Jaromir burst out of the undergrowth just in time to see the end of a horrific sight. At the edge of the rye field, where thick wheat stood in ear, a hastily made altar had been set up — several stones piled into a little pyramid, candles burning, a censer smoking. Beside it lay an open prayer-book, its pages fluttering in the wind. And before the altar, kneeling with his hands raised to the sky, stood old Tadeusz.
Above him a miasma seethed.
It was neither shadow nor smoke, though it looked like both at once. A shapeless mass that now thickened, now spread out, it recalled a warped tree trunk with gnarled branch-arms. At times something like a face showed in that murk — sunken eye sockets, a hollow of a mouth, sharp cheekbones sheathed in bark instead of skin. The half-transparent thing lashed the ground with rootlike tendrils, and the earth blackened and split where they struck, pale, writhing sprouts reaching out of the cracks.
Tadeusz was still trying to recite a prayer, but his voice trembled and broke. The censer slipped from his weakening hands, scattering coals in the grass. The candles were burning down, wax running over the altar stones. And the evil — for that was surely it — thickened around the old man as if trying to drink the very life from him.
"Melitele… merciful Mother…" Tadeusz croaked, and those were his last words.
The miasma tightened sharply, wrapped the old man in coils of fog, and he collapsed to the ground. Jaromir did not even have time to properly make out the creature — the evil immediately dissipated, melted into the morning mist, and swept away toward the fields. Only the acrid smell of decay hung in the air, and the scattered coals around the sprouts reminded one of what had happened.
And the old man, who lay face down, arms outstretched.
Jaromir ran up to Tadeusz, dropped to his knees, checked for breath — to no avail. The old man was dead, and he looked just like the other victims of the evil: his skin had darkened and shriveled, thin little roots had pushed from his ears and nostrils, and white threads like a web of white threads wrapped his fingers.
"What was that?" came a trembling voice behind him.
Agnieszka stood a few paces away, clutching her bundle tightly. Her face was white as a sheet, unfeigned terror frozen in her eyes — she had clearly never seen anything like it and made no attempt to hide her fear.
"I don't know," Jaromir answered honestly, rising from his knees. "Some kind of spirit. Evil."
Shouts carried from the village; someone was tolling the bell — apparently they had heard Tadeusz's cry after all. Soon the men would come running here, and seeing Agnieszka beside the dead body, they would not stop to sort out who was to blame. Not even his word would save the girl — fear makes people deaf to reason.
"Come on," Jaromir said decisively, grabbing the girl by the hand. "Quickly."
Agnieszka tried to pull free, but he hissed at her: "Quiet! Do you want the mob to tear you to pieces?"
They left the path and went through the tall grass along a barely visible animal trail that only Jaromir knew. The shouting in the village grew louder, the bell tolled more and more often. In a few minutes they came out behind his house, where Katara stood by the well, peering anxiously toward the fields.
Seeing her husband, she sighed in relief — she had thought misfortune had overtaken him. But when she noticed Agnieszka, she stared in surprise: "Jaromir? What…"
"Hide her in the house," he ordered curtly, not letting his wife finish. "And not a word to anyone."
Katara looked at the girl's exhausted face, at the bundle in her hands, at the resolute expression on her husband's face — and nodded. Without questions she took Agnieszka by the arm and led her to the hut.
"Come in, child. Everything will be all right."
"Are you sure she passed through here?" Miron the cobbler cast a skeptical glance at the barely visible path winding between alder scrub and nettles. "Too narrow a track for a person."
Jaromir crouched and quickly examined the ground at his feet. Someone had indeed passed here recently — judging by the tracks, a fox had gone to water. But the men didn't need to know that. He pointed to the pressed-down grass at the edge of the path, where stems had been broken recently and had not yet had time to yellow.
"See?" He ran a finger over the soft earth where a vague print could be made out. "Small, light footprint. And here," he straightened and pointed to a broken alder branch hanging at a person's shoulder height, "she caught on something. The shoulder, most likely."
In reality a deer had snapped the branch, but Jaromir's hunter's eye at once suggested how to turn animal signs into human ones. The men exchanged glances — to them the signs were just flattened grass and broken twigs, but the hunter spoke so confidently there was no reason to doubt.
"Let's go on," he said, rising. "The trail is still fresh."
Jaromir had thought he could sit out the village business on the sidelines. Talk with his wife and Agnieszka, think up what they should do next — especially since Bogdan, his crippled brother, kept insisting the girl had no place under their roof. But to ignore the body found in the fields would have looked suspicious. So Jaromir left the girl with his kin, strictly ordering her not to show herself, and went out to the people.
The funeral passed in oppressive silence. Summer fog rose from the bogs and spread over the cemetery in a white veil, and the thin birch branches rustled in the wind as if whispering. People stood around the fresh grave with stony faces, and in their eyes tears and fear, mingled with rage, had frozen. Even the women did not weep — they only laid their hands to their breasts and whispered prayers to Melitele, asking the Great Mother to shield them from evil.
And when the last clods of wet earth fell onto the plank coffin, when old Yakub haltingly, stumbling over his words, recited the final prayer in a trembling voice, the crowd stirred. Someone in the back rows hissed, "The witch." Someone answered, "Find her." And now the voices rose louder — demanding the forests be combed, the fugitive found and burned at the stake, offered in sacrifice to the gods so they would turn misfortune from the village.
Jaromir fleetingly wondered whether to tell the people what he had seen that morning — the miasma that killed Tadeusz. But he cast off the thought at once. Even if they believed him, they would still blame Agnieszka — say she had summoned it herself. And if they didn't believe him, they'd call the hunter mad or say he was in league with the witch. In moments like these people don't look for truth. They look for someone to blame. Fear doesn't care who is right.
As the folk were leaving the cemetery, Stanislav appeared. He came out of his house important and fully arrayed: a coat of stout broadcloth, leather boots, a heavy club studded with iron nails in his hands. Behind him, like a faithful dog, trotted his son Maciej with a rusty grandfather's sword at his side.
"Good people!" the elder's voice carried over the hushed crowd. "Enough of our patience! The third person lies in the damp earth, and the culprit walks free! It's time to put an end to this uncleanliness!"
"And where are we to look for her?" someone shouted. "She vanished as if she fell into water!"
"We'll find her!" Stanislav struck the ground with his club. "We have a man who knows the trails, who can read tracks." His gaze stopped on Jaromir. "Will you help, hunter? You know these woods better than anyone."
Jaromir felt dozens of eyes fix on him. To refuse meant to fall under suspicion. To agree meant to take on responsibility for where an enraged mob would go. And from there it was a short step to being blamed if the search came to nothing.
There was no choice.
"I'll help," he answered curtly.
And now he went at the head of this makeshift band, leading them away from his own house, and prayed to all the gods at once that he would have the wit to muddle the tracks and draw them far afield.
He led the men along a scarcely visible trail that wound between bog hummocks and alder thickets. The men walked in silence, glancing about with that special tension a beast shows when it has scented danger. Every rustle in the reeds made them start; every splash in the standing water made them snatch at their homemade spears and sharpened sickles. But gradually the bogs thinned, the hummocks grew drier, and soon boundary posts came into view, marking the line between their lands and those of the neighboring village of Zalesie.
What opened to their eyes beyond the boundary made the men stop as if rooted. Zalesie's fields, which only last summer had gladdened the eye with golden wheat and the thick green of oats, now presented a ghastly sight. The earth was dead — not merely barren, but dead, as if a plague had passed over it. The soil had taken on a strange grayish tint, covered with whitish striations like mold or pallid filaments. Where grain should have stood in ear, there jutted only dry, blackened stalks twisted into grotesque spirals. Their leaves had curled and fallen, baring knobby little stems as if scorched.
The air above the fields wavered with unhealthy heat, though the day was cool for late summer. Faint vapors rose from the ground — not mist, but something thicker and more oily, with an unpleasant tang and a sickly-sweet stench of decay. Not even weeds grew here. Burdock and lamb's-quarters, which usually ran rampant on abandoned plots, lay withered and blackened as if scalded with boiling water. The only living creatures on those accursed fields were flies — fat, green ones swarming over black puddles of unknown liquid.
"Mother Melitele," someone whispered, crossing himself with a trembling hand. "What is this?"
"I'd heard from traders that things were bad in Zalesie," said Boris the blacksmith, hitching his hammer at his belt. "But this bad… These aren't fields; this is a graveyard."
"They said it was a poor harvest," added Miron the cobbler, pressing his sleeve to his nose. "The harvest failing two years running. But I thought — drought, hail, lean years happen. And here…"
"Here the earth is poisoned," Jaromir concluded grimly.
The men stood staring at the dead fields with the kind of horror one feels at a bad omen. In the air hung a sense of wrongness, of an order of things broken. The earth should bear bread, not exude poison. Fields should feed people, not kill all living things.
"You think a spirit did this here too?" Boris the blacksmith voiced what all were thinking.
Jaromir remembered the bodies — Kazik, Nastasya, old Tadeusz. Around each dead one — rank growth. Wheat growing straight from a mouth. Roots twining fingers. The earth greedily drinking in life, as if gorging itself on human death.
"No," the hunter said firmly. "A spirit kills, but it does not blight the earth."
"Then what is this?"
"Something else," the hunter answered darkly. "A different evil."
Jaromir led the band along the boundary, past stunted stumps and blackened hazel bushes, until he brought them to a narrow stream — the very one that divided the lands of Rechitsy and Zalesie. The water stood murky, with oily rainbow slicks as if used oil had been poured into it. Along the banks there were neither reeds nor water lilies, only bare, scorched earth, as if the river itself had been poisoned by flowing past the dead fields. Jaromir dropped to his knees as if studying tracks and ran a finger over the wet clay right at the water's edge.
"Right here," he said, pointing to a blurred print that could have been anything — a beaver's paw or a human step. "She waded across. See? The tracks break off. She's gone. Beyond is the high road. And on hard road you won't find tracks — too many people walk it, carts pass every day, everything's trampled."
The men exchanged glances and grunted in displeasure. Someone — Miron, it seemed — muttered that they could go farther, that the girl had surely gone around into the forests, to the unclean. But Jaromir only shook his head, stood up, and wiped his hands on his trousers.
"No point," Jaromir cut him off. "Evening's coming on. If we go farther, we'll have to come back at night across the field, and the miasma is there. If we stay the night in the forest, our families will be left without protection. Better to head back. We'll set a watch so no one goes into the fields at night. Without moonshine this time."
And the crowd, unhappy but with no choice, went back, shuffling along the log causeways like a flock of sheep that had lost its shepherd. Jaromir walked last, looking back at the river, at its poisoned water, and thinking not of the witch but of how strangely the earth in Zalesie smelled — not of rot, not of bog, but of something sour, wrong, as if not made by nature.
"It didn't start by itself," Miron the cobbler remarked gruffly, scuffing through the wet moss. "I heard that in Vishnevka it was the same. They said bog spirits started dragging people off. It didn't let up till they tore down the old mill. So something's holding this unclean thing here. Maybe a cursed place, maybe someone's sin."
"Listen to the rumor-monger," snorted Boris the blacksmith. "That's no spirit, it's wicked magic. Old Klim said such troubles are driven out only by other sorcery. Maybe send folks to the city for a mage, have him lift the witchcraft?"
The crowd fell silent for a moment, weighing the proposal. But then old Yakub, a former wagoner who had hauled salt and grain all the way to Vizima, spoke up: "Are you out of your mind? Go to the city for a mage? Now in Temeria every mage is under watch. The moment you so much as mention magic — you'll be on a pyre within a day. And if you do find a hedge-wizard, they'll burn the two of you together as accomplices. Better to perish to the miasma in the fields than in the torturer's cellar."
Jaromir listened, but a different thought was taking shape in his mind. He remembered how the miasma had appeared over Tadeusz — as if it had grown out of the very earth, out of the blackness of the soil, out of those same roots that wrapped the dead. And suddenly a thought stirred in his heart: such creatures don't come for nothing, out of empty malice. If the evil had appeared, then something had called it here — something it wanted from this land and from the people who lived on it.