“A haunted one?”
His jaw clenched as he focused on the wheel again.
“Yes, but you don’t look like the other ghosts.” She scanned the top of his head, the tips of his shoulders. “They fade around the edges. Whereas you seem … entirely present.”
“I guess that’s true. I can do things they can’t, too. Like popping in and out of locked rooms, for example.”
“And weren’tyoublessed by Hulda?” she added. “But that doesn’t make sense, if the dead can’t use god-gifts, like you said.”
He stopped working, his gaze turning thoughtful as the wheel slowed. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He pondered for a long moment, before shrugging and giving the wheel another turn. “I don’t have any answers. I suppose I was probably blessed by Hulda, but I don’t know that for sure, or why they would have bothered with me. And I know that I’m not like the other ghosts, but I’m also the only poltergeist here, so I always figured I’m just … a different sort of ghost.”
She frowned.
He glanced once at the candle, then squared his shoulders. His pace increased as he set to work again. Serilda looked at the candle, too. Her pulse skipped.
There was so little time left.
“If it pleases you,” Gild said, replacing a full bobbin with an empty one, “I’ll have that story now.”
Serilda frowned. “I thought you hated my stories.”
“I hated the story you told last time. It’s easily the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Then why would you want me to continue?”
“Just figured I’d be able to focus better if you weren’t constantly pestering me with questions.”
Her lips twisted to one side. She was tempted to throw one of those bobbins at his head.
“Besides,” he added, “you do have a talent for words. The ending was awful, but everything before that was …” He struggled a moment for the right word, then sighed. “I enjoyed everything before that. And I like listening to your voice.”
Warmth rushed into her cheeks at this almost compliment.
“Well. Lucky for you, that wasn’t the ending.”
Gild paused long enough to stretch his back and shoulders, then smiled at her. “Then I would love to hear more, if you’re willing to tell it.”
“Fine,” she said. “Only because you begged me.”
His eyes glinted almost impishly, but then he looked away and grabbed up another handful of straw.
Serilda thought back to the story she had told last time, and immediately felt the comforting pull of a fairy tale. Where terrible things sometimes happened, but good always defeated evil.
Before she’d even begun, she knew it was just the sort of escape her mind and heart needed at that moment. A part of her wondered whether Gild had realized this. But no—he couldn’t possibly know her so well already.
“Let’s see,” she started. “Where did we leave off …”
As the sun rose over the Aschen Wood, its golden beams descended over the spires of Gravenstone Castle. The veil’s mist evaporated. The haunted night gave way to birdsong and the steady drip of melting snow. As soon as the light beams struck the hellhounds that had attacked the young prince, they turned into clouds of ink-black smoke and vanished into the morning air. In the daylight, the castle, too, was gone.
The prince was badly wounded. Bleeding. Torn. But his heart hurt worst of all. Over and over again, he saw the Erlking driving the tip of his arrow into the princess’s small form. The murderer had taken her life, and now even her body was trapped beyond the veil, where he could not honor her with a royal burial, a proper rest. He did not even know if the Erlking would keep her as a ghost or let her travel to Veloren, where someday he might see her again.
Where Gravenstone Castle had just stood, now there were the crumbling ruins of a great shrine. Once, long ago, a temple had stood in this forest clearing. A sacred place once regarded as the very gates to Verloren.
The prince managed to get to his feet. He stumbled toward the ruins—great monoliths of slick black stone jutting toward the sky. He had heard of this place, though never seen it with his eyes. He supposed it should be no surprise that this unholy clearing in the midst of the forest was the place where the Erlking had chosen to build his castle, for there was such a sense of lifelessness and foreboding between these stone columns that no one with any sense would dare enter.
But the prince was beyond sense. He stumbled forward, suffocating beneath the weight of his loss.
But what he saw made him pause.