Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(68)
“Try as I might, I never did find any evidence of a battle here,” the Countess went on. “But that isn’t to say that blood hasn’t been shed.”
Beware, nameless one, beware.
“What do you mean?” Josef wasn’t sure whether he was asking the Countess or the poppies.
“My family comes from a long line of butchers,” she said. “Not nobly born was I, despite my uncanny lineage. My father was a butcher, my mother a fancy French whore. How far the first Goblin Queen’s descendants have fallen. From Der Erlk?nig’s bride to tinkers and tailors, butchers and bakers. But Snovin”—she breathed in deep the scentless flower—“was where we always returned.”
“Why?” Josef asked.
“Do you know that the heir of the first Goblin Queen is always a stranger?” She laughed. “Foreigners, commoners, the lowly born. Yet we are drawn here because this placed is soaked with innocent blood, and all the Goblin Queen had been was a butcher in the end.”
Run away, nameless one, run away.
“Impossible poppies,” the Countess said. “Blooming in late winter. A place teeming with magic if there ever was one, and the stories say that the flower is all that remains of the souls of the stolen.”
“Stolen by whom?” Fear was beginning to seep in through Josef’s numbness along with the cold.
“The Wild Hunt.” Her green eyes were sharp, even in the dark. “The elf-struck are dead, but the elf-touched are trapped.”
He looked down to his feet, the poppies scattered across his boots like drops of blood. “Do they protect us? From the Hunt, I mean.”
“The unholy host cannot be appeased by anything but a sacrifice,” the Countess said softly. “It is the ancient bargain we’ve struck. A life for a life. Our lives. Our livelihood.”
Josef frowned. “Sacrifice?”
But the Countess did not immediately reply, kneeling down to pluck another poppy from the field. It dulled immediately between her fingers, turning purple and black with decay. She stepped forward and tucked it behind his ear.
“The gifts of Der Erlk?nig are not to be taken lightly. But in the end, the fruits, like all bounties, must be harvested.”
There was no reply but the moan of the wind through the trees.
“Go to sleep, Josef,” the Countess said gently. “Not long now until spring.”
He turned and obeyed, walking back to Snovin Hall as though in a trance. Darkness deepened, then lightened. The sky behind the hills lifted from densest purple to crushed, faded lavender, and the shadows retreated. Josef climbed into bed and watched as, one by one, the stars began to wink out, disappearing from the night like fireflies in summer. Silhouettes took on shape and texture, details grew clearer and brighter, and a world at peace began to stir and rise to greet the day. It wasn’t until the first ray of dawn struck the foot of his bed that Josef remembered that harvest was in the autumn while planting was in the spring. Everything was inside out in this strange and unexpected place, and as he drifted off to sleep, he wondered when the whispers had finally gone silent.
the people said there were wolf-wraiths in the woods.
Tales began to spread from town to town, stories of a sighting here, an encounter there. Freshly baked pies snatched from windowsills as they were laid out to cool, stores of grain disappearing, farm animals crying. No two accounts agreed on the appearance of the wraith: some said they were ghost boys, others insisted they were wolf cubs who walked about on their hind legs. Still others—the elders of many winters past—spoke of kobolds and sprites, mischief-makers and thieves. Spidery fingers and beetle-black eyes, the usual suspects.
Goblins.
Despite these differing accounts, there was one detail all the stories had in common: that wherever these wolf-wraiths had been, red poppies bloomed in its wake.
Impossible, claimed the philosophers. It defies natural order.
But it was impossible to discount the evidence.
It began in the barns and stables of the farmers outside town. Doors left open, footprints in the mud and muck, frightened bleating and lowing, the impression of bodies in the hay. The first farmer to see the wraiths had woken before dawn to milk his cow to see two shadows slipping away from the stable. Fearing thieves, he ran after them, but they vanished with the last dregs of starlight, leaving no sign they had ever been there, save a handful of red poppies scattered among the rushes.
From farm to farm, town to town, poppies began springing up in the oddest of places. In a hayloft, wedged between cobblestones, twined about the gables of houses. Each appearance of the flower came with a strange tale of ethereal figures and things that went bump in the night. Locked pantry cupboards with half a season’s worth of cured meats missing. Furniture completely rearranged without sound in utter darkness. A haunting shushing noise, the sound of winter branches rubbing together in the wind.
As the poppies began making appearances farther south and west, more and more descriptions of the wraith began to become similar.
Boys, the consensus ran. Two ghost boys.
It was always two, or so the stories said. One taller, one smaller, one as black as night, the other white as snow. Some claimed they were the spirits of two children murdered by their parents as a sacrifice to ensure a good harvest, others stated they were not human at all, but changelings escaped from the realm of the fey, looking for a home.