She was smaller than Anya, with a heap of pale hair and blue eyes that switched coldly from one stepdaughter to the next.įor half a year their father stayed home, besotted with his new wife and tolerating his children. In silken slippers, clinging to their father’s arm, she stepped out onto the cobblestones. Until the first warm day of spring, when he drove up to the house in an unfamiliar carriage. The servants sent word to the girls’ father that his wife was dead, or gone, or worse, and for a time heard no reply. The stain she found on the floor infected her with a horror of blood so fearsome, she took to washing out her monthly rags in the dark. But she’d left something behind: on the floor, in a puddle of blood, a bone dagger.Īnya heard the servants whispering about it and crept into the room to see for herself. The windows were shut, winter howled outside, and the woman was gone. After three days the servants broke it down, and found-an empty room. On a winter’s day when Anya was sixteen, their mother locked her door and did not open it again. The voice she heard was so thin and rustling, she could almost believe it was leaves against the window. Her daughters could hear her speaking to someone when they pressed their ears to the door, but only the eldest, Anya, ever made out an answer. Their father was distant and their mother was strange, often shutting herself up in her room for hours. Though he spent most of his days traveling, he was at home long enough to give his wife two daughters, the eldest dark and the youngest golden, born one year apart.

There was once a rich merchant who lived at the edge of the woods, in a tiny town in the Hinterland.

Tales of the hinterland