She was desperate for sleep.

  Serilda shut the bedroom door. There was no lock, not on the outside to keep her in. Not on the inside to keep others out.

  She spun around and allowed herself to forget about ghosts and prisons and kings. Of cats and mice. Of hunters and the hunted.

  She kicked off her shoes as she pulled back one of the velvet curtains. An actual gasp escaped her lips to see the luscious bedding that awaited her. An embroidered coverlet, a sheepskin throw—pillows. Real pillows, stuffed with feathers.

  She slipped out of her filthy dress, finding a piece of straw caught in the fabric of her skirt as she dropped the cloth into a puddle on the floor beside her cloak. She didn’t bother with her chemise before climbing under the coverlet. The mattress sank invitingly beneath her weight. Engulfing her. Embracing her. It was the most miraculous thing she’d ever felt.

  As the sky lightened beyond the window, Serilda allowed herself to enjoy this moment of comfort, such a perfect complement to the all-consuming weariness that clung to her bones, weighed down her eyelids, deepened her breaths.

  Dragged her down into sleep.

  Chapter 14

  She awoke shivering.

  Serilda curled in on herself, grasping for heavy blankets, feathered pillows. Her fingers found only her own thin muslin chemise and gooseflesh-covered arms. With a groan, she rolled onto her other side, thrashing her feet around, searching for the coverlet she must have kicked off. For the sheepskin throw that had so delectably weighed down her legs.

  Her limbs met only crisp wintry air.

  Shaking, she rubbed freezing fingers into her eyes and forced them open.

  Sunlight spilled through the windows, shockingly bright.

  She sat up, blinking to clear her vision.

  The velvet drapes around the postered bed were gone, explaining that wicked draft. So, too, the blankets. The pillows. The hearth lay empty of everything but soot and dust. The furniture remained, though the side table was toppled onto its side. No sign of the porcelain bowl, the pitcher, the candle, or the little vase of flowers. The glass on one window was shattered. The gossamer window drapes, vanished. Cobwebs clung to the chandelier and bedposts, some so thick with dust they looked like black yarn.

  Scrambling from the bed, Serilda hurried to pull on her dress. Her fingers were so numb she had to pause to blow hot breath over them and rub them together a minute before she could do up the last of the buttons. She threw the cloak over her shoulders, gripping it around her arms like a blanket as she stepped into her boots. Her heart was thudding as she peered around at the barrenness of the room, so stark against the memories of the night before.

  Or—the early morning.

  How long had she slept?

  Certainly not more than a few hours, and yet the room felt as though it had sat abandoned and untouched for a hundred years.

  She peeked out into the sitting room. There were the same upholstered chairs, now smelling of mildew and rot, the fabric chewed through in spots by rodents.

  Her footsteps echoed hollowly as she made her way down the stairwell, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Water dripped down the stones, leaking in from the occasional narrow window, many of which had broken or missing panes. A few tiny sprigs of bristle-leafed weeds had sprouted up between the mortar on the steps, coaxed to life by the shard of morning light that struck them and the cold moisture in the air.

  Serilda shivered again as she reached the main floor of the castle.

  She might have been transported to a different world, a different time. This could not be the same castle she’d fallen asleep in. The wide hall might have the same stonework, the same enormous chandeliers, but nature had laid claim to these walls. Sparse vines of ivy trailed along the floor, climbing up the doorframes. The candles were gone from the chandeliers and the sconces. The carpets, disappeared. All the taxidermy beasts, the stuffed victims of the hunt, vanished.

  There was a tapestry hanging in tatters against the far wall. Serilda approached it hesitantly, her boots crunching on chipped stone and dry leaves. She recognized the tapestry with its image of an enormous black stag in a forest clearing. But last night, the image had depicted the animal being shot through with a dozen arrows, the blood leaking from its wounds making it clear that it would not survive the night. But now that same beast stood exalted among the sun-dappled trees, graceful and strong, its massive antlers stretching toward the moon.

  Last night, the macabre depiction had been pristine and vibrant.

  Whereas this tapestry was marred by moth holes and mildew, the dye of the fabric long faded from time.

  Serilda swallowed hard. She had once entertained the children with a tale of a king who was invited to partake in the wedding of an ogre. Sensing that to decline would be to offer great insult, the king attended the wedding, and relished in the ogre’s hospitality. He enjoyed the drink, feasted on the foods, danced until his shoes were worn through, then fell happily asleep. But when he awoke, everyone had gone. The king returned home only to find that a hundred years had passed. All his family were dead and his kingdom had fallen into the hands of another, and no one alive could remember who he was.

  Staring at the tapestry now, her breath steaming the air, Serilda felt a bewildering fear that this was what had happened to her.

  How many years had passed while she slept?

  Where was the Erlking and his ghostly court?

  Where was Gild?

  She frowned at this question. Gild might have helped her, even saved her life, but he’d also taken her locket, and she wasn’t happy about it.

  “Hello?” Serilda called. Her voice echoed back to her through the empty hall. “Where did everyone go?”

  She picked her way over the vines into the great hall. Debris littered the floor. The remains of birds’ nests clung to the ceiling beams. The massive central fireplace still bore marks of black soot, but otherwise appeared to have sat cold and empty for ages. A pile of fabric shreds and twigs in the hearth’s corner might have been the home for a dormouse or ground squirrel.

  A shrill caw split the air.

  Serilda spun around.

  The bird was perched on the leg of a toppled chair. It fluffed its black feathers, irritated, as if Serilda had disturbed its rest.

  “Don’t you give me that look,” she spat. “You startled me.”

  The bird cocked its head, and through the dust motes hanging in the air, Serilda saw that it was not a crow, but another nachtkrapp.

  She stood taller, holding its hollow-eyed gaze. “Oh, hello,” she said warily. “Are you the same bird who visited me before? Or are you a descendant from the future?”

  It said nothing. Beastly creature or not, it was still just a bird.

  The loud creak of wood echoed distantly in the castle. A door opening, or timber rafters shifting under the weight of stone and time. She listened for footsteps, but there were no sounds but the quiet, soothing crash of waves on the lake. The flutter of wild birds in the corners of lofted ceilings. The scuttle of rodents along the walls.

  With another glance at the nachtkrapp, Serilda moved toward the creaking sound, or what direction she thought it had come from. She crept through a long, narrow corridor and had just passed an open doorway when she heard it again. The slow groaning of heavy wood and un-oiled hinges.

  She paused and looked through the doorway, to a straight staircase. Two unlit torches hung on the walls, and at the top, barely discernible in the darkness, a closed arched door.

  Serilda made her way up the stairs, where centuries of footsteps had left subtle grooves in the stone. The door opened easily. Shimmering, rosy light spilled into the stairwell.

  Serilda emerged into a vast hallway with seven narrow stained-glass windows lined up along the exterior wall. Their once vibrant colors were dulled beneath a layer of grime, but it was still easy to recognize the depictions of the old gods. Freydon harvesting golden stalks of wheat. Solvilde puffing air into a ship’s sails. Hulda seated at a spinning wheel. Tyrr preparing to shoot an arrow from a bow. Eostrig sowing seeds. Velos holding aloft a lantern to guide souls to Verloren. Of the seven windows, Velos’s was the only one that was broken, a few pieces of the god’s robes left shattered and barely clinging to the leading.

  The seventh god waited at the end of the line. Serilda’s own patron deity—Wyrdith, the god of stories and fortune, lies and fate. Though they were often depicted with the wheel of fortune, here the artist had chosen to show them as the storyteller, holding a golden plume in one hand and a scroll of parchment in the other.

  Serilda stared at the god, trying to feel some sort of affinity for the being who had supposedly granted her golden-wheeled eyes and a talent for deception. But she felt nothing for the god before her, surrounded in hues of emerald and rose, looking regal and wise as they peered up toward the sky, as if even a god might wait for divine inspiration.

  It was not at all how she’d imagined her trickster godparent to look, and she couldn’t help feeling like the artist had gotten them all wrong.

  She turned away. At the end of the procession of windows, the hall took a sharp turn. Plain leaded windows to one side, looking out over the misty lake. On the other, a row of standing iron candelabras, devoid of candles.

  Between the candelabras stood a series of polished oak doors. All closed, except the last.

  Serilda paused, staring at the pool of light spilling across the worn, tattered carpet. It was not rich daylight she was seeing, tinted cool gray from the overcast skies. It was not like the light coming in from the windows.

  It was warm and flickering like candlelight, cut through with dancing shadows.

  Serilda swiped away a cobweb that hung across the passage and moved toward the doorway. Her footsteps landed quietly on the carpet. She barely breathed.

  When she was not ten steps from the room, she spied the edge of a tapestry. She couldn’t make out the design, but its saturated colors surprised her. Vivid, apparently unfaded, when everything around her was dim and cold and rotting away under time.

  The light in the room darkened, but she was so focused on the tapestry, she barely noticed.

  She took another step.

  From somewhere below, deep in the heart of the castle, a scream.

  Serilda froze. The noise was laced with agony.

  The door to the room before her slammed shut.

  She jumped back, just as a feral screech exploded through the hall. A blur of wings and talons flew at her. She screamed, one arm flailing. A claw slashed across her cheek. She threw her arm out, managing to strike one of the beast’s wings. It hissed and lurched backward.

  Serilda crashed against the wall, both arms raised in an effort to protect herself. She peered up, expecting an enormous nachtkrapp to be preparing for a second attack, but the creature before her was not a night raven.

  It was far worse.

  The size of a toddler, but with the face of a devil. Horns spiraled forward from the sides of its head. Black leathery wings sprouted from its back. Its proportions were all wrong. Arms too short; legs too long; fingers tipped with spindly, pointed claws. Its skin was gray and purple; its eyes slitted like a cat. When it hissed at her, she saw that it had no teeth, but a serpent’s pointed tongue.

  The creature was a nightmare, literally.

  A drude.

  Fear claimed her, crowding out any thoughts beyond horror, and some animalistic instinct to run. To get away.

  Except her feet wouldn’t move. Her heart felt like it was the size of a melon, pressing against her ribs, squeezing the air from her lungs.

  Her hand reached for her stinging cheek, wet with blood.

  The drude shrieked and lunged for her, wings spread wide.

  Serilda tried to strike out at it, but its talons latched on to her wrists, their sharp points puncturing like needles. Its wail invaded her, a scream so unearthly it felt as though it were piercing her soul. Her mind crystallized into nothing but fury and pain—then shattered.

  Serilda was back in the castle’s dining hall, surrounded by disgusting tapestries. The Erlking was looming over her, his smile easy and proud. He gestured to the wall. She turned, her stomach in knots.

  The hercinia bird was above the buffet, its glowing wings stretched out. But this time, it was alive. Screeching in pain. Its wings kept fluttering, trying to fly away, but they were mounted to a board, stuck through with thick iron nails.

  And on the wall to either side, two disembodied heads had been placed on stone plaques. To the right—Gild, glowering at her with hate, his eyes flashing. This was her fault. He had tried to help her, and this was what had become of him.

  And to the left—her father, his eyes open wide, his mouth twisting, trying desperately to form words.

  She stepped closer to him, straining to hear him with tears on her cheeks.

  Until a word finally came. A whisper as harsh as a scream.

  Liar.

  Distantly, a roar thundered through the dining hall.

  No.

  Not the dining hall.

  From a corridor, upstairs.

  Serilda’s eyes snapped open. She had fallen against one of the corridor’s windows, her shoulder cracking the glass, leaving a series of hairline fractures.

  Her wrists were bleeding, but the drude had released her. It was standing a few feet away, its knees bent and wings lifted, preparing to take flight again. It was screeching, the sound shrill enough to make Serilda press her hands to her ears.

  The drude jumped upward, but had barely left the ground when one of the candelabras tipped over. No—was shoved over. It crashed against the drude, momentarily pinning it to the ground.

  The creature howled and crawled out from beneath the heavy iron. It might have been limping, but it took flight again with ease.

  A wind like a sea storm rushed through the hall, smelling of ice, tossing Serilda’s hair into her face and thrusting the drude against one of the doors with such force the chandeliers trembled overhead. The beast collapsed to the ground with a hiss of pain.

  Seeing her chance, Serilda scrambled to her feet and ran.

  Behind her, she heard something fall. Something crash. Another door slamming shut so hard the wall torches shuddered.

  She whipped past the stained-glass windows with their watchful gods, down the staircase, her heart choking her.

  She tried to remember where she was, but her eyes were blurred and her thoughts muddled. The halls were as unfamiliar as a labyrinth, and nothing looked the same as last night.

  Another scream lifted the hairs on Serilda’s neck.

  She collapsed against a pillar, gasping for breath. It had sounded close this time, but she didn’t know which direction it had come from. She didn’t know if she wanted to find out the source of the scream or not. It sounded like someone needed help. It sounded like someone was dying.

  She waited, struggling to listen over the mad thumping of her heart and her rapid, halting breaths.

  The scream did not come again.

  Legs shaking, Serilda headed toward what she thought was the great hall. But when she turned again, she found herself facing an alcove with a set of wide-open double doors. The room beyond was enormous and in as much disrepair as the rest of the castle. What little furniture remained was toppled and broken. Crackled ivy leaves littered the floor, along with chipped stone and twigs dragged in by whatever critters had tried to make this forsaken place their home.

  A raised dais stood at the far end of one room, with two ornate chairs on top of it.

  Not chairs, exactly. Thrones. Each one gilded and upholstered in cobalt blue.

  They appeared pristine, untouched by the decay that had ruined the rest of the castle, preserved by what magic she couldn’t begin to guess. It looked as if the castle’s rulers might be returning any moment. If only the rest of their castle weren’t being slowly eroded away. Claimed by nature, by death.

  And this was a place of death. It was unmistakable. The smell of rot. The taste of ashes on her tongue. The way misery and suffering clung to the walls like invisible cobwebs, floating on the air like bits of ephemeral dust.

  She was halfway across the throne room when she heard the low, squelching sound.

  She paused, listening.

  On her next step, she heard it again, and this time, she felt the sole of her boot sticking to the stone.

  Her gaze dropped to the floor and the trail of bloody footprints that stretched out behind her to the corridor she had just left. A dark pool now swelled around the edges of the throne room, spilling out into the corridor.

  Her insides spasmed.

  She backed away, slowly at first—then turned and fled, toward the large double doors facing the thrones. The moment she crossed the threshold, the doors slammed shut.

  She did not stop. She passed from one grand, decrepit parlor into another, until suddenly she recognized where she was. The enormous fireplace. The carved doors.

  She’d found the great hall.

  With a shuddering, hopeful cry, she launched herself toward the doors and yanked them open. Gray light spilled across the courtyard, which had fared little better with time. The hound statues at the base of the steps were now streaked with green decay, their surfaces pocked by corrosion. The stables were collapsing on one end, the thatched roof mottled with holes. The courtyard itself was being devoured by brambles and spiny musk thistles. A wayfaring tree had sprouted up in the southern corner, its roots tearing through the cobblestones, its barren winter branches like skeletal fingers reaching for the gray sky. The berries that had not been picked clean by the birds had fallen onto the stone and were rotting away into bloodlike splatters.

  But the gate was open. The drawbridge was down.

  She could have wept with relief.

  As a freezing wind blew off the lake, tossing back her hair and cloak, Serilda ran as hard as she could. Behind her she could still hear the screaming, the cries, the cacophony of death.

  Wood thundered underfoot as she crossed the drawbridge. On the other side, the narrow bridge that connected the castle to the town stood weathered from time. Its stones chipping away. One section of rail having collapsed down into the water below. It would have been frightfully treacherous in a carriage, but even the fragile, narrow middle of the bridge still afforded plenty of room for lone Serilda. She ran until all she could hear were the wind whistling in her ears and her own panting breaths.