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Another inexplicable occurrence in a long line, in a string of incomprehensible occurrences.

I knew the skog was not a normal wood. It was a place where witches and huldras dwelled, avoided by humankind,avoidinghumankind.

A world where I was not me. At least not the me I had thought myself to be. No daughter. No sister. No pretend princess. No whipping girl. No girl at all. Not even a wife to the Beast of the Borderlands. No longer any of that.

No longer anything except... alone. I. Was. Alone. A wanderer. Rootless. I’d never been so chokingly alone before.

Palace life was a busy, noisy, messy affair. My only solitude had been found in sleep, in my chamber, and even then my sisters had often invaded my bed.

Now solitude wrapped around me like a heavy blanket, weighing me down, holding me close as I moved through the stillness of the skog, each of my footsteps leaving an impression in the moist earth, the only reminder that I existed at all. Too still. Too quiet. A tomb for the dead. And yet it was alive. Alive and watchful in the way a water snake holds still and peers out above the waterline. Waiting. Unblinking. Biding its time.

I wasn’t like Thora, who was content with her aloneness and as much a part of this world as the whispering grass and listening trees and the squelching ground beneath my feet.

And yet I told myself I could do this.

Reminded myself that since the moment of my birth, I had beenbred to endure. I’d taken the beatings. Withstood the whippings and the floggings. I could endure loneliness, too.

My pace was strong and steady until I hit a wall of dense foliage. It was a game of dexterity and nimbleness then as I squeezed in and around the thick trees and bushes and descending branches, dipping under and around the drapes of moss.

And suddenly it all faded away. Melted like butter on hot bread from an oven. The trees became fewer, the bushes fewer, the clawing branches shrank away like a receding sunset. All but the air.

The air grew. Swelled and expanded like a sponge swollen with water. Heavy and dripping red. It felt thick, sitting like oil on my skin.

This.

This was what Thora had been talking about. The danger of the skog. The teeth. The claws. The hissing breath.

I’d entered the huldra’s silken web.

And I was not the only one here.

My vision was still wildly sharp, the colors searingly bright even within the titian haze, senses as alive and bright as they had been when I’d burst out of my skin and incinerated Arkin.

It still took a moment for me to make sense of what I was seeing. Because it was so veryinsensible.

Fell was here.

My first instinct was to turn and run... to get away, to escape my husband, because... reasons. We could not be together. The Lord Beast with me... this thing I was now...

I shook my head. No. He would kill it—killme. He would destroy me if he knew the truth.

But what I was seeing now cast all that from my mind. Fell and Mari and two other warriors: Magnus and Vidar. They were tangled up together. At first glance it was difficult to determine whose limbs belonged to whom. And there was another body in the fray. A stranger. A woman.

I frowned, assessing her... a task that should not have been sovery difficult, but for the fact that her face seemed to change. Like a puddle caught in sunlight, the surface waxy and effervescent, variable and temperamental as the changing wind.

I warily inched closer for a better look. Dried leaves crunched beneath my boots. The woman whipped her head around to face me in a move so animalistic, so predatory, that I knew at once: she was not human.

I gasped.

She was a combination of faces. A mix of three or four people... the blurred visages where one face should be, flashing in and out, overlapping.

There were three women there. Unknown to me. Young and lovely all, but as different to each other as the night was to the day. One with short hair pale as moonbeams, the other one with dark russet hair, another one with jet-black braids... and then another face... a fourth face. Me.

Me but not me. Because I was standing right here.

And yet it was my face.My. Face.But not. Looking at myself—but not myself. Not myself as I had ever seen myself. Not myself as I existed. This was a trick.

A huldra’s trick.