Three Times by Laini Taylor

Author:Laini Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: fiction
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

THREE

Black Meadows

Some say the Druj are demons, children of chaos brought forth long ago to plague the archangels and seed wickedness into human hearts. Others call them fey, forest spirits who hunt hunters, born of the bones of the earth before mountains were mountains or God was God. Most people have never heard of them at all, and of those who have, many are inclined to believe they’re just folk tales and fancy. But there are yet good people in this world who know too well that they’re real. Who have been pierced by them, like an icicle through the soul, haunted by them, and hunted by them, and whose nightmares won’t let them forget it.

There are places in the furls and fissures of mountains, from the Zagros to the Tien Shan and even as far west as the Carpathians, where humans never stray into the forests, not to hunt or gather firewood, not to meet secret lovers, and not to hide. They go no farther than the edges of the black meadows, those ashen strips they burn to divide their land from the forests.

Twice yearly, on the equinoxes, village elders tend to the meadows. It is only the hunched and white-haired who will go so near the forests, and for good reason: Druj aren’t tempted by the old. So while the young wait in the safety of the villages, the old go forth and scorch the boundary meadows with firebrands. After the black grass cools, they walk across it, feeling it crunch and crackle under their soles, and they leave their tithes just under the forest’s first shadows for the Druj to come and carry away. Brandy, bread, dried fruit and meat, sugar, knives, baskets of new kittens with their eyes still tight. Tales tell that the Druj don’t eat, so the humans don’t know who the food is for and they don’t ask. They simply do as their own grandparents taught them, leave the baskets and keep their eyes down, no matter how great the temptation to peer into the forest. They don’t want to see what might peer back.

The forests belong to the Druj. Everything in them belongs to the Druj and the Druj are supposed to stay there—agreements had been made—but sometimes boredom gets the better of them.

Boredom is a terrible affliction of the soulless.

Every village in the foothills of those varied mountains has its tales of Druj stalking among them. They come as crows and owls, foxes and magpies, stags whose antlers carry the moss of centuries, and wolves, huge and hunched, padding silently through the center of town. Whatever cithra they keep, their eyes are always the same, that desolate blue, and that’s how humans know them. When they come as animals, they perch on rooftops or at the market’s edge and watch in their terrible unblinking way, and the villagers go inside and bar their doors to wait until they leave. They might fright a young girl or boy by following them home, but usually in animal cithra they don’t do much more than that.

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