I wince against the headlights of the cars as I hit the sidewalk. Leaves are tangled into the muddy clots of my hair. My dress—once white—is now a dull and stained color, like the gown one would expect to adorn a ghost. I do not know if my eyes shine like an animal’s. I suspect they might.
The storm hag sweeps after me, swift as a crow and certain as doom.
I pump my legs faster.
Sharp bits of gravel and glass dig into my feet. I wince and stumble a little, imagining I can feel the breath of the hag. Terror gives me the strength to shoot forward.
Now that I have drawn her off, I must lose her somehow. If she becomes distracted for even a moment, I can slip away and hide. I got very good at hiding, back at the Court of Teeth.
I turn into an alley. There’s a gap in the chain-link fence at the end, small enough for me to wriggle through. I run for it, feet sliding in muck and trash. I hit the fence and press my body into the opening, metal scratching my skin, the stink of iron heavy in the air.
As I race on, I hear the shake of the fence as it’s being climbed.
“Stop, you little fool!” the storm hag shouts after me.
Panic steals my thoughts. Bogdana is too fast, too sure. She’s been killing mortals and faeries alike since long before I was born. If she summons lightning, I’m as good as dead.
Instinct makes me want to go to my part of the woods. To burrow in the cave-like dome I’ve woven from willow branches. Lie on my floor of smooth river stones, pressed down into the mud after a rainstorm until they made a surface flat enough to sleep on. Cocoon myself in my three blankets, despite them being moth-eaten, stained, and singed by fire along a corner.
There, I have a carving knife. It is only as long as one of her fingers, but sharp. Better than either of the other little blades I have on my person.
I dart sideways, toward an apartment complex, running through the pools of light. I cut across streets, through the playground, the creak of swing chains loud in my ears.
I have more skill at unraveling enchantments than making them, but since her last visit I warded around my lair so that a dread comes upon anyone who gets too close. Mortals stay away from the place, and even the Folk become uneasy when they come near.
I have little hope that will chase her off, but I have little hope at all.
Bogdana was the one person that Lord Jarel and Lady Nore feared. A hag who could bring on storms, who had lived for countless scores of years, who knew more of magic than most beings alive. I saw her slash open and devour humans in the Court of Teeth and gut a faerie with those long fingers over a perceived insult. I saw lightning flash at her annoyance. It was Bogdana who helped Lord Jarel and Lady Nore with their scheme to conceive a child and hide me away among mortals, and many times she had been witness to my torment in the Court of Teeth.
Lord Jarel and Lady Nore never let me forget that I belonged to them, despite my title as queen. Lord Jarel delighted in leashing me and dragging me around like an animal. Lady Nore punished me ferociously for any imagined slight, until I became a snarling beast, clawing and biting, barely aware of anything but pain.
Once, Lady Nore threw me out into the howling wasteland of snow and barred the castle doors against me.
If being a queen doesn’t suit you, worthless child, then find your own fortune, she said.
I walked for days. There was nothing to eat but ice, and I could hear nothing but the cold wind blowing around me. When I wept, the tears froze on my cheeks. But I kept on going, hoping against hope that I might find someone to help me or some way to escape. On the seventh day, I discovered I had only gone in a great circle.
It was Bogdana who wrapped me in a cloak and carried me inside after I collapsed in the snow.
The hag carried me to my room, with its walls of ice, and set me down on the skins of my bed. She touched my brow with fingers twice as long as fingers ought to be. Looked down at me with her black eyes, shook her head of wild, storm-tossed hair. “You will not always be so small or so frightened,” she told me. “You are a queen.”
The way the hag said those words made me raise my head. She made the title sound as though it was something of which I ought to be proud.
When the Court of Teeth ventured south, to war with Elfhame, Bogdana did not come with us. I thought to never see her again and was sorry for it. If there was one of them who might have looked out for me, it was her.
Somehow that makes it worse that she’s the one at my heels, the one hunting me through the streets.
When I hear the hag’s footfalls draw close, I grit my teeth and try for a burst of speed. My lungs are already aching, my muscles sore.
Perhaps, I try to tell myself, perhaps I can reason with her. Perhaps she is chasing me only because I ran.
I make the mistake of glancing back and lose the rhythm of my stride. I falter as the hag reaches out a long hand toward me, her knife-sharp nails ready to slice.
No, I don’t think I can reason with her.
There is only one thing left to do, and so I do it, whirling around. I snap my teeth in the air, recalling sinking them into flesh. Remembering how good it felt to hurt someone who scared me.
I am not stronger than Bogdana. I am neither faster nor more cunning. But it’s possible I am more desperate. I want to live.
The hag draws up short. At my expression, she takes a step toward me, and I hiss. There is something in her face, glittering in her black eyes, that I do not understand. It looks triumphant. I reach for one of the little blades beneath my dress, wishing again for the carving knife.
The one I pull out is folded, and I fumble trying to open it.
I hear the clop of a pair of hooves, and I think that somehow it is the glaistig, come to watch me be taken. Come to gloat. She must have been the one to alert Bogdana to what I was doing; she must be the reason this is happening.
But it is not the glaistig who emerges from the darkness of the woods. A young man with goat feet and horns, wearing a shirt of golden scale mail and holding a thin-bladed rapier, steps into the pool of light near a building. His face is expressionless, like someone in a dream.
I note the curls of his tawny blond hair tucked behind his pointed ears, the garnet-colored cloak tossed over wide shoulders, the scar along one side of his throat, a circlet at his brow. He moves as though he expects the world to bend to his will.
Above us, clouds are gathering. He points his sword toward Bogdana.
Then his gaze flickers to me. “You’ve led us on a merry chase.” His amber eyes are bright, like those of a fox, but there is nothing warm in them.
I could have told him not to look away from Bogdana. The hag sees the opening and goes for him, nails poised to rip open his chest.
Another sword stops her before he needs to parry. This one is held in the gloved hand of a knight. He wears armor of sculpted brown leather banded with wide strips of a silvery metal. His blackberry hair is cropped short, and his dark eyes are wary.
“Storm hag,” he says.
“Out of my way, lapdog,” she tells the knight. “Or I will call down lightning to strike you where you stand.”
“You may command the sky,” the horned man in the golden scale mail returns. “But, alas, we are here on the ground. Leave, or my friend will run you through before you summon so much as a drizzle.”
Bogdana narrows her eyes and turns toward me. “I will come for you again, child,” she says. “And when I do, you best not run.”