Chapter One
Blood was common on the farm. Birth. Death. Slaughtering a goat for food. But this wasn't that.
Saskia took a deep breath. No. This was past the tree line, through the fog and into Cavebury Woods, where the birds were too quiet. The smell was just heavy enough for her to taste copper on her tongue. Heat rose into her face, shamefully close to pleasure at how quickly her body remembered what blood could mean.
She threw a glance over her shoulder, up at the second floor of the cottage. Edmund could not see her. He couldn't see her shame or the way her fingers wrapped around the rusty dagger she carried on her belt. She stared for a moment, hoping to see his face in the glass. A smile. A wave. A quizzical look.
But he didn't come. It was just her. Just Saskia, her dagger, and whatever waited behind the trees.
She forced herself not to hurry, like a child trying to behave and not devour dessert. The shame came again. No. This wasn't adventure. This wasn't action. This was farm life. Calm down, Saskia, she told herself. Remember where you are. Remember who you are.
Another glance over her shoulder. Edmund had not seen her disappear into the woods. Good. He didn't need to see this. He didn't need to know about the totally benign thing waiting in the pines. No, this was a secret thing, a small stolen pleasure she did not have to explain to anyone. This was hers. The blood led deeper into Cavebury Woods.
There wasn't much at first. A dark spot on the grass. Another on the pale underside of a fern. Then a smear across a stone where something had stumbled or dragged itself through the wet leaves. Saskia crouched beside it and touched two fingers to the stain. Warm. A little thrill went through her. "Oh, stop it." She wiped her fingers on her trousers and continued.
The farm disappeared surprisingly quickly behind her. Cavebury Woods had a talent for that. Twenty paces beneath the trees and the cottage became a suggestion of white stone between the branches. Twenty more and even that was gone. The ground softened beneath her boots, thick with old needles and black leaves, and the fog gathered in hollows and wrapped itself around the pines.
Cold beads of water collected in Saskia's hair. One slipped beneath the collar of her blouse and traced a line down her back. She shivered and pulled Edmund's old coat tighter around herself.
It was much too large for her. That was why she liked it. The sleeves swallowed half her hands and the hem hung nearly to her knees. It still smelled faintly of him beneath the scents of woodsmoke and damp wool: soap, old paper, and whatever indefinable thing made a person's clothes smell like the person who had worn them.
Edmund claimed she had stolen it. Saskia maintained that anything abandoned on the back of a chair for longer than three days became communal property. They had been married long enough that neither expected to win the argument. She smiled and followed the blood.
There were other smells beneath it now. Wet bark. Mushrooms. Rot. Somewhere ahead, something made a sound between a whine and a wet cough.
Saskia stopped. Her hand found the dagger. The little spark she'd been trying to smother since leaving the farm flared again.
She drew the blade. It scraped against the leather sheath on the way out, and even in the dim light she could see the spots of rust along the edge. Edmund had been telling her for months to clean it.
"One day you'll need that ridiculous thing," he'd said, "and you'll discover you've been carrying a decorative piece of iron oxide." "It's intimidating." "It's orange." "Intimidatingly orange." She wished he were there.
The thought surprised her. Not because she didn't like Edmund's company. She preferred it to almost anyone else's, which was fortunate given the arrangement they'd made before a priest. But this had felt like something she wanted to keep for herself.
Now the woods seemed larger. Saskia moved toward the sound.
The blood trail widened. Whatever had made it wasn't walking properly anymore. It had dragged itself through a patch of dead fern, rested against the trunk of a pine, then moved again. A few yards farther on she found a clump of dark fur snagged on a thorn.
Wolf. That dampened her excitement. Only a little.
Wolves were trouble, but they weren't interesting trouble. A wolf meant frightened livestock, sleepless nights, and neighbors standing around discussing fences as though fences were an exciting new invention. It meant checking the goats twice before bed and Edmund insisting on accompanying her because he possessed a touching but wildly inaccurate opinion of his usefulness in a fight.
Still, something wasn't right. A healthy wolf did not crawl away from a goat.
Saskia stepped around the thorn bush. The animal lay beneath a pine with its back pressed against the roots. It was large enough that she stopped walking. Not unnaturally large, not one of the ridiculous beasts people claimed to see after three ales, but large enough that Saskia became acutely aware of the smallness of the dagger in her hand.
Its coat was black and silver, darkened by rain. One ear had been torn sometime long ago. Pale scars crossed its muzzle. Its sides rose and fell too quickly, and its hindquarters were slick with blood.
Then she saw the goat. "Oh, hell." It was one of theirs.