“Turned to stone by sunlight,” Niklas had said. “Like all the other scowlers. But that’s not what killed it. See the hole? That’s what troll’s bane does. It melts through their flesh. One perfect hit and they’re dead.”
This night and every night, as Niklas passed the stone, he patted his shirt pocket. Even if they didn’t play the game anymore, he always carried some acorns with him into the woods.
From Edith’s impatient pace, Niklas guessed she had headed for one of the two perfect spots for grazing on the Buttertop trail. The first was Oldmeadow, a sloping field no more than half a mile up the mountainside. He found it deserted. But he discovered two pebbly piles of dung where the trail curved back into the woods.
That left only one place to look.
Sorrowdeep.
Niklas stared up at the snowcapped peak of Buttertop. To get past it and up into the grassy mountain vales, you had to climb a ragged trail along a lip of cliff, left shattered by the big avalanche almost two hundred years ago. The herds of Willodale rarely went up that path except when their humans made them at the beginning of every summer. But before the trail, on a wide shelf just above the tree line, cradled by slopes of lush mountain grass, lay the black pond of Sorrowdeep.
In the entire valley, it was the place where Niklas least liked to go. Because in those waters lived a darkness that wanted to pull you down. Or so Grandma Alma had told him countless times. It was her favorite scary story. “Stay away from that pond, my boy. It’s made of death and sorrow. If you try to swim in it, it will freeze your limbs and still your breath. It will weigh you down with every wrong you’ve ever done. It will drag you to the bottom and keep you in a cage of regret.”
The problem was, sheep didn’t care about stories, and neither did predators.
Niklas ducked his head and kept climbing, following the path as it carved its way from ledge to ledge through ever-thinning woods. On the final shelf before Sorrowdeep, the wind came down to meet him, setting the ferns to shivering.
He stopped and wrinkled his nose. The wind carried a faint stench. He left the path and made his way to the end of the ledge, where the Summerchild flew off a cliff. Probably a dead deer, but he should look. If the carcass was in the water, it would poison Summerhill’s water supply.
At the top of the waterfall, flat stones formed a dotted line across the stream, like worn-down teeth. Once, before the big avalanche changed the face of Buttertop, the path had crossed over here. But no one used this ford anymore, and the track was nearly lost under roots and dry twigs.
Niklas stepped out on the first stone. The Summerchild rushed past him, misting the air where it fell. He saw no deer, but he heard a rumble, so soft his ears strained to pick it up under the splashing of the stream. He felt it too, a tremor under his feet that brought out goose bumps on his arms.
A howl cut through the mist. Niklas froze, stunned by how strange it sounded. Sharp like the scream of a fox, but so dark it had to come from the throat of a much bigger creature. On the far bank, behind some slender rowans, a single light appeared. Round and big like a flashlight, except there was no beam, and it looked somehow . . . hungry.
Twigs began to snap, the rowan trunks creaked and yielded, and suddenly there were two lights instead of one.
Eyes.
Niklas Summerhill was no coward, but neither was he a complete idiot.
He turned and fled.
CHAPTER THREE
The beast ran faster than him.
Niklas took all the shortcuts he knew, pivoting around the right branches as the path jackknifed down through the woods. The creature behind him was not so limber. For every turn it made, he heard it crash into a tree or thump against a stone. Even so, it gained on him.
When they emerged onto the Oldmeadow, the path looped through the grass in a wide curve with nothing to slow the beast down. Niklas had to think of something, now, or it would catch him.
He veered right and plunged into the thigh-high grass. Nettles licked at his hands as he cut across the field, dodging stones and grooves in the ground. The wind made the grass hiss, bringing the foul smell with it. The bear—it had to be a bear; Niklas couldn’t think of any other animal this big and heavy—must be very sick or hurt. He felt a cold tug in his belly. There was nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal.
The beast howled behind him, the same eerie, distorted scream, and so close now. Niklas wanted to look over his shoulder, but he couldn’t afford it. The beast came closer for every step. He needed to hide.
They were coming up on the southwest corner of the Oldmeadow, where the path crossed the Summerchild over Oak Bridge.
Niklas knew he wouldn’t make it to the bridge. He broke right again, down into the streambed, hurtling into the water. On the far bank, he slammed down on his belly and scrambled under a dense mass of juniper brambles. Dry needles crackled as he crawled in between the bushes.
The beast splashed into the water and stopped. Niklas couldn’t see it, but he could smell it, and he could hear it, snorting and wheezing, sniffing at the shrub.
It could smell him, too.
A slithering breath gusted under the juniper. Under the branches, the eyes appeared again, pale green discs, broken into pieces by the twigs. The beast grunted and began pulling the bushes out of the ground, roots and all.
Niklas pushed himself up the bank, squeezing deeper and deeper into the shrub, until he rolled out between two knobby juniper limbs and saw a latticed canopy far above. The oak tree!
He stumbled across the path and clawed his way up the gnarled trunk until he got high enough for the branches to thin. Only then dared he to look down.
A bare wedge of ravaged earth cut into the shrub, reaching almost to the other side. The far bank of the stream was strewn with torn and tossed junipers. But there was no hulking shape, no green eyes. The beast had disappeared.
Niklas tried to keep his gulps of air quiet. This didn’t make any sense. A wounded animal would attack; maybe give chase if it felt threatened. But this thing didn’t act like a creature crazed by pain. It was hunting him. And bears did not have green eyes that glowed in the dark.
His hands shook too hard to hold on properly, so he slid down a few yards and settled where three branches met to form a chair of sorts. Lin used to call it his throne. He had sat in it hundreds of times because the oak tree was their troll-hunting headquarters.
“Best place to get acorns for the troll’s bane,” Niklas had pointed out. Oak trees rarely grew this far north, and there were only three in all of Willodale. But that wasn’t the only reason they had chosen it. The oak tree had branches that stretched over the stream, and reached out beyond the cliff upon which the tree perched. If you moved around in the canopy, you had as good a view of the Summerhill lands as you’d ever get.
The wind shifted, and hushed voices blew across the stream from Oldmeadow. Niklas eased out of his throne and moved a notch up the trunk to see better.
The hunting party. They approached quickly along the trail, flashlight beams roving over the grass. “I swear I heard a scream,” said a voice, and Niklas winced. Mr. Molyk.
“You’re sure it wasn’t young Master Summerhill trying to pull our legs?” another voice said. Mrs. Ottem. “He’s always lurking around this neck of the woods.”
“Well, if it was, maybe I should give him a taste of my peppercorns.” Molyk patted his shotgun as he stepped onto Oak Bridge. “He deserves it tonight, that’s for sure.”
Mrs. Ottem grunted. “It was a shame with his mother, but it’s past time everyone stopped coddling him.”
“They’re just pranks,” a third man said, joining them on the bridge. Niklas recognized the voice of one of the Fale brothers.
“Tell that to your wife,” Mrs. Ottem said. “It’s her plum jam that keeps vanishing.”
“Oh, we don’t know it’s him,” Mr. Fale sa
id. “We keep our jam behind locked doors, and Niklas is just a lad. I hardly think—”
“Tell that to my sheep,” Mr. Molyk cut him off. “You saw Edith, half-mad with fear, and the lambs, too. We’re lucky we got them before they fell off the mountain trail.”
Up in the tree, Niklas leaned his forehead against the trunk. The Willodalers didn’t get it at all. He might fill their boots with muck when they deserved it, but he would never hurt an animal on purpose. He felt tingly with relief that the sheep were safe. But then Mr. Molyk added, “And that’s not even mentioning the last poor wretch. Or was that just a prank, too?”
Niklas’s tingles went cold. What had happened to the last poor wretch?
But he didn’t find out, because instead Mr. Fale gave a cry. He leaned over the side of the bridge, pointing his flashlight up the stream. The hunters filed down to the water and out of Niklas’s line of sight. He heard them arguing over the torn shrubs and whether or not they could have anything to do with the beast. Then they all fell silent.
Niklas craned his neck, but he couldn’t see anything. When the hunters started speaking again, the words were harsh hisses that he couldn’t make out over the Summerchild. He eased out on a branch that leaned over the stream.
“I’m telling you, it’s warped,” Mrs. Ottem said.
“No it isn’t,” Mr. Molyk said. “It’s clear as day. It’s just too big to be possible.”
What were they looking at? Niklas needed to get closer, but the branch he perched on was on the slim side and yielded slightly every time he shifted his weight. He glanced behind himself to gauge how far he could go, and just like that, he forgot all about the hunters’ discovery.
There was something in the tree with him.
It sat crouched and tense in his throne, watching him with slanted eyes that were rimmed in black and white.
A lynx.
For a long moment, they stared at each other, boy and cat. Below them, the hunters came clambering up the bank under Niklas’s branch. He only had to call out and the men would have both him and the lynx at close range.
But Mr. Molyk spoke first. “If I catch this thing, I’m going to make it pay for my lamb.”
The lynx turned away, looking out over the valley. It had paws as big as saucers. Even a male that size would be reckoned as large, but Niklas was sure this one was female. He took in her long whiskers and white chin fur, the elegant curve of the flecked back and the tall tuft that crowned the right ear. The left ear had a split down the middle, a nasty old wound that had robbed her of the tuft.
Huge or no, this could not be the same creature that had chased him. She wouldn’t crash into trees on the path. She didn’t stink. And though he had no idea how or why, Niklas had the strangest feeling she felt sorry for the lamb.
So he didn’t call out. He stayed still until the hunters had passed under them and disappeared down the trail.
When their voices had completely drowned in the Summerchild’s noise, Niklas edged farther out on his branch, until it creaked under his weight. If it snapped, he would probably break his neck, but he wanted to put whatever distance he could between and himself and the giant cat. One thing was certain: The lynx had to leave first. Niklas could not climb down until she was gone. He didn’t want to be pounced from above.
The lynx didn’t make him wait. She slid out of the tree, melting from limb to limb and onto the path without ever snapping a twig or shaking a leaf. Before the woods swallowed her, she turned and looked up at Niklas one last time.
She opened her mouth and a voice came out, slurred and rough, but clear enough to almost send Niklas tumbling from the branch.
“Thhhhank you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
All the way down from Oak Bridge, Niklas fought to keep his eyes forward. He needed to watch where he stepped, but his back crawled with sneaking horror. He waited for the hunters to cock their rifles, for the smell of the green-eyed creature to catch up with him, for the lynx to attack. Had he imagined that she said those words? He must have, because it was impossible. Maybe it was just a desperate need to be right that she wasn’t the killer beast. That she was somehow kind and gentle, even if she was a predator. Uncle Anders’s warning churned in his head: You be careful now. If the cat is big enough, it might consider you prey.
The cat was big enough, and she could very well be the lynx from this spring. That sneaky lynx, as Grandma Alma had put it. His grandmother was still angry about the roast, and she didn’t understand when he tried to explain about Lin and Rufus.
Rufus was Lin’s pet, a little redback vole that she had rescued in the mountains. Niklas had never had a pet, and he really wanted one. He had asked for a dog a hundred times, but Grandma Alma always answered with a
gruff “We don’t keep dogs at Summerhill,” or “We have animals aplenty.” And sure, there was Tobis the cat, who hated kids and preferred the hayloft to humans anyway. There was Dokka, Uncle Anders’s horse, who liked only him. There were the milk cows, who let him pat their foreheads, but only if he brought them salt. None of them loved Niklas, not like Rufus loved Lin.
Then the lynx turned up during a spell of heavy snows last March.
They had found her tracks near the edge of the thicket just above the screaming stone. Round four-toed footprints under the biggest ash tree, where she must have perched for a while, or so Uncle Anders reckoned. “That must be one hungry cat to come this close to the house,” he had said, shaking his head. So Niklas had an idea. He had taken the Sunday roast and strung it up in the branches.
“You have lost your mind, boy,” Grandma Alma had muttered as she served them a dinner of cabbage and potatoes. “Stealing food to feed killers on our doorstep!”
The next morning, the roast was gone. But it was snowing hard, and the tracks were gone, too. Niklas couldn’t know for certain who had taken the meat. He believed it was the lynx, but that could be because he wanted it to be her. He just wanted to save her, like Lin had saved Rufus.
He turned the final bend before Summerhill and stopped cold. The last lamb.
She lay draped over the screaming stone, belly down, limbs stretched down the side. The hunters must have put her there to keep the little body away from hungry mouths. There was a spot of black behind her ear, one that he had scratched only hours ago. The little straggler.
She had a single long gash in her side, where some of her pelt had been torn off. What creature did that? The lynx did have big paws and the claws to go with it. But he told himself that the cruel injury fit better with the green-eyed hunter. Not that it mattered to the lamb. Niklas stood beside her for a while, aching with regret. He wanted to lift her down and hug her, but what good would it do? She would still be dead, and his clothes would be stained for Grandma Alma to see in the morning. So he scratched the black spot gently and left her there for the hunters to bring home.
The wind blew the rest of the clouds from the sky, leaving it bleak and bare. It chased down from Sorrowdeep and swept over hill and trail, and as Niklas slunk home to his bed, the screaming stone whistled after him.
CHAPTER FIVE
With the nightmares it could go either way.
They could leave him alone or they could poke at him all night. Skeleton birds pecking at his eyes. Dark water rushing in to sweep him away. Giant rocks tumbling down toward the sleeping house. Or worse, much worse. Niklas sometimes thought it had to do with his room, which had windows facing both north, up the mountainside, and south, into the yard. One toward horror and one toward home.
He crept under the covers. Don’t think bad things, he told himself.
It was no good, of course. Even with his eyes shut, he saw the lamb with the little spot on her neck, and the hungry lantern eyes shining in under the skirts of the juniper. But when he finally gave in and slept, the lamb didn’t bother him, and neither did lynx nor beast. Instead the wail from the screaming
stone found its way into his ears, curling down his spine, squeezing his ribs good and tight. For the first time in a long while, Niklas dreamt of her.
• • •
He woke in his bed and turned to the north. The moon lit the sandy path up the slope so it gleamed like a road of bones. He couldn’t see her yet, but he knew she would come. The woods knew it, the stream knew it, every sleeping soul in Summerhill knew it.
His heart pounded louder and louder, and when it had him shaking like a drum, she stepped through the gate, wearing a white dress that brushed the ground as she floated up the path. Her face was half turned away, but he could see her high cheekbones and the silver-blond curls.
His mother, going to Sorrowdeep.
At the screaming stone she halted as always. Slowly, surely, she turned, until he could see her gaunt face. She stared straight at him with eyes as black as the pond, silenced by the water that poured from her mouth. But the screaming stone spoke. It wailed and wailed, crying for the dead.
Niklas woke, bolting upright in his bed. The cover dropped to the floor with a whisper. He forced himself to look out the north window at the trail lightening in the gray of dawn.
Empty. It was always empty.
• • •
That wasn’t at all how his mother died.
The dream must come from Grandma Alma’s story, because Niklas had no recollection of his mother even mentioning Sorrowdeep, let alone walking up the trail. By the time he was old enough to remember, she didn’t have the strength to trek up the mountainside anyway. Still, he had this nightmare every night from the day his mother died and until Lin and her family moved in.
He sank back on the pillow. His throat felt parched. Uncle Anders had left a glass of water for him right next to the bed, but Niklas didn’t touch it. He never could drink water without thinking of the liquid gushing out of his mother’s mouth.
Which was stupid, because Erika Summerhill didn’t drown. She was eaten up by a sickness that was there before Niklas was born and got much worse after, until there was nothing left of her.
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