She woke to the cry of a falcon fishing in the lake and the midday sun in her face, the fire doused by the dew and Bohdan sleeping beside her.
Mouse felt clean at last.
Streaks of bright orange and yellow and red wove though the dark evergreens around the lake as Mouse and Bohdan prepared for their third winter together. While Mouse spent her days foraging, the wolf would hunt, but Bohdan was always waiting for her at dusk as she came back lugging the baskets she’d woven from the mountain matgrass, full of the forest’s offerings. He would jog down the path to greet her, running his head under her hand so that her fingers raked the fur along his neck and spine.
But one day, heavy with clouds that crawled from the far north promising the season’s first snow, Bohdan wasn’t there as Mouse rounded the lakehead and turned for home. She was late, the sun already set. She knew the path well enough to walk it in the growing dark, but an uneasiness quickened her step. The scream still caught her off guard. She raced up the path, basket slamming against her hip and sending showers of nuts rolling madly behind her.
As she crested the rise, Mouse saw near the mouth of the cave a memory come to life again: The deer strung up on a tree. The poachers in Ottakar’s woods. The man who’d tried to rape her. The man she had killed.
Then another scream ripped the air.
It came from the deer that was not a deer. It was Bohdan. His front legs were bound and jutting oddly over him as they held the weight of his body which dangled from the tree. His head hung down like the crucified Christ, eyes open.
Gathered around him were things that were not men, not animals. They were not natural creatures—too thin, rib cages sticking out like skeletons, a slick skin like tarnished silver stretched taut over them. The two on either side of Bohdan crouched on all fours, but the one in the middle stood upright like a man, hips strangely angled. It reached up and pulled its claw down the side of Bohdan’s chest, tugging at the wolf’s coat until it tore from the body, skinning him. Bohdan screamed again.
Mouse screamed with him.
The creatures holding the wolf’s legs let go, startled, and they all turned to look at her.
She acted without thinking, rage driving her. Still screaming, she ran at them but turned at the last, thrusting the bottom of her basket into the fire. The dry grass caught fire quickly, and Mouse swung the basket in front of her as she made her way to Bohdan. The silver demons slid back. She grabbed her knife from where it hung at her waist and reached up to slice at the rope above Bohdan’s head.
One of the demons slashed at her, claws raking her leg as she swung the basket of flames at it. It squealed in pain, blisters bubbling on its silver skin. Remembering the hollow-eyed children, Mouse doubted that the fire would kill these demons, but as long as they held their physical form, they were as vulnerable to pain as anything else.
She lunged at the other two, driving them farther back into the shadows as she cut through the last of the rope and Bohdan dropped to the ground at her feet. He didn’t move. Mouse didn’t wait. She grabbed the rope still wrapped around his legs and ran toward the cave, dragging him behind her.
She heard the demon coming before it landed on her back, claws digging into her shoulder. Mouse turned to swing the basket around, but the flame had eaten through the grass and it fell apart in her hands. She could feel the demon’s breath on her neck, and she knew it was about to bite. She threw herself toward the cave.
As they crossed the threshold, the demon on her back cried out, and Mouse felt scalding liquid run down her spine. She spun, crawling to grab the rope and pull Bohdan into the cave with her. She saw a pool of silver bubbling on the other side of a dark line running along the mouth of the cave. When she and Bohdan had decided to make the place their home, out of habit Mouse had crafted the protective spells Father Lucas had taught her all those years ago. She never thought she’d need them.
The other two demons paced silently at the edge of the firelight, but Mouse wasn’t watching them. She bent over Bohdan. And what she saw broke her. His mangled skin lay twisted under him, shredded muscle and sinew glistening in the firelight. He opened his eyes as she ran her hand along the top of his head. He looked at her the same way he did when they first met. With hope. He wanted to live. He wanted to stay with her. But this time there could be no healing.
Mouse buried her face in the fur at his neck, tears running as his blood ran, both of them weeping. She looked back into his eyes, shaking her head. And he knew. She could see the hope leave and another want take its place.
Mercy.
Mouse gripped the knife, brought it to his neck. One jab and it would be over in seconds. Her body shook. She bit into her cheek, trying to use the pain to summon her courage. But she couldn’t. She wanted those last minutes with him. She flung the knife away and curled herself around him, her head resting beside his.
“I love you.” Half whisper, half cry, her voice thick and cracked from disuse, they were the first words she’d spoken in nearly twenty years, and at the end of them, he was gone.
But she had little time to grieve.
“What are you?” The demon breathed in rather than out to make the sounds, so the words all ran together in an eerie monotone.
Mouse sat up and looked out toward the dying fire. The light glinted off the silver bodies of the demons as they slithered back and forth in front of the cave.
“You are not like the others,” it squealed. “Look what you did to our brother.” It dragged a claw through the silver liquid that puddled at the mouth of the cave.
Her grief gave way to anger. “I’ll do the same to you,” she spat. She wondered if she could. “Come here,” she commanded, waiting for the power to awaken in her, watching to see if her compulsion would work.
The demons stilled but they came no closer. The one who had skinned Bohdan pulled its lips back into a sneer, black fangs dripping with saliva, and let out a long, dry, scratchy laugh like sand grinding on stone.
All the better, she thought, as her mind filled with how to kill them slowly so they would suffer as Bohdan did. Teeth gritted, Mouse took a step toward the mouth of the cave, but her foot brushed against Bohdan’s body. She dropped to her knees again, breaking under the weight of what she had lost, her rage transformed. “Why did you do this?” she asked.
“We want it.”
“Want what?” she asked, but she knew the answer to her question before they gave it.
“The power. We felt it. We want it.” They called out in that sick, uneven drone of inhaled words.
Mouse understood. Walpurgis Night. Her blood on the straw-witch. She’d felt it, too, as the witch burned and released that power. The demons had come because of her, just like the hollow-eyed children all those years ago.
She felt the despair caving in on her, but as she turned back to Bohdan, she thought about what he had given her—healing, love, hope. To give in to her rage or despair would undo the years they’d shared, all that he had done. She couldn’t let that happen. What years were left her she would live as a testament to their time together.
Mouse carefully pulled the tangled skin out from under Bohdan, gently smoothing it in place. She gathered her needle and the vine she used to mend her clothes and began her work. She could not heal him, but she could make him whole.
She stopped often when the tears came too thick to see. She ignored the taunts and screams of the demons. As the morning light broke over the mountains, she looked up to watch them slink away. She carried Bohdan up the mountain opposite the lake—Raphael’s mountain, she called it, because near the summit stood her statue of the archangel of healing carved from a seven-foot tall shaft of sycamore that had been struck by lightning. His arms were held out wide as if he were blessing the lake and valley below.
Mouse lifted Bohdan up into the angel’s arms. She built a mound of kindling at the base of the statue and lit it.
“Carry him with you as you go. Heal him on the way,” she said as the fire took wo
lf and statue together. Lifting her head higher as she watched the tendrils of smoke join the clouds overhead, flecks of snow drifting down white and pure to burn in the flame, she spoke to God for the first time in years. “Do not turn him away because he was my friend. He was better than me. He has a soul. I saw it.”
Mouse did not cry, but she stayed until there was nothing but ash, and then she started her long journey out of the woods.
THIRTY-THREE
Now where did you come from?” asked the old woman pulling up a bucket of water from the far side of the Otava River.
Mouse had been walking for days, doubling back often to check that she wasn’t being followed—she didn’t want to lead the demons to anyone else. But the silver demons had been drawn to the power, not to Mouse, and if the power was gone from her, there was nothing to lure them. She had certainly seen no sign of them or anyone else as she traveled the woods.
And yet Mouse never felt alone. She found herself looking for Bohdan out of the corner of her eyes, expecting to see him weaving between the trees beside her. She would lower her hand, fingers spread, waiting for the cold, wet nuzzle and then the soft fur of him raking his head under her palm. She would reach out for his warmth in the night and though he was not there, the memory of him was and it offered a bittersweet comfort. With her sadness came the realization that he would be with her always like this. There but not there.
This feeling of his presence gave her the courage to come to the river and speak to the old woman even though every part of Mouse wanted to bolt, frightened like a wild animal by the smell and the sounds of anything human.
“The lake,” Mouse finally answered, pointing back toward the snow-covered woods. Words still felt foreign in her mouth.
“Devil’s Lake?” The woman shook her head and crossed herself. “There be dark things living in them woods and water. My dear Bernd tried to cut wood up near the lake many years ago, and he come running home, afraid for his soul. God be with you if you came through there, girl.”
The woman squinted and leaned a little out over the water. “How you come to be out in them woods? You wander off? Lose your man, maybe?”
Mouse couldn’t answer, couldn’t look the woman in the eye, but she managed to shake her head. She was trembling now, not from the cold but from fighting all her instincts to run.
“Trouble find you, girl?”
Mouse nodded.
“Best come home with me,” the woman said and beckoned Mouse to cross the river. “It ent deep here, though it is sure to be cold. But home is just up the rise. Come along, now.”
Mouse was wet to the waist when she stepped onto the shore beside the woman and bent to pick up one of the buckets of water.
The old woman nodded. “I near took you for a ghost so thin you are and dark about the eyes.” She smacked her lips and shook her head. “You need food, girl, and I could use some help seeing after the workers boarding with me. They come to build up the new town for our Gold and Iron King.” The unexpected mention of Ottakar ran like ice through Mouse, chilling her far more than the river had. The Gold and Iron King—it was the title she had given him years ago.
For her, he had become like a character in some minnesinger’s tale of heroes, a part of her life so long gone that despite her perfect memory, she never fully trusted her remembrances. She had pushed those memories away so often that Ottakar was more ghost than man, just as Nicholas had become more dream than reality. But now she had come back to the world of men, and here was Ottakar. She wondered about Nicholas.
“I be Enede,” the old woman said. She waited a beat for Mouse to give her name, but when nothing came, Enede started rattling on more about the new town they were building and the old one they were tearing down. Hoping she might say something more about Ottakar, waiting foolishly for a mention of Nicholas, Mouse followed Enede’s voice until they reached the tiny cottage.
She balked at the door, the closed space and smells too unfamiliar. A few sheep and goats and chickens were penned on one side, a wooden table and a handful of stools stood at the other, and a thick patch of straw ran along the front wall. Simple and bare like the homes Mouse had visited with Mother Kazi back in Teplá, tending the sick or birthing babies. Mouse knew this life. She had lived this life once before. She could live it again. She stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind her.
That first day, Mouse ate little, not trusting her stomach to real food after so long, but the warm, yeasty bread in her mouth tasted like joy. She kept herself busy so she wouldn’t think about where she was—the walls surrounding her, the stifling human smells, the loud voices of the half dozen men who paid to eat Enede’s food and to sleep on her straw. It was hardest when they talked directly to Mouse. She felt too visible, too much among them. Fighting the panic squeezing her chest, she would grab the buckets and go down to the river where she could breathe and be alone just long enough to calm herself. The men learned soon enough to ignore her.
They talked instead about the work of building the new town. And about the king who had ordered it. These craftsmen, who had come at Ottakar’s bidding from Germany, loved their Golden King. And Mouse loved hearing them talk about him.
“By the saints, you stink, lass!” one of the men, a new boarder, spat as she bent over him, refilling his cup. She had been at Enede’s for the better part of a week and had learned to control her fear and nervousness though it never really left her. She felt her face flush now as the men all looked at her. Enede, too, seemed to be studying her, and Mouse was suddenly aware of her ragged, soiled clothes and the ends of her filthy, matted hair that dangled as she bent. She put the bronze ewer on the table, wine sloshing from the spout, and walked back to the fire.
“Hurt the child’s heart, you have,” Enede reprimanded the men, who were laughing as they traded crude jokes about filthy women. But as they left for work, one of them laid his hand on Mouse’s shoulder, “We meant nothing by it, girl.”
His touch, the first human touch she’d had in nearly twenty years, plucked something lose in her. She spun toward him. “I am not a girl!” She turned to Enede. “Nor a child, either.” Her voice came out as a quiet croak rather than the forceful shout she intended. The man didn’t even turn back to look at her.
But Enede had heard. “Right you be, a woman you are, though to my old eyes you still look a child. I be fifty years old come my name day.” She chuckled. “And sadly, to most men, every woman’s a girl until she’s in his bed. Wrong they were to tease you so, but the truth be that you need a bath and a hair washing. Go fetch us some water.”
Mouse lingered at the river, buckets in hand, her eyes turned up toward the lake as she tested herself. Living among people was hard. Alone was better—though maybe not alone without Bohdan. She sighed and turned back toward the cottage.
The bathwater had turned dark with grime by the time Mouse had scrubbed herself clean. She stood now in an old kirtle Enede had pulled out of the bottom of one of the trunks along the wall. The dress clung to her damp skin and her wet hair pulled heavily on her neck. She smelled fresh, the wildness washed away.
Enede smacked her lips and shook her head as she tried to comb through Mouse’s ratted hair, which stretched well past her waist. “There be nothing for it but to shave it off and start again,” the old woman said and took a razor to Mouse’s head. The hair coiled in long dark ropes around her feet as it fell, and something quivered in Mouse as her eyes carefully studied the black tresses. It took her a moment to realize what was wrong. There should be gray in the hair of a woman almost forty years old, but her hair lay there as dark as ever. Her head jerked forward as Enede cut a large chunk of hair from the back, freeing her from the weight, and Mouse bent down, running her fingers through the mass of cut hair.
“Young as you be, it will surely grow back,” the old woman said soothingly.
Mouse started to shake. Young. Girl. Child. She looked into Enede’s eyes trying to see herself in them.
“C
alm yourself, child. I promise it will grow back as thick and beautiful as it must have been before the dark times befell you out at Devil’s Lake.”
Mouse pushed past Enede and grabbed the bronze ewer from the table, flipping it upside down, wine splashing red against the straw-covered floor. The smooth bottom of the polished brass made a looking glass, and Mouse saw herself for the first time in many years. Enede had not yet finished, so part of her head was shaved bald and the other had clumps of frayed hair sticking out from her scalp at odd angles. The bones jutted from her face, her eyes sunk back in dark holes. But these were to be expected from the years of hardship in the Sumava. These did not scare her.
Frantically, she ran her hands along her jaw, around her eyes. It was all the same as it had always been. Mouse looked just as she had twenty years ago when she went into the woods. She had not aged.
She looked up at Enede, terrified. The old woman reached out to her. Mouse grabbed her hand. She held her own against it. Enede’s hand, not ten years older, sagged and wrinkled with age and wear. Mouse had the hand of a young woman, smooth and spotless.
She paced, her hands rubbing her rough scalp, trying to understand. Enede tried to calm her, but Mouse didn’t hear; her mind was racing. It had been almost twenty years; she knew it. Her unnatural mind kept perfect awareness of the days—she had always known when it was Nicholas’s birthday, she knew Walpurgis Night, she knew the Saints’ Days, though she did not honor them. And besides all that had been the seasons. She could count them—the fourth winter when she broke her leg, the ninth autumn when she watched the wolves trap the deer and she could not save it, the summers with Bohdan, the springs.
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