Greymist Fair by Francesca Zappia

Author:Francesca Zappia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Five

On a dead spring day, the wargs began to laugh.

It was not normal animals that made the people of Greymist Fair so wary of the forest. Normal animals could be killed with weapons of wood and iron. Normal animals did not manifest from the deep bruises of the trees. Normal animals were not creatures of magic.

The beasts chasing her were wargs, Katrina knew, not wolves. She could see them running through the trees alongside her. They were cut from shadow, flat, darting from one trunk to the next. Black tongues lolled from smiling black snouts, and their eyes were blue flames. They laughed human laughs. The laughs of children and adults both; soft snickers, belly chortles, and, when Katrina stumbled, giddy shrieks.

Hilda’s voice echoed through the branches, an incantation that dropped leaves from the trees and made Katrina’s legs go numb. She could no longer remember why she had come here, or where she was trying to go. She no longer had ethereal beauty she hadn’t asked for, no longer had coveted grace of movement. She was no longer friendless. She no longer had parents, a home, or a name.

She had fear. She had a body and a pulse inside that body that told her she must run. There was only survival or death.

The wargs laughed. They were in front of her, behind her, around her. Spirits of those the forest had claimed. They surrounded her, a ring of gaping teeth and corpse-fire eyes. She tripped, screamed, scraped herself up from the ground and kept going. The ring tightened. Her legs were so tired. Her knees burned. Tears blurred her vision. Where was she going? Where could she go? She remembered safety and warmth, but they seemed so far away now. She was no longer running but stumbling from tree to tree, hands bloodied, hair hanging in tangles around her face. She screamed for help and listened to her own voice echo endlessly, only to return as laughter.

At last, when her legs could no longer hold her, she skidded to her knees on the forest floor. Her fingers splayed in the hard-packed earth. Her nails were torn, her knuckles caked red. She knew she would not get up again, so she did the only thing left to her, and curled into herself, crying, allowing herself to be the small and weak thing she was.

This is all a dream, she thought wildly, in the last shred of her rational mind. If I surrender to it, I will wake up. I only have to give in, and everything will be okay.

She shut her eyes tight and put her arms over her head. Her ears rang with the laughter of the lost.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.