Juliet Marillier - Wildwood Dancing

Go, go, go, odious man.

“I think—” said Cezar, but I never heard what he thought.

We opened the kitchen door on an uproar. In the center of the room stood small, wizened Petru, and by the hearth a younger man of similar build: his grandson, Ivan. Petru was telling some kind of tale, stumbling over his words as Daniel and R˘azvan and my sisters bombarded him with questions. Florica, pale as bread dough, was muttering and crossing herself. Tati alarmed me most of all, for there were hectic red spots on her cheeks and she was clutching her tea glass so tightly I expected it to shatter at any moment.

“What—” I began, but Cezar’s bigger voice boomed over mine.

“Sit down, all of you, and speak one at a time. Tatiana, what has happened here?”

Tati turned her big violet eyes on him, but did not speak.

“Iulia?” I queried. “What is it?”

“Petru has a terrible story,” Iulia said, her lip quivering.

“A killing.” Petru’s voice was as grim as his seamed and creviced face. “Ivona, daughter of Marius the miller. Only fifteen years old. Her mother went in at dawn, and there was the girl, sprawled across the quilt like a rag doll, white as snow: a bloodless corpse.”

“What are you saying?” I whispered, not prepared to acknowledge, even to myself, that I already knew the answer.

“She had puncture wounds on her neck,” said Florica heavily. “A bite.”

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“You know what that means.” Petru tightened his lips.

And although nobody actually said it aloud, our blanched faces and shocked eyes spoke the words for us, into the silence of a shared terror. Without a shred of doubt, this was the work of the Night People.

149

Chapter Seven

Cezar took charge immediately. He would head straight down to the village to meet with Judge Rinaldo. The able-bodied men of the district must arm themselves however they could in readiness for going out into the forest at dusk to hunt down the evildoer. They would bring him to justice or they would kill him. Even as Cezar spoke, Petru and Ivan, R˘azvan and Daniel were donning cloaks and gathering their belongings to leave.

Tati had fled upstairs. After a little, my other sisters followed, leaving me to deal with the situation.

“Jena,” Cezar said gravely, “I will be advising all households to install appropriate defensive measures—not just on their dwellings, but on barns and outhouses as well. I want Florica to do the same: garlic, iron nails, amulets—whatever you can manage.”

“Marius’s place was well protected,” Petru said, pulling his 150

sheepskin hat down over his ears. “That didn’t stop the creature from coming in.”

Tadeusz’s words rang in my head: I am not bound by man’s fences or fettered by his puny charms of protection. Cezar’s eyes were full of dark purpose. Disgust, guilt, and fear churned inside my belly.

“I don’t want any of you girls going outside,” Cezar said.

“Nor you, Florica, unless you absolutely must. You’ll need to tend to the work of the farm, I know, at least until we can spare Petru. But keep it to what is essential, and be always on your guard. Come back inside and bolt your doors and windows well before dusk.” He was looking at me closely. “It’s all right, Jena,” he said in a different tone. “We’ll catch this beast—

I give you my promise.” He took my hand. “I think, after all, one of us should remain here with you. R˘azvan, will you stay at Piscul Dracului in my absence? Make sure the young ladies are not frightened. You should keep your crossbow at hand at all times.”

R˘azvan gave a curt nod. He looked annoyed. It was plain that the task of guarding a household of women was less to his liking than a manly mission of vengeance.

“Remember my warnings. Keep the doors locked,” said Cezar. “Be watchful, all of you. This is a dark time.” And he was gone.

“I have a confession to make,” I said to my sisters a little later as we sat in our bedchamber, shocked and quiet. “I don’t want to tell you, but I think I have to. This is probably all my fault.”

They sat in total silence as I recounted my conversation with 151

Tadeusz. I did not include quite everything he had said, but by the end of my account they were staring at me, incredulous.

“Jena!” exclaimed Paula. “You’re supposed to be the sensible one! What on earth possessed you to listen to him? Have you forgotten everything you know about the Night People?”

“He said that was old wives’ tales,” I told her miserably.

“That we didn’t really know what they were like. And that could be true. It sounds as if someone walked right past the charms of ward at the miller’s house. So much for all those stories about garlic and silver crosses.”

“That’s if it was one of them who did it,” said Tati. She was shivering even though she had her thick woolen shawl wrapped around her, and her face was pinched and pale.

“Of course it was, Tati,” said Iulia. “You heard what Petru said. You just don’t want to believe it because of Sorrow. You don’t want to admit that he could have been the one responsible.”

Tati was on her feet, eyes wild. “He wasn’t! Sorrow would never do something wicked like that—he couldn’t!”

“We can’t know that,” put in Paula calmly. “We can’t really know much about the Other Kingdom, even though we’ve been visiting Dancing Glade for so long. It’s full of tricks and traps, masks and mirrors. Tati, I know you won’t like this, but Sorrow could be anything at all. The face he shows you may be only the one he wants you to see.”

Relieved to have my younger sisters’ support on the issue of Sorrow, I risked a new suggestion. “There is one way to see the truth about the Other Kingdom,” I said. “We could go across 152

at Dark of the Moon and look in Dr˘agu¸ta’s mirror, as Tadeusz told me. We could see the future. And if we could do that, we could change it—take action to prevent the bad things from happening.”

There was a silence.

“Jena,” said Paula, “I’ve spent a lot of time with the soothsayers and wizards of the Other Kingdom. We’ve talked about tools for divining the future. We’ve talked about portals and the way that time and space work between their kingdom and ours. Nobody ever said a thing about a magic mirror.”

“Maybe they only tell you what they want you to know.”

My voice was a little sharp. I felt as if I were walking on a knife edge. A girl had died horribly. The men would be out there tonight with their crossbows and cudgels, their pitchforks and scythes, hunting the Night People down. Yet something still drew me toward Dark of the Moon. It was not so much Tadeusz’s beguiling voice, though I knew that was part of it.

Even after this—even after innocent blood had been spilled—

I felt its pull. But far more powerful was the thought that Dr˘agu¸ta’s mirror might provide the answers we so badly needed.

So easily, I could know whether Father would come home again; I could know whether Tati would get over her foolish in-fatuation and be safe. And if I went there, I could confront Tadeusz with what he had done. I could tell him that this vile act of bloodletting was not what I had wanted; that the price for mending a few fences should not be the life of an innocent young woman. I could make it clear that I had never asked for such offerings and that there were to be no more of them.

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“You wouldn’t actually go, would you, Jena?” Iulia was looking at me with a mixture of alarm and admiration. “After what’s just happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said. In my pocket Gogu was still, as if frozen. I could feel his horror. No, Jena. No. “Maybe I won’t have to think about it. Maybe Cezar and the other men will catch the killer. Maybe Ileana will banish the Night People from her realm, and this will be all over.”

“It might not be your fault, Jena,” Paula said. “It’s possible that the girl’s father did something to make the Night People angry, like setting fires in the forest or felling an oak. You can’t know.”

“I do know.” I took Gogu out and held him between my hands for comfort. “I can feel it. I can feel things turning dark.

It started when the Night People came. It got worse when Tati encouraged Sorrow. Now I’m responsible for someone’s death. I have to put it right somehow.”

“I told you, this is not Sorrow’s doing, Jena.” Tati was huddled on the bed now, hugging the shawl around her. “He’s the kindest of men, gentle and good.”

“To you, maybe,” I said.

A small voice spoke. “Tati wouldn’t fall in love with a murderer.”

Stela’s words hung in silence for a little, then Iulia cleared her throat. “You’d be surprised,” she said. “Love makes people do some odd things. I mean, Jena loves Gogu best in the world, doesn’t she? A frog. That’s just about the weirdest thing you could imagine.”

Gogu twitched as she spoke his name. Then, abruptly, a 154

sort of cloud fell over his thoughts, as if he were deliberately hiding them from me. “That’s not the same kind of love,” I said.

“Anyway, Tati hardly even knows Sorrow.”

Tati said nothing.

“Love at first sight,” put in Paula. “If it happens in stories, why shouldn’t it happen in real life?”

“It’s a mistake to let your head get full of stories about true love,” I said. “It just means you’ll be disappointed. There are no handsome heroes in the real world—only boring young men like R˘azvan and Daniel. That’s probably the best any of us can hope for.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it, Gogu,” I said later in the day, as I threw out grain for the chickens under a leaden sky. “I owe it to that girl, Ivona, to cross over and speak to Tadeusz again, to tell him to stop. What if Cezar’s hunt actually kills one of the Night People, and then Tadeusz seeks vengeance for that, and so on, until the whole valley is awash with blood? I can’t wait until next Full Moon. It’s too long. Think how much damage they could do.”

Brave. Brave, but foolish. You can’t go.

“The Night People must leave this forest—they have to go home. I don’t know why they came here in the first place. If they left and took Sorrow with them, that would remove the danger and solve the problem of Tati, as well.”

No response from Gogu. On the far side of the courtyard, R˘azvan was shoveling away snow, clearing paths to the barn and outhouses. In Cezar’s absence he had surprised me by offering his help with whatever needed doing. It was clear he 155

would rather have work to keep him occupied than stand about with crossbow in hand, trying to look fierce.

“What else am I supposed to do?” I asked the frog. “Stop looking at me like that!”

I could see by Gogu’s expression that he thought I’d over-reached myself this time, and it wasn’t helping. I set him down to explore the woodpile by the hen coop.

Don’t go at all. Full Moon, Dark of the Moon, keep well away.

“You think Tati’s going to agree to that? Sorrow’s all she can think about. In her eyes he’s incapable of an ill thought, let alone an evil deed.” At that moment an idea came into my head.

In one way it was ridiculous, given what had happened. In another it made perfect sense. “Unless,” I mused, thinking aloud,

“she met someone else, someone nice and suitable—the kind of young man she could like and Aunt Bogdana would approve of.

If I could get her interested in a real man, maybe she would realize how hopeless her attachment to Sorrow is. It might break whatever spell he’s put on her. I don’t suppose we could give a grand party. It’s too soon after Uncle Nicolae’s death, and the whole valley’s going to be consumed by the hunt for the Night People. Besides, our money’s gone; we can hardly feed guests on