“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I gasp, stumbling back.
There’s a bang. A glittering cloud pours from the open coach door: everything I took from the Eisendorfs, hanging in midair like hornets.
The pewter ring rises above them all, its moonstone shimmering in cold talons. “This,” Eiswald snaps. “This is a token of my protection. It is not yours to take.”
“Ezbeta and Gustav don’t need your protection,” I fire back.
Eiswald only gnashes her teeth. “Everyone in my woods needs my protection. They make their sacrifices every solstice. They respect the old ways. They respect me.”
“Easy to respect a god,” I mutter, thinking of the look on Hans’s face when Ezbeta screeched his name. “Anyway, your token was just gathering dust in the bottom of a jewelry box. They weren’t using it.”
“But they are far from your only trespass, aren’t they, little Vanja?”
The sound of my name knocks any answer from my tongue.
For the last year, I’ve been Marthe, Gisele, the Pfennigeist. I have not answered to Vanja.
I can’t remember the last time someone called me by name. I’ve forgotten what it feels like.
Eiswald pushes closer, and I smell night and yarrow and rot. “Do not think your godmothers can help you now. Take, take, take, that’s all you’ve done for the last year, taken whatever you desired. But you have come into my woods tonight, and stolen from those under my ward. So now . . .”
One pale hand reaches out, knuckles flushed red. My hood falls back on its own, the mink trim coiling around my throat like a noose. I try to move, try to scream, but—nothing. I can’t even breathe, lungs afire, my sight filling with the coal dust of terrible luck.
A burning-cold fingertip presses to my cheek, just below my right eye. There’s a sharp pain.
“. . . I will give you a gift,” Eiswald whispers, and glides back. “You will have what you want.”
I suck in a breath like a dagger in the gut. I can move again. My hand flies to my face—and catches on something hard, no bigger than the tip of my little finger.
Eiswald does not have lips to smile with, but the jaws of the bear skull crack a little wider. Torchlight slices along her teeth. “Rubies and pearls you shall become, little Vanja, and you will know the price of being wanted. For true greed will do anything to take what—”
“Wait.” I strip off my glove and run my bare fingers over whatever she’s put on my cheek. It’s too rough to be a pearl. “Is this real?”
Eiswald tries again. “To take what it—”
“Is this a real ruby?” I whip out my boot knife and check my dim reflection in the blade.
Sure enough, a fat, impeccable, teardrop-shaped ruby sits below my right eye.
“Scheit,” I breathe, and immediately prod at the stone with the tip of my knife. “I could buy five horses with this.”
“True greed,” Eiswald thunders, “will do anything to take what it wants.”
I shoot her a pointed look as the blade scrapes against the ruby, perhaps a little too close to my right eye. Admittedly, cutting gemstones out of my own face is not ideal, but . . . five horses. “Do you mind? I’m trying to concentrate.”
But no matter how I chisel at the jewel, it won’t move, as if it’s grown right out of my cheekbone.
Eiswald knocks the knife aside anyway, seizing my chin in a grip that makes me squirm. “Out of respect for your godmothers, I give you one more gift.”
“Pass,” I grind out.
“You have until the full moon to make up for what you have stolen,” Eiswald growls. “The longer you take, the more your greed will overtake you, until it is all you are.”
The thing about Low Gods is they’re inordinately fond of talking like a book of doomsday prophecies. You could ask Fortune about the weather and she’d say something like The wind’s loyalty skews, the veil lifts and that would mean “The rain will clear out by Tuesday.” The only way to get a straight answer from them is to spell it out first. “So I’m going to keep breaking out in gemstones?”
“By the full moon, you will be gemstones and nothing more. The only way to save yourself is to shed your greed and make amends for—”
“What I took, right, I heard you the first time.” I purse my lips. If I’m sprouting jewels like warts, maybe I’ve solved at least my money problem. “Are they all going to grow on my face, or somewhere less . . . necessary?”
“Enough. You grow tiresome.” Eiswald flicks a hand, and the raven flutters down from her antlers to alight upon one ruddy fingertip. “My daughter, Ragne, will watch over you until my gift ends, one way or another.”
“Your curse, you mean.” I eye the raven as the gravity of this situation begins to sink in.
Eiswald tilts her head, and the leaves on her antlers shiver. “It will be what you make of it, little Vanja.”
All the floating jewelry falls to the ground, save for the pewter ring, which vanishes. I swear and crouch to begin picking everything up, doing my best to keep the dirt off my pale-blue cloak. The raven— Ragne, I suppose—lands on the road, then hops away as I gather up the Eisendorfs’ jewelry. A moment later she returns, dragging my knife. I tuck it back into my boot.
“At least your daughter’s helpful,” I grumble to Eiswald.
She doesn’t answer. When I look up, she’s gone.
In her place stands Godmother Death, her shroud bleeding into the mists of the road.
I rise, my hands dripping stolen gems. “Don’t give me that look.”
Death does not deny it. Fortune can be slippery, but you can count on Death to deal plain. Disapproval is collecting on her like dew on a grave.
I sigh and jerk my head toward the open coach door. “If you’re going to yell at me, do it in here. We’ve still got a long way to go until Minkja.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Midnight Oil
“I’m not angry,” Death says in the seat across from me, “just disappointed.”
I stare out the coach window at the passing trees, mouth pinched shut. The coach jolted back into motion once I’d settled inside, my escort carrying on as if we hadn’t taken a short break for me to be struck with a deadly curse.
Death waits a moment, then says exactly what I know she’ll say. “It doesn’t have to be like this. You know I can help.”
And that is when Fortune arrives in a jingle of coins and bones, manifesting into the seat beside Death with a flourish of dust and gold. To me, she looks a little like Joniza, the bard from Castle Falbirg, with skin of deep bronze and glossy, tight black curls.
“We agreed,” she says indignantly. “If we’re going to discuss her servitude, we do so together. It’s only fair.” Then she reaches over and pats my knee. “Hello, Vanja dear.”
“I didn’t come to speak to her of servitude,” Death protests, as annoyed as she ever gets. At least, she sounds like it. I get seasick if I look at her face too long. It’s already hard to see beneath her hood, and her features constantly shift, taking on the visage of people about to perish at that precise moment. “I came because she’s going to die.”