The fog had teeth. That was the wrong word for it—teeth implied something as honest as biting—but Elara couldn’t find a better one as the mist closed around her and the last smear of lantern light from the road dissolved into nothing. The fog didn’t bite. It replaced. One moment there was a dirt track, a stone wall, the distant bleat of someone’s lost sheep. The next, only white—a white so total it had texture, pressing against her skin like wet silk.
The man who held her arm did not slow down.
He hadn’t given his name. She’d stopped asking after the second time he declined to answer, which he’d done not by refusing but by continuing to speak as though she hadn’t said anything at all. He was tall and narrow, with a face that rearranged itself depending on the angle—sharp-jawed in profile, almost soft from the front, and from behind, when she’d stumbled and fallen a step back, she could have sworn his ears came to points fine as thorns.
He had come to the cottage at dusk. Her father had answered the door, and then her father had not spoken again. He’d stood in the kitchen with his hands at his sides and his mouth slightly open, and when Elara had come in from the garden with a basket of comfrey and seen the stranger in their home, her father had looked at her with an expression she would be dismantling for years. If she had years.
The tithe is come due, the stranger had said, as though announcing that the post had arrived.
And her father—her father who could argue with a stone and win, who had once chased a tax collector off their land with a hoe—had just nodded.
Now the fog thinned in threads, and what replaced it was worse. The quality of the air had changed, the way it moved into her lungs, the weight of it. She breathed in and tasted something sweet and mineral, like licking a rain-wet stone, and beneath that a faint rot. Flowers left in a vase a day too long.
“Keep walking,” the man said. The first thing he’d said in what might have been an hour. His voice was pleasant. Everything about him was pleasant in a way that felt like a locked door.
“Where—”
“Walking is the relevant instruction.”
…she kept it sharp.