Tales from the Hinterland by Melissa Albert

Author:Melissa Albert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

ILSA WAITS

In a village where a plague called the dream sickness slipped from house to house, a man lay dying.

But never a man so young, his wife said, watching the sleeper like she could hold him there just by looking. The dreaming sickness only takes old men. Yet the hours passed and still he did not wake.

The dying man had six sons and a daughter named Ilsa, the youngest child and often overlooked. With curious eyes that saw much and understood little, she watched his decline.

The sickroom smelled of dried sweat and burning wood and there were always too many people in it—Ilsa’s mother and brothers and the herb-woman who could do nothing but took her coin anyway, just for bathing the dreamer’s face in scented water. At the end, as her mother’s whispering became a keen and the herb-woman shook her head and six sons moved in to say their goodbyes, Ilsa saw a man she did not know.

There was no such thing as a stranger in the girl’s small world, in her hard, poor village tucked among the trees. But she would have remembered this man, whose shape was cut like paper against the room’s sour shadows. He sat perfectly still, hands resting on his knees. His pale eyes were on her father.

The dying man’s breath labored and slowed. Someone pushed Ilsa toward him, and she went reluctantly. She didn’t know her father well. He was a deep voice in the dark before dawn. A hand on her hair, too hard to be affectionate. But her mother was watching, so Ilsa put her lips to his damp cheek.

When she straightened, the stranger was looking at her.

“Do you see me, child?” His voice was low and slow. His lips were lovely, for a man’s.

“Yes,” she said, uncertain.

His head tilted. Even that small movement seemed grand. “And yet it is not your time. I think you see too much, little Ilsa.”

This was the most anyone had spoken to the girl since her father lay down one night and did not get up again. The gift of this stranger’s focus made her hard seed of a heart soften. She opened her mouth to respond, but her mother was pushing her away, laying her own cheek over the place in her husband’s chest where his breath clotted like spider’s silk. Above the heads of her brothers Ilsa saw the stranger moving toward the bed. To help, she thought, and stood on her toes to see it.

Then her mother was wailing, her sons gathering around her or drifting from the room, according to their character. The stranger, too, had gone. Whatever he’d done to Ilsa’s father, it hadn’t saved him.

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