After a supper of berries and hazelnuts, Milla and Iris slept cocooned in blankets that smelled of damp and smoke. Whenever Milla woke in the night, which she did often, she sensed that Iris was just as awake beside her. Sverd and Selv squirmed, restless. Fulla slept so deeply she snored.
As soon as the sky was light, they set off to find Hulda. Iris was quiet as they walked. Milla sensed Iris’s fear, her worry that the closer she was to Hulda, the greater her risk of losing herself. The same fear twisted in Milla’s belly. If Iris became that other version of herself, Milla would have to face Hulda alone.
They hadn’t gone far when Milla felt Iris tense beside her. “What is it?” Milla said.
“Listen.” Iris eyed the woods around them.
Fulla nosed the back of Milla’s head when she stopped walking. At first she heard only the horse’s breathing and the shushing of air through evergreen needles. But then she realized it wasn’t shushing, it was hissing. Soft and low. Then there was a flash of movement through the trees and a woman leapt in front of them wearing only an apron and a man’s trousers. Her hair and eyebrows were faded russet-red.
Leah.
She hissed at them, her breath a sizzle between her teeth. Sverd and Selv rose from Milla’s head and hissed back.
Iris extended an arm in front of Milla. “Let us pass, Leah. Milla is here to see Hulda.”
“She’s here,” Leah hissed. Then she leapt and slithered through the trees—over rocks and roots, weaving out and in among the tree trunks.
The words she’s here were picked up and passed along in urgent whispers, and then more demon girls emerged from the woods like gathering fog. First there were only tree trunks, and then there were girls and women, some still wearing the rough burlap dresses they’d worn in The Place. Others wore odd combinations of rags and clothing, knotted and sewn together. All had bright, lamplit eyes. All hissed.
She’s here.
She’ssss here.
She’sssssssssssss here.
Iris led Milla on, her eyes fixed forward. “Talk to me, Milla. Remind me who I am.”
Milla reached for Iris’s hand, held it tight. “You’re Iris. And you’re my sister. And I’m yours.”
“Yes,” Iris said. “That’s right. Tell me again. Keeping telling me.”
And so Milla did. Over and over. You’re Iris. And you’re my sister. And I’m yours. Each time Milla said it, Iris squeezed her hand more tightly, as if she were holding onto herself, as much as to Milla.
They came to a clearing with an evergreen tree larger than any Milla had ever seen. Its grooved trunk was as wide as a cottage, with a jagged opening in the front. The tree grew so high, and its thickly needled branches spread so widely, that it seemed endless, like the tree from which all other trees had sprouted—like something that had existed forever, and would exist forever.
Iris let go of Milla’s hand and slapped her hands to her ears. Milla was losing her. Iris was being shoved aside, and something else was taking her place.
“You’re Iris,” Milla said. “You’re my sister, and I’m yours.”
Iris dropped her hands from her ears and smiled at Milla. “She’ssssss here,” she hissed. Then she ran into the woods to join the other demon girls.
Milla threw Fulla’s reins over her saddle, then pushed her fat rump. “Go on, girl. This is too much even for you.” Fulla let herself be driven off, and Milla knew that if any animal could find her way home, that one would.
As the girls moved around her through the trees, Milla was reminded of the cloud of wasps that had surrounded Liss and Kai. Now she was the one surrounded, only there was no one outside the cloud to save her. If it hadn’t been for Iris’s hair, Milla wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of the swarm of girls.
Then, from the jagged opening in the tree, Hulda emerged.
She was a woman made of snakes—constructed of snakes. Instead of hair she grew countless snakes, all of them lifting from her head, eyes forward, tongues out and tasting. The snakes shimmered black, blood-red, brilliant green and yellow. All were longer and thicker around than either Sverd or Selv, who hissed and whipped the air above Milla’s head madly, frantically. Hulda’s shoulders and arms were woven with snakes where a woman’s muscles should be. Even her fingers were slender snakes. She had snakes for veins, snakes for ribs. She wore no clothing, so Milla could see the snakes that corded her chest and belly, her thighs and legs. When Hulda moved toward Milla, the snakes that made up her legs spread out, slithering across the ground and carrying her forward, so her motion was more like undulating than walking.
Hulda’s face, like the rest of her body, was both beautiful and terrible. Her skin was the texture of snakeskin and brilliantly colored. Her forehead was grassy green, her cheeks blushed red-orange, her lips were the blood-brown of clay. They drew back over fangs that were long, sharp, and starkly white.
Milla’s voice came out high and childlike. Querulous. “I’m here to give you what you want,” she said. She’d wanted to sound strong and sure, but looking at Hulda made that impossible. Ridiculous.
Hulda opened her mouth and every snake that made up her body seemed to hiss as one. “What isssssssss that? What isssss it you think I want?”
“An apology,” Milla said.
Hulda’s snake legs swirled and whipped the ground, lifting leaves and dirt in violent gusts. “An apology? An apology? An apology?” Hulda rolled forward and wrapped her snake arms around Milla. She pulled Milla so close that Milla could look into her lidless eyes, her slender, black pupils encircled by amber that quivered yellow and green. Where Hulda should have had eyebrows, her scales arched upward, blackberry-purple. “Can there be an apology for thisssss?”
Milla struggled to speak and not whimper. “I know you’ve suffered.”
“You don’t know what I’ve suffered.” Hulda’s breath hissed hot and acid between her fangs. “How my own sssister betrayed me. Gitta, my love. My best love. How I wished she could love me back. How instead she despised me. How they buried me in the snow. How they left me there. Alone. How I shook and froze and cried out for my snakes to comfort me. And how then . . . I became this.”
Hulda unwrapped her arms from Milla and she stretched them out and the snakes that made up her body moved and shifted and her snake arms whipped the air around her. Her face became a grimace, and the hisses that made up her voice vibrated with sadness. “Will an apology make me a girl again? Will it give me back my life?”
The demon girls hissed in response, a chorus of abandonment so profound that Milla felt it vibrating in her chest.
Then the air around Milla grew thick with bitterness. The scent of it kissed the tip of Milla’s tongue and it tasted like bile. She despaired. “Hulda, I would give you back your life if I could. Instead I’m begging you. Please let the curse end with me, and then you can let these girls go. Let them have their lives back.”
“Why do you care about these others?” Hulda hissed. “No one cares for you. Silly Milla. Loveless child.”
Milla felt Hulda’s hatred rising from her, burning Milla from the outside in. Milla was overcome by Hulda’s desire to hurt her, to make her suffer, and it made her stupid; it opened up her mind to Hulda’s words and they latched onto her like thorns. Milla’s years of isolation, of being called silly Milla by the one she loved the most, heated her up inside. She felt on fire, would have doused herself with water if she could.
“You can’t know that,” Milla said.
“But I do. I know because the one you call friend told me. She’ssss telling me right now. She’ssss telling me you’re the least loved. That your brother shines like the sun. Your brother makes everyone happy. And you . . . you are the one they wish had never been born.”
Milla looked around her for Iris. Then she spotted her, russet-haired and hissing. Traitor. She said she’d keep Niklas and Milla in a safe place in her head, but she hadn’t. Sverd and Selv writhed and nipped at her cheeks, sensing her resentment toward Iris ri
sing, her feelings of betrayal making her stupid and incautious. Stop, they hissed. Stop. But Milla couldn’t stop.
“Iris lies,” Milla said. “None of that is true.”
Hulda rolled and writhed to Iris, who cowered away from her now, whimpering. Hulda wrapped five snake fingers around Iris’s neck and dragged her to Milla. She held Iris in front of Milla, the tips of Hulda’s snake fingers all snapping and hissing around Iris’s throat. Her eyes were round and panicked, the eyes of Milla’s friend. More than friend: sister. And Milla had betrayed her in a heartbeat. Milla had thought herself so much better than her mother, but now, overwhelmed by shame and self-loathing, she knew she wasn’t.
“Milla?” Iris said.
Milla lurched toward Iris, but Hulda jerked her out of Milla’s reach. She squeezed Iris’s throat, and the air around Milla was coal-hot. Milla felt it scorching her cheeks. Then there was no air, only burning. Milla felt that she was suffocating, surely turning to ash.
“Iris can’t lie to me, Milla. She belongssss to me.”
Iris screamed, slapped her hands to her ears. “Get out get out get out get out get out get out get out.”
Then Milla screamed as well. “Stop it!”
Hulda smiled, triumphant, and she dropped Iris to the ground. Iris sobbed and covered her head with her hands.
Milla wanted to pick up Iris from the ground, to tell her that it wasn’t her fault. Milla had thought she’d understood Iris’s pain. But she hadn’t had any idea what Hulda was really like. Milla had really only thought of her own pain, her own resentments. She was worse even than her mother; Milla felt no less a bitter, hateful monster than Hulda was.
“Please, Hulda,” Milla said while pulling up one sleeve and showing how the pale green scales had spread to the crook of her elbow. “I’m a monster already. You’ve gotten your revenge. Let this stop with me.”
Hulda wailed from her belly, not a hiss but a howl. “I CANNOT.”
Iris scrambled away from Hulda on hands and knees.
“But you can,” Milla said, trying to make her voice sound calm and certain. “You’re the demon. It’s your curse.”
Hulda’s snakes rose from her head and froze in midair, staring. “You think I’m the demon?” Hulda said. “I’m not the demon. The snakes brought the demon to me, and then she turned me into”—she looked down at her own slithering body—“this. A monster.”
Milla tried to imagine a demon that wasn’t Hulda—a demon more powerful and horrible than Hulda was. She couldn’t. Milla’s thoughts couldn’t stretch that far. “But you cursed us. So you can lift the curse. Can’t you?”
“The demon has all the power,” Hulda said. “It was her voice in my mouth when I cursed the village.”
“Then you must ask her to lift it,” Milla said. “Go to her and tell her that it’s enough. Or take me to her, and I will ask her myself.”
Hulda whipped her snake arms and legs so wildly that Milla stumbled backward to avoid being flattened. Hulda’s words came out in panicked hisses.
cannot . . .
frightened . . .
the demon . . .
terror . . .
terror . . .
terror . . .
The girls responded to Hulda’s wild panic with their own, hissing and writhing.
terror . . .
terror . . .
terror . . .
Hulda rolled back and back, a swirl of snake hair, snake legs, snake hands, snake fingers, and back and back and back until she disappeared into the jagged, dark opening in the tree.
The hissing of the girls grew louder, and Milla saw that they were closer than they had been before, and closer all the time. Iris still crouched on the ground, her arms over her head. “Iris,” Milla said. “We must leave. Now.”
Milla reached for one of Iris’s hands to pull her to her feet. Iris snatched her hand from Milla while twisting up and hissing. Iris was gone again. “Terror,” she hissed at Milla. “Terror. Terror.”
Milla backed away from Iris, looking around her for a path through the writhing, hissing, encroaching swarm of Hulda’s girls.
Then she ran.
28
EACH TIME MILLA TURNED HER head to see how close the demon girls were, they were too close, and so she kept running. The girls slipped and slid through trees and over rocks and branches as if they were no barrier at all. All the while they hissed. Terror.
Then, in an instant, the girls’ hissing stopped. Milla turned around to find them gone, the woods quiet except for the scurrying of small animals and the calls of birds. She was alone. Strangely alone. Hadn’t the girls been there just a moment ago? It was as if they’d vanished. Milla should have been grateful, but instead she felt unnerved. She wondered if they might be hiding, waiting for her to stop running so they could surround her.
Sverd and Selv tasted the air, alert to danger. “Which way should we go?” she said to them. There was no answer. She felt herself crying and that made her angry. She said aloud to herself, “Stop it, Milla. Since when has your crying gotten you anywhere?” She didn’t want to be the stupid, frightened girl in a story. “Think, don’t cry,” she told herself.
Then she knew: She would go to Niklas and warn him that Hulda was coming for him. That was the only thing to do. It was already late afternoon, and if she was going to find her way back to familiar ground today, then it must be before nightfall. The forest canopy was so thick here that sunlight only trickled through in slender beams. At night, the way ahead would be black and treacherous.
Milla had been walking for some time, when she heard a sound like humming. Not a buzzing. Not the humming of wasps. The humming of a person. A woman, Milla thought.
Her snakes strained forward, as curious as she was. If this were a story, Milla thought, the girl wandering in the woods and hearing a song would find a witch at the end of it. But this wasn’t a story. And if a woman lived here and might give Milla food and shelter for the night, well . . . it was worth at least a peek.
Milla walked toward the humming, and as she drew closer she smelled wood smoke and something more pungent. Then Milla saw light shining into a clearing ahead and she dropped to a crouch. She moved from tree to tree peeking around each to see what she could glimpse until she was nearly to the edge of the clearing. From there, Milla saw a ragged little cottage at its center—and the humming woman. Or rather: witch.
Because that was what she must be—a witch out of stories. Her long white hair was in a tangle atop her head, her eyebrows were as woolly as caterpillars, and her face was as creviced as a walnut shell. She appeared so impossibly old, and her pallor so gray, that had Milla seen her lying down she’d have thought her dead. Her lips were as cracked as her cheeks, and were puckered as if stitched into a knot. And the tip of her long, warty nose nearly met the tip of her long, warty chin.
Milla sucked in a breath.
The witch was puttering around a kettle hung over a fire, out of which curled a stench so vicious that Milla’s eyes teared and she feared she’d sneeze. Hanging from two posts held together by horizontal pieces of wood were three bloody animal carcasses, scraped of most of their flesh and drawing flies. The cottage looked more like a loosely constructed pile of sticks than a house, and was topped with a high-pitched, thickly-grassed roof. Chickens pecked about the yard, the one thing about the place that made it look at all homey.
Sverd and Selv hissed in Milla’s ears, then tucked themselves into her hair as if to say, if you don’t have the sense to avoid a witch, then we certainly do.
Milla backed away over soft evergreen needles that she hoped muffled both her scent and her sound. Gradually the witch’s humming grew softer and the clearing was just a spot of brightness behind her, and Milla allowed herself to breathe.
She stopped for a moment, looking forward, left, and right. Which way? She was more lost than ever and the only thing she knew for certain was that she should leave the witch as far as possible behind her. Finally deciding that st
raight ahead was the likeliest route back, Milla took a step forward and her foot sank into soft needles. Then she felt herself sink farther and farther, and then she was crashing down and down and grasping at branches, but the branches weren’t holding and before she’d reached bottom she knew: She’d fallen into a trap.
Her fall was mostly broken by damp, rotting leaves, but she landed stomach-first on a bowl-shaped rock that knocked the wind out of her. She rolled off it and lay there for some moments feeling stupid.
Sverd and Selv tasted her cheeks and nudged her neck and shoulders. “Yes,” she said to them. “I’m all right.” She sat up and her hand brushed the rock, which wasn’t a rock at all, she realized. It was a skull—a man’s, judging by the size of it. She held it up and centipedes oozed from its eye sockets. She tossed it away. She stood and felt along the sides of the pit, looking for something she could hold onto. She scraped and clawed until her hands bled, but any root she grabbed pulled free. She dug her hands into the earth, finger deep, and tried to climb up while kicking footholds, but she could manage to lift herself no more than three feet from the bottom before the soft earth gave way and she lost her grip. It was hopeless—the top of the pit was a good five feet above her head.
Milla sat down on the floor of the pit. In the dim she looked around for what else might be down here with her—some sign of what this pit was used for, and how recently. The poor fellow whose skull she’d fallen on had clearly been down here a long time. The bone was smooth and picked clean. She searched about with her hands, brushing away leaves and evergreen needles, and she found more bones, some person-sized. Some deer-sized. Some tinier. This accounting of the dead things that occupied the pit with her kept Milla’s brain from spinning into panic. If someone had gone to the trouble of making this pit, she thought, and then covering it over, then that someone would surely come back and check what they’d caught. Surely Milla wouldn’t be left here to starve, she told herself. Her very next thought was that perhaps whoever dug this pit intended it for unsuspecting wanderers like her and was content to leave them here to die—however long that took. Hence the skull Milla had landed upon. Milla thought of the humming woman. Wasn’t that just the kind of thing a witch would do?
The Cold Is in Her Bones Page 18
