Page 100 of Gilded

She held her breath as it swung backward. The light she’d seen came from a single candle set onto a stone ledge just inside the door. She stepped into the room, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness.

Her gaze fell on a curtain of sheer lace hung from the ceiling, draped around a cage in the center of the room.

She froze. Cages were for animals. What kind of creature would be kept in such a room? She squinted, but could barely make out a lumpy form behind the bars, unmoving.

Asleep?

Dead?

Holding completely still, she shifted her gaze to the wall where she had seen the tapestry.

She frowned.

The tapestry was there, but in a reversal of the mortal world, it was not pristine as it had appeared on the other side of the veil. Here, it hung in shreds. She could make out a bit of the background scenery, a lush garden at nighttime, lit by a silver moon and dozens of lanterns. In the garden stood the figure of a bearded man wearing an ornate doublet and a golden crown. But something was off about him. His eyes too large, his smile a toothy grimace.

Serilda inched closer, even as quiet dread began to gnaw at her.

Once her eyes adjusted to the dim candlelight, she froze. The tapestry did not depict the face of an honored king. It depicted a skull. A corpse dressed in fine regalia.

The man was dead.

Shaking now, she reached for one of the shreds of woven fabric and caught sight of a second figure, smaller and ripped in two, but clearly a girl by her poufed skirt and ballooned sleeves and?…

Thick ringlet curls.

Her heart thundered.

Could it be the girl from the locket?

Serilda reached for the next scrap, when, from the corner of her eye, a dark shadow lunged toward her.

Her scream collided with its shrill cry. Serilda barely had time to raise her arms. The monster sank its talons into her shoulder, its shriek flooding her thoughts.

And she was no longer in the castle.

She was standing in front of the schoolhouse in Märchenfeld, or—what had been the schoolhouse, recognizable for its yellow-painted shutters. But it was on fire. Black smoke filled the air. Serilda started to cough, trying to cover her mouth, when she heard their screams.

The children.

They were inside.

They were trapped.

Serilda started to rush forward, ignoring the stinging in her eyes, but a hand grabbed her shoulder, holding her back.

“Do not be a fool,” came the voice of the Erlking, preternaturally calm. “You cannot save them. I told you, Lady Serilda. You should have done as I asked.”

“No!” she gasped, horrified. “I have! I’ve done everything you asked!”

“Have you?” The question was met with a low chuckle. “Or have you been trying to sell me a lie?” He spun her around to face him, his gaze bitter in its coldness. “This is what happens to those who betray me.”

His face faded away, replaced with a cascade of images, too grotesque to process. Papa’s body facedown in a field while scavenger birds picked at his insides. Anna and her two younger siblings locked in a cage while goblins jeered and stabbed them with sticks. Nickel and Fricz fed to the hellhounds, ripped to shreds by their merciless teeth. Leyna and her mother together as a flock of nachtkrapp came at them again and again—their sharp beaks targeting their vulnerable eyes, their kind hearts, the hands that tried desperately to hold on to each other. Gild pinned like a moth to an enormous spinning wheel that whirred and whirred and whirred?…

A feral roar reached her across the plain of nightmares.

The claws on her shoulder were torn away. The shriek was silenced.

Serilda tried to climb back to consciousness, but the nightmares clung to her, threatening to drag her back. Somewhere beyond the darkness, she could hear a fight. The drude’s angry hisses. The strikes and grunts of a battle.