Niklas’s lungs seemed empty of air. “Mom?”
“Careful.” Secret shifted uneasily on the ladder.
But other than the arms, Niklas could see no change. He stepped just within reach of the statue, leaned forward and touched her cheek. It felt hard and unalive. Now he noticed the lines where her arms met her shoulders. They were hinged. The water had probably loosened them. “It’s okay,” he said. “She’s not alive, she just . . .”
Wait.
On the statue’s chest, which had been hidden in the shadows between her arms, something blinked in the lantern light. A medallion. It was carved with the same thorn that had marked the loose flagstone in the nightmare castle, and like the flagstone, it could be twisted. With a click, wood sprang back against his hand to reveal a dog under the lid. Niklas pressed it. To the left and below the medallion a concealed door swung open where the statue’s heart should be.
“There is something wedged inside,” he said.
Didn’t the Thornghost song say something about a key locked inside a heart?
But it wasn’t a key. Instead his fingers found a long, thin object. He eased it out.
A twig.
He held it up to the lantern. The twig was still flexible, or he wouldn’t have been able to pry it out, but it seemed shrunken like cured meat. Three curved thorns stuck out from the black bark. “It’s a briar.”
Secret’s nose wrinkled. “It smells like old blood.”
“Oh?” Niklas tested the thorn with the tip of his finger. Sharp enough to draw blood without even pushing. “I guess that explains it.”
“Why go through all this trouble to hide a twig?”
“I don’t think it was meant to be found. Remember, she wanted everything about her to be forgotten.”
“That’s what I mean. Why put it down here?”
“I don’t know.” Niklas put the twig in his satchel along with the notebook and the acorn flask. “But she must have hidden the twig extra well for a reason.”
A desperate, high-pitched screech cut the air. It came from the direction of the yard, and for a moment, Niklas thought the border had been breached. He turned to Secret. “Is it the trolls?”
Secret shook her head. “It’s the little fat cat. He’s in trouble.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tobis had scratched his way into the elm tree and clung to a high branch. His entire fur stood on end, but from the hard swishes of his tail, he didn’t look too injured.
Niklas and Secret huddled below the barn bridge. While they were in the crypt, night had come to the farm. A fat moon hung between the mountain peaks. “Tobis,” Niklas called softly, but as soon as he spoke, the cat gave a loud, warning yowl.
“He won’t come down as long as I’m around,” Secret said. “But I don’t think I’m the reason he’s up there. Something is going on here. I hear the horse inside the barn, too. She’s scared.”
She nodded at the main house. There were no lamps lit, and the front door yawned wide. “Does your uncle usually leave the door open like that?”
“Never,” Niklas said. “It lets in flies.” He looked around, found a milk churn sitting on the bridge. “I have to make sure he’s okay. You keep watch. If you need to warn me, knock down the milk churn.”
• • •
The door to the bird room stood ajar, letting out a slim wedge of blue. Niklas walked slowly to the doorway. Moonlight shimmered across the walls. Outside the east window, the tower of his mother’s castle poked up like a tusk. “Hello?” Niklas took a step into the room so he could see all the corners. “Is someone here?”
At first he thought there was no reply. But then he heard it, behind the desk. No words, just strange little tinkles. The hairs rose on his arms. He pulled the long-handled spade he used for the bird castle down from the wall and edged around the desk.
He didn’t quite know what he had expected to find, but it wasn’t this. He lowered the shovel. “What are you doing?”
Uncle Anders didn’t answer. He lay on the floor, clutching his violin like a baby, shivering so hard his beard scratched the strings and made them whimper and mewl. Niklas reached for his arm, but his uncle curled together like a wounded animal.
“Uncle Anders? What’s wrong?” Niklas patted him on the shoulder. “Please, what’s going on?”
Only then did his uncle look up, and his face was pulled into a mask of despair made more terrifying because it didn’t shift. “It wasn’t her fault,” he gargled out between stiff lips. “It wasn’t any of our faults. We didn’t mean for anyone to die.”
“Who do you mean?” Niklas’s tongue felt numb. “Are you talking about Sebastifer?”
“The boat was leaky, we knew that. But we had always managed to bail the water out before. We were just so much heavier with the cage.”
“The cage,” Niklas said.
Tears streaked Uncle Anders’s cheeks. “I told her it wasn’t her fault. Peder did, too. We were just trying to help. But she wouldn’t listen!” He grabbed Niklas by the shirtsleeve. “The bad dream is back. I hear her voice in the stream. She’s coming back!”
“Who?” Niklas heard his voice crack. “Who is coming back?”
Uncle Anders didn’t look, but he lifted his arm and pointed out the north window, toward the inky mountainside and the white slash of the Oldmeadow path.
Out in the yard sounded the cold metal thunder of a milk churn falling down.
And Niklas knew that she would come.
She stepped through the gate, keeping her face half turned as she floated up the path, hidden behind a curtain of silver curls. At the screaming stone she halted as always. Her white dress hung heavy from her frame. Slowly, surely, she turned, until he could see her face.
Erika.
But not the Erika of his nightmares, not the bone-thin mother. The young Erika of the stubborn mouth and strong hands.
She raised her arm, fingers stretched out down the hill, staring straight toward the bird room window with pond-black eyes. Straight at Niklas, who leaned against the window, breath held and hands shaking. He couldn’t look away. She cocked her head, waiting for something. For him?
“What do you want from me?” Niklas’s breath made a very small cloud on the pane. It was just a whisper, not even loud enough for Uncle Anders to hear from where he lay curled up on the floor. But Erika still answered.
Her arm swung around like a compass arrow, until it pointed up the mountainside, toward the broken face of Buttertop that hovered above the treeline.
Toward Sorrowdeep.
She held his gaze, still waiting.
“No,” he said.
A spot appeared on Erika’s chest where her heart would be. She put her hands over it, but black liquid welled out between her fingers, spilling down her nightgown.
Somewhere in the house sounded a scream and a crash of shattering glass.
On instinct, Niklas’s head jerked in the direction of the crash. But in the corner of his eye, he saw Erika change. He turned back, watching in horror as the darkness in her chest spread. It covered her entire body now, turning it into water that loomed over the trail like a cresting wave. Then she dissolved and splashed to the ground.
The water drained into the moss and trickled down the trail, until the only sign of the nightmare was a spattering across the face of the screaming stone.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Grandma Alma lay on the kitchen floor next to the kettle. Her long white locks spread over her face, and her nightgown was splotched with tea. Niklas threw himself to the floor beside her and lifted her hair aside. “Grandma! Are you all right?”
“Niklas?” She stared at him.
He helped her sit up. “What happened?”
“I was making tea.” Her eyes flicked to the north window and the trail, then to Uncle Anders, who hovered on the
threshold, puffy-faced with tears. “I must have fallen asleep somehow, because I thought I saw . . .” She licked her lips in confusion. “It was an old night fright, that’s all.”
They all crammed into her bedroom. Even Tobis came out of the tree to curl up at her feet, glaring at anyone who came near. As they fussed about, fetching painkillers and the last of the chocolate cake and extra blankets, Grandma Alma settled back against the pillows, limp and pale. “Dreaming while standing on my own two legs,” she mumbled. “It doesn’t make sense.”
No, Niklas thought. It did not. But then, she hadn’t been dreaming. Erika really had walked up the trail. An old night fright, his grandmother had called it. The bad dream is back, his uncle had said. It sounded like they also were familiar with Niklas’s nightmare.
Uncle Anders sat in a chair sipping his tea with solemn gratitude. Unlike Grandma Alma, he hadn’t seen the nightmare, and Niklas hadn’t told him what happened on the trail. He didn’t want to ask either of them any questions until they had recovered.
Outside in the yard, he heard a soft bark. Niklas peered out into the elm tree and saw a pair of purple eyes up among the leaves. He felt almost dizzy with relief. Secret was out there, watching over them.
He took Grandma Alma’s empty mug. “I’ll just make you a fresh cup,” he said, and slipped out into the night.
• • •
Secret stretched out along a branch with a view of the bedchamber window and the barn bridge. Niklas set the mug down and climbed up next to her. “Are you okay?”
Secret swished her tail. “It wasn’t interested in me. It just walked straight past me up the hill from the bone field.”
It. Niklas shuddered.
“Your grandmother is unhurt?”
He pulled his shoulders up. “On the outside. But both she and Uncle Anders are pretty shaken up. My mother . . . I mean, it . . . came from the hallowfield?”
“Yes, but not out of the ground, I think,” Secret said. “It didn’t smell like dirt.”
“It looked at me,” Niklas said. “I asked what it wanted, and I could have sworn it heard me. It pointed up the mountainside.”
“Toward Sorrowdeep?”
“I think so. What else could it be?”
But why? Twenty-five years ago Sebastifer had died there, and later two horses had been killed. The line from the journal entry played over and over in Niklas’s head. My games are dangerous. Mr. Molyk said the attacks—troll attacks, most likely—had suddenly stopped back then. Maybe his mother’s decision to end the game had helped? But Niklas hadn’t even played the troll hunt since Lin left. There was no game to end, no book to lock up, not so much as a jar of acorns to destroy. And now the nightmare was real, too? He couldn’t control his dreams, much as he would like to.
Through the golden squares of the window, he could see Uncle Anders holding Grandma Alma’s hand. It was hard to tell who was comforting whom. “We have to fix this, Secret,” he said. “This magic taint, we have to find out where it comes from. It must have a source. Can you track it somehow?”
Secret thought for a moment. “I sniffed the stains where the nightmare fell apart, but they just smelled like wet roots and stones. Like the stream.”
“Like the Summerchild?” Niklas frowned. Didn’t Uncle Anders say he heard Erika’s voice in the stream? The troll first showed up near the old ford, then near Oak Bridge. And the nightmare had turned into liquid. There was only one magical creature that didn’t seem connected with water: a certain talking lynx who was just now licking her paws.
He sat up straight. “Secret, when you sheltered from that spring storm, what did you do?”
“I hid in a cave near Buttertop. It’s deep, mostly empty, and it has—”
“Water.” Niklas could hardly keep his voice down. “I think we got it wrong. Willodale didn’t change while you were in there. You did.”
Secret crinkled her nose. “I don’t understand.”
“Think about it. All the strange things that have happened have one thing in common: Water. I think you changed when you drank in that cave.”
As Niklas explained his theory, Secret’s tail began to thump against the branch. “The only water inside the cave is a spring,” she said. “It’s where the Summerchild begins.”
Niklas whistled softly. “If I’m right, that means the entire stream is tainted by magic. All of Summerhill’s water supply.”
He curled his fist. “You have to show me where that cave is. We have to find a way to un-taint the spring. Although we should wait until tomorrow so the trolls will be hiding from the sun.”
“The sun won’t help us,” Secret said. “Look.”
Heavy clouds rolled up Willodale. It would be a foggy and wet morning. The trolls would be a danger no matter when they left. “Well, that settles it.” Niklas swung his legs down from the branch. They felt light and ready for danger. “We’ll go now, before the rain makes the path slippery.”
• • •
When he returned inside, Grandma Alma slept silently and Uncle Anders snored in his chair. Niklas wondered if he should wake them and tell them what was happening. But they would never let him leave. They would call for help, and the Willodalers would have even more reasons to call his uncle crazy. Actually, they’d call everyone at Summerhill crazy, and he bet none of them would listen to theories about a magic taint in the water.
He left a note on the nightstand instead.
I’ll be back soon. Don’t let anyone go into the woods. Don’t drink the water, not even in tea. N.
“You take care of them,” he whispered to Tobis, and closed the door.
He ate two cheese sandwiches and stuffed another into his satchel. He also brought a flask of apple juice, his flashlight, a folding knife, and the things he had taken from the chapel crypt: the bottle of acorn dust, his mother’s book of troll runes, and the shriveled twig he had found inside her heart.
Last of all, he added the dog figurine from the castle. They were going up to Sorrowdeep tonight, and Sebastifer had saved his mother there. Maybe he would do it again.
For a moment he weighed Uncle Anders’s phone in his hand. There was no reception up the mountainside, so there was no point in bringing it. But he needed to make a call.
His fingers shook as he dialed the number.
Lin didn’t answer. Of course she didn’t, it was past midnight. Niklas still tried two more times before he gave up and wrote her a message. He hoped it would make sense to her, but no one else.
“If this message were a flashlight, it would blink twice. I’ll try to fix this, but if I can’t, at least you know what’s going on. Be careful. Bring acorns. Bye.”
He left a lamp on in the kitchen, not so much for his sleeping family, but so it would shine for him up the hill.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Even on the most brilliant of days, Sorrowdeep showed black, studded with water lilies and disturbed only by fish that slid between the stems. Tonight, under the gathering clouds, it looked like a hole into nothing.
Niklas turned away from the water and found Secret watching him.
The lynx sat beside him, closer, he thought, than she had done before. If he stretched out his arm, he could almost reach her. She nodded at the broken face of Buttertop across the lake. “Do you see that cut in the rock?”
Niklas’s night vision couldn’t match Secret’s, but he thought he saw a line of black snaking down the mountain wall. “The tall one in the middle?”
“That’s the entrance to the cave.”
Niklas felt his eyebrows rise. He had thought the cave would be farther up the trail to Buttertop, somewhere along the lip of the avalanche. The pond lapped against the sheer wall, except for a narrow beach below the cut. It would be impossible to reach it by dry land. He managed a brittle laugh. “I didn’t know we would have to swim. I should have brough
t a towel.”
“I only ever use the cave when the lake is frozen,” Secret said. “But we don’t have to swim. There’s a boat over there.”
A finger of rock poked into the pond, and on the other side bobbed a tiny rowing boat. Just the thought of crossing Sorrowdeep in that little husk made Niklas’s belly churn. Images pushed their way into his head. Children swimming for their lives. Horses dead on the shore, cut by runes. A green-eyed monster rising from the water to grab Rag by the leg, while Edith and the other lambs scattered in panic. “Could the trolls be down there?”
“No. Their smell is stronger than any creature I’ve met. I would know if they were close.”
“I wonder where they are tonight? Full moon, a storm coming in. You’d think they’d be on the prowl.” He hesitated. “Do you smell any wet roots?”
“You mean the nightmare? No again. Sorrowdeep smells like always. Still water and silt.”
Even so, Niklas couldn’t help thinking of the nightmare pointing, commanding him to come here. He had told it no, but here he was, all the same. “All right,” he said. “But if you can bear it, you should come in the boat with me. Just in case.”
He took out the Sebastifer figurine and put it in his shirt pocket, near his heart. Somehow he trusted the dog to mean him well.
They climbed into the boat and pushed out between the water lilies. Secret crouched down on the bottom boards, ears turned out and tail tucked in. She must be very scared, but she didn’t complain. Niklas decided to stop complaining, too. It wouldn’t do to be a coward.
He dug the oars into the lake. Rings reached out over the surface.
Mostly he saw his own reflection in the water. But sometimes he thought he glimpsed things in the deep; hair that wafted in the currents, a nightgown billowing like a sail snagged on the bottom. Pale bones. They’re not hers, he reminded himself. No matter what Sorrowdeep wants me to believe, her bones are in the hallowfield.
As the first raindrops plinked down around them, they crunched against the pebble beach. Niklas pulled the boat up on shore, almost nauseous with relief.
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