Page 156 of Gilded

Her gaze fell.

Her lungs sputtered.

A figure lay half across the road and half in the ditch.

A child, with two dark braids and a pastel-blue nightgown streaked with mud.

“Anna?” she breathed. The horse had barely slowed before she was jumping out of the saddle and racing toward the figure. The girl was lying on her side, facing away, and she might be merely sleeping or unconscious. That was what the wild hunt did, she told herself, even as she was falling to her knees at Anna’s side. They lured people from their homes. Tempted them with a night of wild abandon, then left them cold and alone on the edge of the Aschen Wood. So many had woken up disoriented, hungry, maybe embarrassed—but alive.

It had been a threat, that was all.

Next time would be worse.

The king was toying with her. But the children would be all right. They had to be—

She grabbed Anna’s shoulder and rolled her onto her back.

Serilda cried out and fell backward, pushing herself away. The image seared into her mind.

Anna. Skin too pale. Lips faintly blue. The front of her nightgown painted red.

There was a ragged hole where her heart had been. Muscle and sinew gaping open. Bits of cartilage and broken rib bone visible in the thick, drying blood.

This was what the scavenger birds had been feasting on.

Serilda staggered to her feet, backing away. Turning, she braced herself on her knees and heaved into the ditch, though there was little to come up but bile and whatever remained of the witch’s potions.

“Anna,” she gasped, swiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m so sorry.”

Though she didn’t want to see it again, she forced herself to look Anna in the face. Her eyes were wide-open. Her face frozen in fear.

She had never stopped moving. Always with her acrobatics and her tricks. Always dancing, fidgeting, rolling through the grass. Madam Sauer had chastised her nonstop, while Serilda had loved it about her.

And now.

Now she wasthis.

It wasn’t until she palmed the tears from her eyes that she saw the second body, a little farther up the road, half buried in the brambles that grew wild in the summer.

Bare, muddied feet and a linen nightshirt down to his knees.

Serilda stumbled closer.

Fricz was on his back, his chest as cavernous as Anna’s had been. Silly Fricz. Always laughing, always teasing.

Tears streaming fast down her cheeks now, Serilda dared to look past him. To take in the full stretch of road between these two murdered children and the Aschen Wood.

She saw Hans next. He had grown so tall this spring, and she’d barely been around to notice. He had always idolized Thomas and his other brothers. He had so yearned to grow up.

His heart had been ripped clean out of him.

Or—eaten out of him, for Serilda wondered if this was the work of the nachtkrapp.

Perhaps a gift for their loyal service to the hunt.

It took longer, but finally she found Nickel, too. He was lying on his stomach in a tiny creek that would eventually meet up with the Sorge. His honey-colored hair was dark and matted with blood. He had lost so much of it that the downstream current was tinted pink.

Sweet Nickel. More patient, more empathetic, than any of them.