“Because that would have ruined the surprise. She’ll be thrilled to see you in it.” My mother pulled me into an embrace that lasted a little too long. Then she turned abruptly toward the front room again. “You should get going, if you want to be back in time for the celebration. Don’t forget your lantern.”
I pushed the back door open and grabbed the lantern hanging on the wall. The candle inside the simple metal frame was short, but it should be enough to get me through the trip.
“Pretty!” Sofia jumped up from her stool the moment I stepped back into the front room. “Where did you get the red cloak?”
“It’s a gift from your grandmother,” Mama told her. “Adele is sixteen years old this season, and it’s time for her to start thinking about adult things.”
The flush that rose in my cheeks had nothing to do with the heat from the oven. She wanted me to think about “adult things,” yet she wouldn’t even discuss Grainger’s request for my hand. A refusal that made even less sense to me than her wariness around his father.
“Hurry,” she said as she went back to her dough. “And do not stop on the path.”
“I won’t.” I gave Sofia a smile as I lit the lantern, then I pulled the front door closed behind me.
On my way west through the village, I passed the blacksmith, the candle maker, the fletcher, and the spinster, who all looked up from their work to compliment my new cloak. I nodded to Madame Gosse, the potter’s wife, and after returning my polite nod, she stopped to observe to the spinster that perhaps red was not precisely my best color, considering the strong coppery cast of my tresses.
I gave them both a friendly smile and kept walking.
I passed the sawmill, the fallow fields, and the empty pastures, and as I approached the path leading into the forest, I saw a group of villagers gathered at the edge of the wood, working in the light from the halo of torches, which penetrated into the forest where daylight refused to fall. Half a dozen women with baskets were gathering acorns, while three men from the village watch stared out into the forest with their hands on the pommels of their swords, ready and willing to take on any beast that might lurch from the inky darkness.
But only one kind of monster ever ventured from the dark wood—the same species that had cost my father his life.
Loup-garou. Werewolf.
They looked normal in their human guise, but loup garou were enormous and bloodthirsty in wolf form. Though my father had survived the initial attack from a werewolf, I’d seen the remains of other victims ripped limb from limb. Twice, when I was a small child, the village watch had recovered little more than a leg, still wearing the shredded scraps of a pair of trousers.
Werewolves were the reason for the halo kept burning around Oakvale—loup garou were afraid of fire.
A few yards to the east, the Thayer brothers were hard at work with their axes, chopping new-growth trees from the perimeter of the forest. The woodcutters worked daily to keep the woods from encroaching any farther upon Oakvale, yet they never managed to actually push it back. And as grateful as I was for their service—which they profited from by selling the trees to the villagers as firewood or to the sawmill to be split and planed into lumber, then sold down the river—I found the brothers themselves to be unpleasant, at best, and occasionally an outright menace.
“Adele!” a familiar voice called as I approached the wood, and I realized that Elena was among the women gathering acorns. She broke from the group and raced toward me.
“Congratulations!” I pulled her into an eager embrace. “But shouldn’t you be getting ready for the celebration?”
She shrugged, chewing on her lower lip. “You know what the priest says about idle hands. And I needed a distraction.” Elena stepped back to look at me. “What a beautiful cloak!” Then her focus fell to my basket. “You’re going to see your grandmother? Alone?”
“She won’t be alone for long,” Lucas Thayer called, his ax propped over one thick, broad shoulder. “If Adele goes out there, she’ll soon be joining her father.”
“Shush!” one of the ladies scolded, rising from a kneeling position to glare at him. “Leave the poor girl alone. She ought not go on her own, but it’s her choice.”
Noah Thayer snorted. “Who do you think the watch will recruit to help find her body and drag it from the woods to be burned? She shouldn’t be allowed out there. Neither should her grandmother. Emelina Chastain is a witch, and you all know it. How else could an old woman survive in the dark wood all on her own?”
“She isn’t on her own,” I snapped at him as my temper flared. “My mother and I bring her supplies every month. And I’ve never known either of you to turn down her venison.”
Our errand was as important for us as it was for my grandmother. For the most part, villagers were unable to hunt in the dark wood, even when they could afford to pay Baron Carre for the privilege, but deer often wandered into the clearing around my grandmother’s cabin, and she always seemed to be waiting for them with an arrow notched in her bow.
And not even the neighbors who whispered “witch” behind our backs had ever turned down the fresh game she sent for my mother to trade for ground grain, honey, salt, and ale. They were willing to deal with the redheaded Duval women and their mad, reclusive matriarch, as long as those dealings filled either their bellies or their purses.
“Mark my word,” Lucas Thayer said as I settled my basket into the crook of my arm and stepped back onto the path, my spine straight and my head high. “That girl will come back in pieces.”
The dark wood was alive. That’s how it had always felt to me, anyway. As if every breeze that skimmed my skin were a breath from the forest itself, blowing over me. As if I’d marched into the belly of some great beast.
As if I’d been swallowed whole.
My heart pounded at that thought, but I sucked in a deep breath and kept putting one foot in front of the other.
Stay on the path. Don’t stop. Hold your lantern high.
Nothing could hurt me if I followed the instructions. Right? Yes, there were monsters in the woods. But they were afraid of light. Of fire.
I would be fine, as long as I had my lantern.
Within a few steps, I lost sight of the light from the village, and a few steps beyond that, I could no longer hear the thunk of the Thayers’ axes or the women talking as they gathered acorns.
Every step carried me deeper into the darkness, and I could feel the chill of the frozen earth through the leather soles of my shoes. The forest swallowed the light from my lantern just a few feet from the source, leaving me isolated in a bubble of weak firelight, staring out into impenetrable gloom.
I’d never been alone in the dark wood before, and I felt my mother’s absence like the loss of a limb. She’d grown up in my grandmother’s cabin, though back then, before the forest had encroached so boldly upon Oakvale, it was just inside the dark wood. So she was far more familiar than I was with the dangers and with ways to avoid them.
Though I could only see the path beneath my feet and the occasional branch that dipped into view over my head, I could feel the woods around me. And I could hear . . . things. An unnerving slithering that seemed too loud and too late in the season to be snakes. A series of wet snorts. The crack of twigs beneath a foot too heavy to be human. The dry clatter of dead branches crashing into one another with every breeze.