Chapter Thirteen

Thirteen

Lorelei awoke to an ache in her limbs and a cold that had settled into her bones. The first thing that reached her through the fog of her exhaustion was the faint scent of snow.

Now, that would be just their luck.

Outside her tent, that bruised-purple sky awaited her, maddeningly unchanging. The branches over the clearing knitted together like the gnarled, imposing latticework of a wrought-iron gate. No one else had stirred.

Coffee, she decided. It was the only way she could make it through another day of aimless wandering. She grabbed the kettle and walked to the stream that skirted the edge of camp. She knelt by the water and submerged the kettle, letting the current eddy around her wrists. Nothing but the burble of water cut up the silence, but she did not move until her fingers went bone white in the cold. The knot of unease pulled tighter within her. Even now, she couldn’t shake the feeling that had chased her into sleep.

Something in this forest was watching them.

After returning to camp, she raked the coals back from the embers of their campfire and boiled water for coffee and oat porridge. They’d tragically run out of raisins yesterday—more accurately, Heike had eaten half of them herself—which left them with nothing but flavorless slop to look forward to.

One by one, the others stirred. Johann first, then Adelheid. They sat side by side, grim and golden-haired. After the most perfunctory of greetings, the three of them sat in silence, which suited Lorelei fine. She didn’t feel compelled to start a conversation with either of them as they brooded by the fire’s glow. Within a few moments, a cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge materialized in Adelheid’s hands—courtesy of Johann. He fed her before he thought to fix himself a thing.

Heike emerged some twenty minutes later. She let out an exaggerated yawn, but before she could issue a single word of complaint, Adelheid shoved a cup of coffee into her hands. Only a few moments later, Sylvia crawled from her tent. It never failed to amaze Lorelei how wild her hair was—and how incapable she was of managing it. She’d wrangled it into a loose approximation of a chignon at the nape of her neck. It looked more like a knot, with a few stray curls making their bold escape. Lorelei reminded herself to stop staring.

Sylvia paused at the sight of the four of them. “Where is Ludwig?”

Heike took a sip of her coffee. “Still sleeping, I assume. We’re out of tea, by the by. Sorry.”

She did not sound very sorry at all. Sylvia sighed. “Oh dear. Well, I suppose it’s for the best. What we got in town was hardly worth brewing at all.”

Adelheid rose from her seat. “I’ll check on Ludwig. We’ve wasted enough time already.”

“Good thinking, Addie,” Heike said with a lazy wave of her hand. “We cannot be late for our daily exercise in futility.”

Adelheid pointedly ignored her.

“It’s unwise to make light of evil,” Johann said. “There must be some escape from this foul magic.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure we will find one today.” Heike rolled her eyes. “You are such a bore sometimes.”

Adelheid rustled Ludwig’s tent to announce herself. When no answer came, she made quick work of the buttons on the canvas. After a moment, she turned around with a puzzled expression. “He’s gone.”

Indeed, his tent was completely empty—as though both Ludwig and all his belongings had been spirited away in the night.

Consider it my parting gift, Ludwig had said, all but winking at her .

The memory slammed into her with force. At the time, she’d taken it as a self-deprecating joke, but now she wasn’t so sure. Goddamn him. She should have demanded more information from him—or at least asked how long he expected to be gone. All that she knew was that she’d been the last one to speak to him, and that he’d told no one else of his plans. The knot of apprehension within her grew heavy. If they knew he’d gone looking for a way up the mountain, would they accuse her of sabotage?

She did not intend to find out.

“Last night, he told me he was going to look for a night-blooming plant,” Lorelei said. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon enough.”

But by the time they struck camp and passed out their meager ration of dried meat for the afternoon, Ludwig still had not returned. Adelheid and Johann bickered over the remains of their campfire. Heike had taken to doodling in one of her notebooks, her head resting in Adelheid’s lap.

Sylvia, however, was pacing restlessly. It was making Lorelei’s blood pressure rise. Just as she opened her mouth to tell her to sit down, Sylvia stopped dead. The color of her eyes matched the eerie violet of the skies overhead. “Do you think he got lost?”

Heike did not look up from her sketchbook. When she spoke, her voice dripped with sarcasm. “Oh yes. I definitely think he’s lost.”

“What are you suggesting?” Adelheid asked wearily.

“Me, suggesting something? Never.” Heike set aside her pen and sat upright. “Lori, what was it you said he planned to do?”

“He wanted to find a night-blooming plant.” Spitefully, Lorelei added, “Although I believe the word he used was nocturnal .”

“How fascinating,” Heike said. “Which one?”

Her green, catlike eyes gleamed in the twilight. In them, Lorelei saw pure, calculating malice. The other day, Heike had tried to win her over with her sob story. Had she killed anyone but Ziegler, it might have worked. Heike clearly knew it; the only recourse she had left was to turn the others against her.

“I don’t know.” Lorelei struggled to keep the hostility out of her voice. “He was rather evasive about it, actually.”

“Mm.” Heike cut her gaze to Johann and Adelheid meaningfully. “And now he’s disappeared. What do you make of that?”

“How mysterious,” Johann said drolly.

Disappeared seemed rather dramatic, but Lorelei did not like the idea of him alone in these woods. Surely, he wouldn’t have tried to summit the mountain alone. He should have returned by now.

“You are only trying to create drama,” Sylvia said exasperatedly. “He brought all his things with him, except for his tent. He obviously intended to be back in time to sleep. He’s lost—or injured. We need to look for him.”

“We need to be strategic about this.” Adelheid smoothed her hands over her skirts. “If he returns and finds us gone, he’ll go looking for us. We’ll never find one another again. It would be wise to divide ourselves into two groups: one to stay here and one to search.”

“I’ll go,” Lorelei said. “But if he’s injured, I can’t carry him back on my own.”

No one volunteered.

Lorelei swept her gaze over the others. Sylvia did not look at her. Unsurprising, she supposed. They hadn’t spoken since the day of the festival. The others, huddled by the remains of the fire, had clearly come to some kind of understanding, discussed and decided upon without words. It was a language she’d come to understand well: us against them . Lorelei wasn’t surprised, only bitterly disappointed. Whatever scrap of power she had been gifted by Wilhelm meant nothing.

She’d been exiled.

Lorelei snatched her backpack from the ground and threw it over her shoulder. She wanted to bear it stoically, but the leering dark between the trees and the serrated ridge of the mountain beyond unnerved her. She’d never braved the wilderness on her own. If anything happened—or if they chose to head back down the mountain without her—she’d be dead. No one would come for her. No one would tell her family what happened.

Then, Sylvia huffed. “Such bravery and selflessness on display. What shining examples of the nobility you all are. I’ll go with you.”

Once again, that petty, helpless impulse to lash out rose up within her. She wanted to sneer—to reject her help, if only to spite her. She did not want her pity. She did not need it. But she couldn’t do this alone.

“Fine,” Lorelei said. “Let’s go.”

To her utter humiliation, she’d failed to keep strangled hurt out of her voice.

Lorelei knew very well they might be marching to their deaths. But outside that damned clearing, she felt oddly lighter. Sylvia, meanwhile, had grown sulky and petulant, dragging her feet as they trudged through the forest’s underbrush. Every now and again, she muttered something or other about cowardice and the decay of virtue. For her own sanity, Lorelei let the sound of her voice recede into meaningless noise. If she acknowledged her at all, inevitably they would have to discuss the way Sylvia had leapt to her protection. Twice. Lorelei would sooner die.

Bitter cold held the world in its grip, and the air hung heavy and still with the threat of snow. They had wandered this stretch of the woods so many times, it had ceased to be remarkable. And yet, she did not know what to expect anymore; anything seemed possible. Ludwig crumpled on the forest floor. Ludwig emerging from the thicket with his sly, quicksilver grin. Ludwig waiting for them back at camp as though he had never vanished at all.

No, she was not so optimistic as to expect that.

They walked for what felt like hours in grim silence. Lorelei strained to notice anything out of the ordinary, but all around her was interminable green, and overhead was the tangle of pine boughs. God, she couldn’t wait to return to the heaving sprawl and noise of the city. Then she remembered that if she did not find the Ursprung—or convincing enough evidence to pin the murder on Heike—she would never go home again.

What am I doing? Walking in circles, looking for a needle in a haystack…They would never find him at this rate. All of this was completely, utterly pointless, and—

Something about the tree in front of her caught her eye: an L-shaped mark carved into the trunk. Yesterday, when they’d realized just how lost they were, they’d made a few attempts to record where they’d already been. Johann—to Ludwig’s dismay—had slashed a few trees deep enough that they bled sap. But these cuts were careful, shallow, and precise.

Had Ludwig done this?

Lorelei paused to inspect it. Nothing about the tree seemed terribly unusual at first glance. Then, she spotted the mushrooms sprouting from its roots. Their bell-shaped caps looked to be shingled and dripping with liquid aether. It pooled on the earth below, indigo and shimmering.

Sylvia appeared over her shoulder. “Well done, Lorelei!”

Lorelei nearly leapt out of her skin. “Don’t scare me like that,” she snapped. Her heart was pounding far too loudly. “What am I looking at?”

“A gate,” Sylvia said.

“To what ?”

“Freedom.” Her entire being lit up. “As you know, many wildeleute can ensorcell people. Take nixies and their magnetic songs, for example. You will also sometimes find that places with high concentrations of aether become shrouded in a sort of ambient enchantment, often to protect themselves.”

Lorelei frowned. “And you think this is such a place?”

“It must be! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Ludwig was working on a paper many years ago about this phenomenon. He noticed that the bounds of these aetherically charged places are often marked with unusual flora. Oftentimes, the area of effect is quite small: say, the center of a ring of mushrooms or the shade cast by a lone tree in the middle of an empty field. But in this case…” Sylvia swept her hand out. “There’s a gate. Do you see it?”

To her surprise, she did.

Two narrow trees leaned toward each other, their branches twining elegantly together like a pediment over a doorway. Mushrooms—all of them faintly iridescent in the twilit glow of the woods—carpeted the earth between them.

“Shall we?” Lorelei asked.

Feeling foolish, she squeezed through the narrow gap between the trunks. There was no sudden flood of light, no shiver of magic that passed over her skin. She was almost disappointed. But after a few paces, the landscape began to change. A light dusting of snow glittered on the ground, and delicate icicles dripped from the branches. And there, rising high above the trees, was their destination: the summit, shrouded in a skein of mist as delicate as gossamer. Whatever spell of suspension the woods had imprisoned them in had broken.

Ludwig really had done it.

“How marvelous!” Sylvia’s boots crunched in the snowfall as she trailed after Lorelei. “The others will be thrilled to know we’ve found a way forward—and Ludwig, too, to have another data point for his project.” She evidently found Lorelei an inattentive audience, for she asked, with renewed indignation, “Where on earth are we going?”

“Toward the Ursprung.”

Sylvia dug her heels in. “What? What about Ludwig?”

Lorelei sighed through her teeth. “He left camp to find a way out of those woods. If that’s all he intended to do, he would have come back. I expect he made his way to the summit.”

“But you said—”

“Forget what I said!” Her temper flared helplessly at her confusion. “I lied.”

The grave disapproval on Sylvia’s face rankled her. “I see. Setting that aside for the time being, we cannot just go…” She gestured vaguely. “…up.”

“That is exactly what we are going to do.” With that, Lorelei pressed onward in the general direction of the summit.

Sylvia let out a sound of frustration. “You are being stubborn. It’s not that simple.”

“You have been a great help so far, but—”

“First of all, it’s deeply unsettling to hear you compliment me in such an acid tone. Second of all—” Sylvia cut herself off. “Will you stop walking for one moment and listen to me?”

Lorelei stopped so suddenly, they almost collided. “I am listening.”

“Then look at me!”

Lorelei drew in a deep breath and reluctantly turned around. Sylvia’s eyes were as cool as lake water, but they were flung wide and her face was flushed. If Lorelei didn’t know better, she’d say she looked almost flustered.

“Thank you.” Sylvia huffed out a shaky breath. “As I was saying. Second of all , I refuse to submit to the tyranny of…of…!”

“Do finish that thought.”

Lorelei thought she heard her mutter something to the effect of “ a scowling wax bean. ” Sylvia threw her hands in the air, exasperated. “You may be the leader of the expedition, but I’m not a knight on a chessboard to be moved around at your pleasure. I have expertise you might find useful if we hope to find Ludwig and make it out of this unharmed.”

Sometimes, that obstinate streak of hers was horribly inconvenient. As much as Lorelei wanted to dismiss her, Sylvia had managed to put together what Lorelei had not. Lorelei had no survival skills to speak of and limited knowledge of the creatures that prowled the mountainside. She could not afford to ignore Sylvia.

“Fine,” Lorelei snarled. “We’ll do it your way.”

“And! How do you hope to find— Oh.” The anger dropped clean off her face. “You agreed? I’d expected more of a fight.”

“Do I want to know what you were going to say?”

“Forests protected by eschenfrau rearrange themselves,” Sylvia said, sounding just a little smug. “You’d never make it to the summit without me.”

Lorelei might have been impressed were she not so chilled by the thought of being lost in an ever-shifting labyrinth of trees. “And you know how to navigate?”

“If Ziegler’s theory is correct, we don’t need a dowsing machine to track a source of magic.” Sylvia beamed. “The wildeleute can guide us there.”

Lorelei felt another headache coming on. “You’re joking.”

Sylvia’s expression soured. “I’m very serious! Of course, if you’d like to try to—”

“We don’t have any more time to waste. Don’t speak. Walk .”

To Sylvia’s credit, she did.

Although the sky had lightened to lavender as the day wore on, the silence of the forest grew no less oppressive. No birdsong broke the steady crunch of their feet against the snow underfoot. Sylvia walked slightly ahead of her. She’d pinned the wild mass of her chignon in place with a hairpin capped with a red glass bead, as bright as a drop of blood. Lorelei was still considering it when Sylvia stopped dead, her arm held out in warning. Lorelei nearly crashed into her.

“Ash trees.”

A copse of them stood like a group of crones, gnarled and ancient and implacably disapproving. Their branches tangled so thick she could not see the bruising sky or those eerie pinpricks of starlight. Even in this bitter cold, clusters of silver berries, as delicate and shining as ice crystals, hung from their boughs. They were as tempting as the long slivers of bark that curled like fiddleheads, begging to be peeled off. Lorelei had the distinct impression that taking anything would be a fatal mistake.

Sylvia pulled a flask from her bag and approached the tallest of them. Its roots had erupted from the earth and twisted into the shape of a skull. She poured water over it, murmuring softly to herself. “Now I sacrifice so that you do no harm.”

The leaves shivered in response. It sounded like a woman sighing.

“Don’t touch any of these trees.” So that confirmed her suspicion. Sylvia jabbed a finger at Lorelei. “Better yet, do not think about them at all. Do not walk in front of me, either. The eschenfrau are very particular about their offerings.”

“Yes, yes, I understand.”

Sylvia gave her a considering look before corking her flask. They continued up the mountainside in silence, flanked by rows and rows of ash. It was terrible. On an ordinary day, Lorelei might have celebrated the small victory of managing to stem the flow of Sylvia’s unfailing chatter. But the trees’ leering presence made her long for one of Sylvia’s sparkling-bright moods. She rarely found herself in a position where she needed to start a conversation with Sylvia, and she was hard-pressed to think of a topic that wouldn’t devolve into bickering.

“Tell me,” she tried. “Where did you acquire all your arcane knowledge about the wildeleute?”

Sylvia glanced over her shoulder. “You really want to know?”

Lorelei leveled her with an impatient look. “I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”

Sylvia stopped to pour water over the roots of another tree. The dark, rich smell of damp soil rose around them. “Much of Albe is wild and untamed; we haven’t driven our wildeleute out as they have in Ruhigburg. My nursemaids told me all sorts of tales, and I grew up chasing sylphs through the woods outside my home. I saw many wildeleute during the war as well. Many of them fled their natural habitats, but many more were drawn to the carnage. Eventually, I came to understand that even the most fearsome of them can be communicated with, if you care enough to learn how.”

“How did you learn?”

“Trial and error, mostly.” She smiled almost shyly. “And I suppose I talked to people. My soldiers told me about their lives, about the stories their mothers had told them. I believe that’s why I am still alive and so many others are not.”

It felt terrible to carry the weight of what Ludwig had told her, to hold on to it alongside this half confession. Lorelei had known the depths of despair and had forged herself on the iron of that pain. She hadn’t imagined Sylvia knew something of that, too. Lorelei had once believed her life to be so charmed.

It was charmed, she reminded herself. Hardship she had chosen did not undo that. Under no circumstances would she begin to feel sorry for Sylvia von Wolff.

“I see,” said Lorelei, more coldly than she had intended.

Sylvia looked stung only for a moment before turning back toward the path. “And you? Do you really know so little about them?”

“I have lived in the city all my life, so I’m afraid I had no opportunity to frolic among them as you did. Yevani used to have house spirits, but most of them haven’t survived.” Her grandfather, also a shoemaker by trade, apparently had a shretele that would finish any shoes he left out after the workday ended. It never asked for anything in return. “They defended their homes quite fiercely, but there is only so much that can be done.”

“I’m sorry.” Sylvia sounded earnestly sad. “People are unspeakably cruel.”

As they walked, Lorelei could feel the attention of those pale-barked trees on them. It unsettled her, the bark rippling, the knotholes seeming to blink like eyes. Little voices whispered in the flutter of the leaves. Sylvia walked as though she belonged among them, as ethereal as the sylphs she’d followed as a girl.

Something crunched beneath Lorelei’s boot. When she glanced down, she saw something glitter with a reflection of the unnatural twilight. She bent down and retrieved a shard of glass. “I found something.”

“What is it?” Sylvia grabbed her wrist, startling her, and inspected the glass in her palm. Her face paled, but it took a moment longer than she would have liked for Sylvia to let her go. “This looks like a piece of one of Ludwig’s collection vials. Do you think he’s…?”

Wind gusted through the trees. Their branches clattered. Their leaves hissed. All at once, they went silent.

A warning.

As storm clouds clawed their way across the sky, darkness closed like a fist around them. And then, cutting through the eerie quiet: a scream.