—still as only the dead can stand—at either end of the five-sided room, and watched each other closely. The room was hung with purple from roof to floor, windows lost under a weight of velvet soft enough to muffle the world’s scream to a dull hum, thick enough to shut out even the sun. Against this backdrop, Carola’s husband shone like leprosy, toying with his dagger. His eyes were green, like cut church glass; his teeth, porcelain.
“Well met, truly, after so long an absence.” He said, bowing. “Will my Lady sit?”
Carola did not reply.