Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(13)

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What am I looking for?”

The rector’s dark eyes bored into mine. “The ending. Magda’s ending.”

Frowning, I returned to the book. Babies were born and, if they were lucky, grew old. Some never made it out of infancy; others lived to see several generations of their own children predecease them. There was no rhyme or reason but chance. I didn’t understand why Magda’s ending was so important.

Until I couldn’t find it.

Constanze and Bettina’s lives were well-recorded: their births and baptism, their marriages, their children. Bettina’s story seemed to end with her marriage to Ansel Bergman, but Constanze’s continued on through her children: Johannes, Christoph, Constanze, another Constanze, Georg, another Constanze, Josef, and Franz. Every single one of my aunts and uncles had their deaths written alongside their births, indelibly inked into history.

But not Magda.

I went backward and forward in time, searching for an exit, an ending. But no matter where I looked, there was no further sign of Magda, no marriages, no children, not even a death. Her life was unfinished, and if it weren’t for the fact of her birth, recorded by the rector several decades before, she might have never existed.

“There is—there is no ending,” I whispered.

The rector folded his hands into his voluminous sleeves. “Yes,” he said simply.

“Do you know what happened to her? Did she die? Move away? People don’t just . . . disappear.” I looked up from the tome, spooked and unsettled. “Do they?”

“People don’t disappear, but their stories become forgotten,” he said in a soft voice. “It is only the faithful who remember.”

“And you remember.”

The rector nodded his head. “She was taken. Stolen.” He swallowed. “By the Wild Hunt.”

The world narrowed to a single point of focus before me, the small, steady light of the lantern flame. All else was dark, and I felt myself falling, spiraling down, down, down into the abyss of fear. I tried to recall everything I knew of the Wild Hunt—what they were, who they were, and why they rode abroad—but a cold void of anxiety spun at the heart of my swirling mind. My hand went to the ring at my throat, feeling the comforting bite of the wolf’s head in my palm.

“How?” I croaked. “Why?”

It was a long moment before the rector replied. “No two stories of the unholy host agree. It is said their appearance presages some unspeakable catastrophe: a plague, a war, or even”—he flicked his gaze at my clenched fist—“the end of the world.”

I tightened my grip on the Goblin King’s ring.

“Others say the Hunt rides abroad when there is an imbalance between heaven and hell, between the Underground and the land of the living, sweeping through the world above to claim what is rightfully theirs. The old laws made flesh: given steel and teeth and hounds to reap what they are owed.”

The void at the heart of me was threatening to engulf me whole. “A sacrifice,” I said hoarsely. “The life of a maiden.”

To my surprise, he gave a dismissive snort. “And what sort of sacrifice would a maiden’s life be? A heartbeat? A breath? A touch?”

Think you your beating heart the greatest gift you could give? No, mortal, your heartbeat is but the least and last.

“Then what . . .” But I could not finish. Then what was my sacrifice for? What was his? What was the price to be paid by my austere young man for letting me walk away?

“Oh, child,” the rector said with a sigh. “Life is not the body”—he tapped my hand, the one curled around the Goblin King’s ring—“but the soul.”

“I don’t—I don’t—”

“You don’t understand?” He shook his head. “The queer, the wild, the strange, the elf-touched—they are said to belong to the Goblin King. Their gifts are fruits of the Underground, their genius, their passion, their obsession, their art. They belong to him, for they are Der Erlk?nig’s own.”

Der Erlk?nig’s own. It was what Constanze had always called us, me and Josef, but I had always thought she meant those of us who believed in the Underground.

“And Magda was taken because of her . . . gifts?”

The rector’s face was grim. “Magda was taken because she believed. It is madness to bear witness to the Hunt, and she was already mad.”

A sudden, chilling thought crossed my mind. “What happens to those who do not believe?”

Through the haze of the flickering lantern light, our gazes met. “I think you know, Fr?ulein.”

I did.

Elf-struck.





a king stands in a grove, hooded and cloaked, a tall, elegant stranger. His back is turned, his face gazing into the formless mist around him, both defiant and sorrowful, as the sound of thundering hooves and the bell-like bays of hunting hounds fill the air.

His features are hidden by shadow, but wisps of feathery-white hair peek out from the depths of his hood, a glint of pale eyes mirroring the strange, depthless light around him. In the distance, shapes begin to coalesce, the passing tatters of fog into banners, mist into cresting waves, into horses’ manes, into men. Men with spears, men with shields, and men with swords. An unholy host.

They are coming, Elisabeth.