Serilda gave a sage nod. “My job is to prepare you for adulthood.”

  “Ugh,” said Hans. “You’re playing at teacher, aren’t you?”

  “I am your teacher.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re barely Madam Sauer’s assistant. She only lets you around because you can get the littles to quiet down when she can’t.”

  “You mean us?” asked Nickel, gesturing around to himself and the others. “Are we the littles?”

  “We’re almost as old as you!” added Fricz.

  Hans snorted. “You’re nine. That’s two whole years. It’s an eternity.”

  “It’s not two years,” said Nickel, starting to count off on his thumb. “Our birthday is in August and yours—”

  “All right, all right,” interrupted Serilda, who had heard this argument too many times. “You’re all littles to me, and it’s time for me to start taking your education more seriously. To stop filling your heads with nonsense. I’m afraid that story time has ended.”

  This proclamation was met with a chorus of melodramatic groans, whining, pleas. Fricz even fell face-first into the snow and kicked his feet in a tantrum that may or may not have been in mimicry of one of Gerdrut’s bad days.

  “I mean it this time,” she said, scowling.

  “Sure you do,” said Anna with a robust laugh. She had stopped doing flips and was now testing the strength of a young linden tree by hanging from one of the lower branches, her legs kicking back and forth. “Just like the last time. And the time before that.”

  “But now I’m serious.”

  They stared at her, unconvinced.

  Which she supposed was fair. How many times had she told them that she was done telling stories? She was going to become a model teacher. A fine, honest lady once and for all.

  It never lasted.

  Just one more lie, as Madam Sauer had said.

  “But, Serilda,” said Fricz, shuffling toward her on his knees and peering up at her with wide, charmed eyes, “winter in Märchenfeld is so awfully boring. Without your stories, what will we have to look forward to?”

  “A life of hard labor,” muttered Hans. “Mending fences and plowing fields.”

  “And spinning,” said Anna with a distraught sigh, before she curled her legs up and draped her knees over the branch, letting her hands and braids dangle. The tree groaned threateningly, but she ignored it. “So much spinning.”

  Of all the children, Serilda thought that Anna looked the most like her, especially since Anna had started wearing her long brown hair in twin braids, as Serilda had worn hers for most of her life. But Anna’s tan skin was a few shades darker than Serilda’s, and her hair wasn’t quite as long yet. Plus, there were all the missing milk teeth … only some of which had fallen out naturally.

  They also shared a mutual hatred for the laborious work of spinning wool. At eight years old, Anna had recently been taught the fine art on her family’s wheel. Serilda had looked upon her with appropriate sympathy when she heard the news, referring to the work as tedium incarnate. The description had been repeated among the children all the following week, amusing Serilda and infuriating the witch, who had spent an entire hour lecturing on the importance of honest work.

  “Please, Serilda,” continued Gerdrut. “Your stories, I think they’re sort of like spinning, too. Because it’s like you’re making something beautiful out of nothing.”

  “Why, Gerdrut! What an astute metaphor,” said Serilda, impressed that Gerdrut had thought of such a comparison, but that was one thing she loved about children. They were always surprising her.

  “And you’re right, Gerdy,” said Hans. “Serilda’s stories take our dull existence and transform it into something special. It’s like … like spinning straw into gold.”

  “Oh, now you’re just smearing honey on my mouth,” Serilda scoffed, even as she cast her eyes toward the sky, quickly darkening overhead. “Would that I could spin straw into gold. It’d be far more useful than this … spinning nothing but silly stories. Rotting your minds, as Madam Sauer would say.”

  “Curse Madam Sauer!” said Fricz. His brother shot him a warning look for the harsh language.

  “Fricz, mind your tongue,” said Serilda, feeling like a little chastisement was warranted, even if she appreciated his coming to her defense.

  “I mean it. There’s no harm in a few stories. She’s just jealous, ’cause the only stories she can tell us are about old dead kings and their grubby descendants. She wouldn’t know a good tale if it rose up and bit her.”

  The children laughed, until the branch that Anna was hanging from gave a sudden crack and she fell into a heap in the snow.

  Serilda gasped and rushed toward her. “Anna!”

  “Still alive!” said Anna. It was her favorite phrase, and one she had cause to use frequently. Untangling herself from the branch, she sat up and beamed at them all. “Good thing Solvilde put all this snow here to break my fall.” With a giggle, she gave her head a shake, sending a tiny flurry of snowflakes cascading onto her shoulders. When she was done, she blinked up at Serilda. “So. You are going to finish the story, aren’t you?”

  Serilda tried to frown disapprovingly, but she knew she wasn’t doing a very good job at being the mature adult among them. “You’re relentless. And, I must admit, quite persuasive.” She heaved a drawn-out sigh. “Fine. Fine! A quick story, because the hunt will be riding tonight and we all should be getting home. Come here.”

  She forged a path through the snow to a small copse of trees, where there was a bed of dry pine needles and the drooping branches offered some protection from the chill. The children eagerly gathered around her, claiming spots amid the roots, shoulder to shoulder for what warmth they could share.

  “Tell us more about the god of lies!” said Gerdrut, sliding beside Hans in case she got scared.

  Serilda shook her head. “I have another story I want to tell you now. The sort of story that belongs under a full moon.” She gestured toward the horizon, where the new-risen moon was stained the color of summer straw. “This is a different story about the wild hunt, which only rides beneath a full moon, storming over the landscape with their night horses and hellhounds. Today, the hunt has but one leader at their helm—the wicked Erlking. But hundreds of years ago, the hunt was led not by the Erlking, but by his paramour, Perchta, the great huntress.”

  She was met with eager curiosity, the children leaning closer with bright eyes and growing smiles. Despite the cold, Serilda flushed with her own excitement. There was a shiver of anticipation, for even she rarely knew what twists and turns her stories would take before the words slipped from her tongue. Half the time, she was as surprised by the revelations as her listeners. It was part of what drew her to storytelling—not knowing the end, not knowing what would happen next. She was on the adventure every bit as much as the children were.

  “The two were wildly in love,” she continued. “Their passion could bring lightning crashing down from the heavens. When the Erlking looked at his fierce mistress, his black heart was so moved that storms would surge over the oceans and earthquakes would tremble the mountaintops.”

  The children made faces. They tended to bemoan any mention of romance—even shy Nickel and dreamy Gerdrut, who Serilda suspected secretly enjoyed it.

  “But there was one problem with their love. Perchta desperately yearned for a child. But the dark ones have more death than life in their blood, and thus cannot bring children into the world. Therefore, such a wish was impossible … or so Perchta thought.” Her eyes glinted as the story began to unfold in front of her.

  “Still, it tore at the Erlking’s rotten heart to see his love pining away, year after year, for a child to call her own. How she wept, her tears becoming torrents of rain that soaked the fields. How she moaned, her cries rolling like thunder over the hills. Unable to stand seeing her thus, the Erlking traveled to the end of the world to plead to Eostrig, the god of fertility, begging them to place a child into Perchta’s womb. But Eostrig, who watches over all new life, could tell that Perchta was made of more cruelty than motherly affection and they dared not subject a child to such a parent. No amount of pleading from the Erlking could sway them.

  “And so the Erlking made his way back through the wilderness, loathe to think how this news would disappoint his love. But—as he was riding through the Aschen Wood…” Serilda paused, meeting each of the children’s gazes in turn, for these words had sent a new energy thrilling through them. The Aschen Wood was the setting of so many stories, not just her own. It was the source of more folktales, more night terrors, more superstitions than she could count, especially here in Märchenfeld. The Aschen Wood lay just to the north of their small town, a short ride through the fields, and its haunting presence was felt by all the villagers from the time they were toddling babes, raised on warnings of all the creatures that lived in that forest, from those who were silly and mischievous, to others foul and cruel.

  The name cast a new spell over the children. No longer was Serilda’s story of Perchta and her Erlking a distant tale. Now it was at their very doorstep.

  “As he traveled through the Aschen Wood, the Erlking heard a most unpleasant sound. Sniffling. Sobbing. Wet, blubbery, disgusting noises most often associated with wet, blubbery, disgusting … children. He saw the mongrel then, a pathetic little thing, barely big enough to walk about on its pudgy legs. It was a human baby boy, covered head to foot in scratches and mud, wailing for his mother. Which was when the Erlking had a most devious idea.”

  She smiled, and the children smiled back, for they, too, could see where the story was headed.

  Or so they thought.

  “And so, the Erlking picked up the child by his filthy nightgown and deposited him into one of the large sacks on the side of his horse. And off he went, racing back to Gravenstone Castle, where Perchta waited to greet him.

  “He presented the child to his love, and her joy made the sun itself burn brighter. Months went by, and Perchta doted on that child as only a queen can. She took him on tours of the dead swamps that lie deep in the woods. She bathed him in sulfur springs and dressed him in the skins of the finest beasts she had ever hunted—the fur of a rasselbock and the feathers of a stoppelhahn. She rocked him in the branches of willow trees and sang lullabies to lull him to sleep. He was even gifted his own hellhound to ride, so that he might join his huntress mother on her monthly outings. She was content, then, for some years.

  “However, as time passed, the Erlking began to notice a new melancholy overtaking his love. One night he asked her what was the matter, and with a sorrowful cry, Perchta gestured at her baby boy—who was no longer a baby, but had become a wiry, strong-willed child—and said, ‘I have never wanted anything more than to have a babe of my own. But alas—this creature before me is no baby. He is a child now, and soon he will be a man. I no longer want him.’”

  Nickel gasped, horrified to think that a mother, apparently so devoted, could say such a thing. He was a sensitive boy, and perhaps Serilda had not yet told him enough of the old tales, which so often began with parents or stepparents finding themselves utterly disenchanted with their offspring.

  “And so, the Erlking lured the boy back out into the forest, telling him that they were going to practice his archery and bring home a game bird for a feast. But when they were deep enough in the woods, the Erlking took his long hunting blade from his belt, crept up behind the boy…”

  The children sank away from her, aghast. Gerdrut buried her face in Hans’s arm.

  “… and slit his throat, leaving him in a cold creek to die.”

  Serilda waited a moment for their shock and disgust to ease before she continued. “Then the Erlking went off in search of new prey. Not wild beasts this time, but another human child to give to his love. And the Erlking has been taking lost little children back to his castle ever since.”

  Chapter 3

  Serilda was half icicle by the time she spotted the cabin’s light across the field, illuminating the snow in a halo of gold. The night was well-lit by the full moon, and she could clearly make out her small house, the gristmill behind it, the waterwheel on the edge of the Sorge River. She could smell the wood smoke, and this gave her a new spark of energy as she cut across the field.

  Safety.

  Warmth.

  Home.

  She yanked open the front door and stumbled inside with a dramatic sigh of relief. She fell back against the wood frame and began tearing off her soaked boots and stockings. She tossed them halfway across the room, where they landed with wet plops beside the hearth.

  “I … am so … c-cold.”

  Her father jumped up from his seat beside the fireplace, where he’d been darning a pair of socks. “Where have you been? The sun set more than an hour ago!”

  “S-sorry, Papa,” she stammered, hanging her cloak on a peg by the door and peeling off her scarf to join it.

  “And where are your mittens? Don’t tell me you lost them again.”

  “Not lost,” she breathed, pulling the second chair closer to the fire. She crossed one foot over her knee and began working some feeling back into her toes. “I stayed late with the children, and didn’t want them going home in the dark alone, so I walked with each of them. And the twins live way over on the other side of the river, so I had to go all the way back, and then—oh, it does feel good to be home.”

  Her father frowned. He was not an old man, but anxious wrinkles had become permanent fixtures on his face long ago. Maybe it was due to raising a child on his own, or fending off gossip from the rest of the town, or maybe he’d always been the sort to worry, whether it was warranted or not. When she was little, she’d made a game of telling him stories about the dangerous mischief she’d gotten herself into and delighted in his utter horror, before laughing and telling him she had made it all up.

  Now she could see how that maybe wasn’t the kindest way to treat the person she loved most in this world.

  “And the mittens?” he asked.

  “Traded them for some magic dandelion seeds,” she said.

  He glared at her.

  She smiled sheepishly. “I gave them to Gerdrut. Water, please? I’m so thirsty.”

  He shook his head, grumbling to himself as he stepped over to the pail in the corner where they gathered snow to be melted nightly by the hearth. Taking a ladle from above the fireplace, he scooped out some water and held it out to her. It was still cold, and tasted of winter going down her throat.

  Her father returned to the fire and stirred the hanging pot. “I hate for you to be out all alone, on a full moon at that. Things happen, you know. Children go missing.”

  She couldn’t help smiling at this. Her story today had been inspired by years and years of her father’s doom-filled warnings.

  “I’m not a child anymore.”

  “It isn’t just children. Full-grown men have been found the next day, dazed and muttering about goblins and nixes. Don’t be thinking it isn’t dangerous on nights like this. Thought I raised you with more sense.”

  Serilda beamed at him, because they both knew that the way he’d raised her was on a steady stream of warnings and superstitions that had done more to ignite her imagination than they had to inspire the sense of self-preservation he’d been striving for.

  “I’m fine, Papa. Not kidnapped, not ferried away by some ghoul. After all, who would want me, really?”

  He fixed her with an irritated look. “Any ghoul would be blasted lucky to have you.”

  Reaching over, Serilda pressed her frigid-cold fingers against his cheeks. He flinched, but didn’t pull away, allowing her to tilt his head down so she could press a kiss against his brow.

  “If any come looking,” she said, releasing him, “I’ll tell them you said that.”

  “It is not a joking matter, Serilda. Next time you think you’ll be late on a full moon, best you take the horse.”

  She refrained from pointing out that Zelig, their old horse who was more vintage decor now than useful farm stud, had no chance whatsoever of outrunning the wild hunt.

  Instead, she said, “Gladly, Papa, if it will ease your heart. Now, let’s eat. It smells scrumptious.”

  He pulled two wooden bowls down from a shelf. “Wise girl. Best to be asleep well before the witching hour.”

  * * *

  The witching hour had come and the hunt surged across the countryside …

  These were the words shimmering in Serilda’s mind when her eyes snapped open. The fire in the hearth had burned down to embers, emanating only the faintest glow over the room. Her cot had been in the corner of this front room since she could remember, with her father taking the only other room, at the back of the house, its rear wall shared with the gristmill behind them. She could hear his heavy snores through the doorway and for a moment she wondered if that was what had startled her awake.

  A log in the fire broke suddenly and collapsed, emitting a spray of sparks that singed the masonry before blackening, dying.

  Then—a sound so distant it might have been her imagination if not for the ice-cold finger it sent skimming down her spine.

  Howls.

  Almost wolflike, which was not uncommon. Their neighbors took great care to protect their flocks from the predators that regularly came prowling.

  But there was something different about this cry. Something unholy. Something savage.

  “Hellhounds,” she whispered to herself. “The hunt.”

  She sat wide-eyed in shaken silence for a long while, listening to see if she could discern whether they were coming closer or moving farther away, but there was only the crackling of the fire and the rowdy snores in the next room. She began to wonder whether it had been a dream. Her wandering mind getting her into trouble yet again.

  Serilda sank back into the cot and pulled the blankets to her chin, but her eyes would not close. She stared at the door, where moonlight seeped through the gaps.