Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(8)

“Thank you, Liesl,” she said thickly, dabbing at her eyes. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“I think K?the needs some help with the guests downstairs, Mother,” I said quietly.

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said. And then she was gone, unable to stand another moment in Constanze’s presence. For a moment we stood there, my grandmother and I, staring at each other, at the salt and filth on the floor between us.

“Girl,” she rasped.

I threw up a hand. “I don’t want to hear it, Constanze.” I yanked open the broom cupboard in her room, roughly shoving a bucket and washrag in her hands. “Either you help me clean up this mess or you march straight on downstairs to help K?the with breakfast.”

Her lip curled. “You would leave a fragile old woman to make her way down those rickety stairs by herself?”

“You were obviously fine carrying all this salt from the cellar by yourself,” I said shortly. “Get started, Constanze, or make yourself useful in another way. Clean this up.” I grabbed the broom and dustpan and began sweeping.

“And leave us vulnerable to the Hunt?”

I resisted the urge to grab my grandmother by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. “The days of winter are over. We’ll be fine.”

To my surprise, Constanze stamped her foot like a petulant child. “Do you not remember the stories, child?”

In all honesty, I did not. While Josef and I had delighted in our grandmother’s gruesome tales of goblins and gore, it was always stories of Der Erlk?nig to which I returned over and over as a child. My hand went to the ring I wore on a chain about my throat. The ring was silver, wrought into the shape of a wolf with two mismatched gemstone eyes, one blue, one green. The Goblin King had ever been more than a myth to me—he was a friend, a lover, a man. I released the ring, and lowered my hand.

“The Hunt are . . . spectral horsemen,” I hedged. “Riders who galloped before death, disaster, or doom.”

“Yes.” Constanze nodded. “Harbingers of destruction and the unraveling of the old laws. Do you not see, girl? The signs and wonders?”

I vaguely remembered now what she had told me of the Wild Hunt. It was said Der Erlk?nig himself rode at their head. I frowned. But I thought he only ever wandered the world above during the days of winter. Was it with the unholy host? To search for a bride? Yet it took a sacrifice from a maiden to bring the world back to spring. Every year? Once a generation? What exactly were the old laws that maintained the balance between worlds?

“Bettina?” Startled, I glanced at Constanze, whose dark eyes were fixed on my face with a faraway expression. “Do you see?”

I took a deep breath, trying to calm my racing mind, trying to catch up to the present moment. “See what?”

“In the corner,” she croaked. “It watches us. It watches you.”

I blinked, wondering if it were me or my grandmother who had lost the plot. I could not grasp her thoughts, could not follow, could not understand, but was Constanze alone in her tower of nonsense, or was it me?

I shook my head and glanced over my shoulder. “I see nothing.”

“Because you do not choose to see,” Constanze said. “Open your eyes, Bettina.”

I frowned. Constanze occasionally called me by my given name, Elisabeth, but more often I was merely girl or child. Never Liesl, and certainly never Bettina. I watched my grandmother carefully, wondering if she were with me, or in the midst of one of her flights of fancy.

“Well?” she harrumphed.

With a sigh, I turned to look again. But as before, the corner was empty of anything save dust, dirt, salt, and filth.

“It’s on your shoulder now,” Constanze went on, pointing to a spot by my left ear.

I swear, she grows madder by the day.

“A strange little homunculus, with hair like thistledown and a pinched expression.” She leered, a spiteful smile on her thin lips. “It doesn’t seem to like you very much.”

A chill ran down my spine, and for the briefest of moments, I felt the weight of tiny black claws on my back. Thistle.

I whirled around, but the room was still empty.

A cracked cackle came from Constanze behind me. “Now you begin to understand. You’re just like me. Beware, Bettina, beware. Heed the horn and the hound, for something wicked this way comes.”

I snatched the wash bucket from my grandmother’s hands and shoved the broom and dustpan at her. “I’m going to fetch some water from the well,” I said, trying to hide the shaking of my voice. “You had better start straightening up before I come back.”

“You can’t escape it.” A wide grin plastered itself across Constanze’s face, and a flame of recognition lit her dark, dark eyes.

“Escape what?”

“The madness,” she said simply. “The price we pay for being Der Erlk?nig’s own.”





giovanni Antonius Rossi was dead. Plague or poison, the Viennese weren’t sure which, but when the old virtuoso’s pupil and servant were found missing, they suspected the latter. But the body was untouched when the Baroness’s valet discovered him—his golden-buckled shoes still on his feet, his silver fob-watch still in his pocket, his jeweled rings still pinching the base of his gnarled and weathered fingers. No thieves they, those two boys, but their absence was damning, for if they had nothing to do with their master’s death, then why disappear?