I turned the black feather between my fingers. It was cold, smooth as metal, and seemed to devour what little light remained in the twilight. Whatever it was, it didn't belong to a normal bird.
"Is it always... like this?" Margot asked the girl, her voice gentler than I'd ever heard it. "Does it always leave one of these?"
The girl nodded, clutching the small wooden carving to her chest. "Yes. Every time."
I asked, turning toward her. "Who else has been... taken?"
She sniffled, her gaze lost in emptiness. "Before... before Sophie. The miller's daughter. Then Jean-Pierre, the old carpenter." Her voice broke. "And now... now my Nicolas."
"Did they have something special in common?" I asked thoughtfully.
"Sophie was a wonderful singer," she said between sobs. "Jean-Pierre... I can only say his hands created wonders."
Perhaps it wasn't random. A singer, a carpenter, and a wood carver. What did they have in common?
"Talent!" I hissed, looking at Margot.
She stared at me, her eyes widening as the puzzle pieces fell into place. "It's choosing them for their talent," she whispered, horror creeping into her voice.
I looked at the feather in my hand again. It was its signature.
"It doesn't just kidnap them," I said, the terrible certainty forming in my throat. "Maybe it takes their talent, or at least chooses them for it, it would seem."
The girl kept sobbing, clutching the small wooden crow between her fingers as if it were the only wreckage from a shipwreck.
"He's never coming back, is he?" she whispered, raising two eyes so full of despair toward us that I felt like a worm. "The Raven took him. Carried him to its nest... like the others."
Instinctively, I started to say something reassuring, a kind lie. But the words died in my throat.
It was Margot who spoke. She knelt beside her, her usual prickly demeanor replaced by a sharp determination.
"What's your brother's name?" she asked in a firm voice.
"Nicolas."
"Listen," Margot said, and in her tone was a promise so bold it seemed like madness. "We'll bring him back. I swear it."
The girl stared at us, her sobs stopping in astonishment. Her eyes darted from me to Margot, seeing us for what we were: two dirty, tired kids, barely older than her brother, armed only with our arrogance. The expression on her face changed. Hope, which for a microsecond had peeked through, was devoured by an even deeper sadness.
"You're just children," she murmured, shaking her head. It wasn't an insult. It was a terrible, resigned observation. To her, we were just two more victims in waiting.
She stood up abruptly, as if our presence hurt more than it helped. She hunched her shoulders, embracing the small crow. "Leave him in peace," she said, her voice once again a broken whisper. "Let his soul rest."
Without adding another word, she turned and ran away, a small fragile figure disappearing into the purple twilight. We watched her enter a modest house right across from the church. We heard the dry sound of the door closing and being barred.
"'You're just children,'" Margot repeated in a low voice, staring at the closed door. There was a new, icy anger in her tone. "We'll show her."
"Yes," I agreed. "We'll show her!"
But as we walked away, her words echoed in my ears. "You're just children."
Maybe she was right. Maybe we were just going to get ourselves killed.
The village, which before was merely silent, now seemed complicit. Every dark window an eye watching us, every shadow a hiding place.
"Guillaume," Margot said, her voice pulling me from those dark thoughts. "The blacksmith. He's our only lead. We need to move before it gets completely dark."
I nodded. We moved, this time not just with the caution of two thieves, but with the heavy awareness of being prey in an unknown hunting ground. Guillaume's forge was at the edge of the village, the last outpost of civilization before the known world ended. It was a squat, blackened building, isolated from the others, almost on the border between the village and the forest. Beyond his workshop, the cobblestone road surrendered, becoming a muddy path that wound between dark trees and disappeared into the heart of the Vosges, toward a "who knows where" that promised nothing good.
We approached the forge with the caution of someone about to step into a bear trap. I stopped a few paces away, straining my ear.
"Do you hear anything?" I whispered to Margot.
She shook her head, her eyes fixed on the building. "No. And that's the problem."
She was right. There was no sound at all.
"He should be working at this hour," Margot continued, her voice barely a breath. "A blacksmith doesn't rest while there's light. And here... there's not even smoke."
I followed her gaze to the stone chimney. It was cold and inert against the gray sky. I focused on the air. The acrid, metallic smell of coal and beaten metal, which should have permeated everything, was only a faded echo. In its place was the damp scent of the woods and something else... a cold, stale odor.
"It's the smell of fear," I said, realizing it as I spoke. "The same as in the inn. They're even afraid to light the fire."
Margot moved slowly along the perimeter, a shadow inspecting every crack. "The shutters are barred, and the door looks blocked." She stopped, pointing out a detail I'd missed. "Look. The bar. He probably added it recently. It shows no signs of wear or rust."
I approached. "You're right, it looks freshly forged, he nailed it hastily," I said, looking at a poorly placed nail.
"It's like a metal warning against the outside world," Margot murmured. "He's trying to keep out something other than the usual annoying customers."
I approached the door and knocked. The sound echoed in the silence, loud and brazen. No response. I knocked again, harder. "Monsieur Guillaume? Angelica Glarner sends us."
Speaking that name was a risk and I knew it. But it was the only password we had.
We heard a noise from inside. The sound of a bar being moved. The door opened a crack, revealing a suspicious eye in the darkness.
"Angelica?" asked a hoarse voice. "I haven't seen her in years. And I don't receive visits, usually. Especially not from two kids."
"We have a problem that concerns you. That concerns everyone!" I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "The Raven Man!"
There was a long moment of silence. Then the door opened fully. The man facing us was a giant. Shoulders as wide as a wardrobe, arms thick as tree trunks, covered with a web of old burn scars. But his strength was undermined by fear. His face was drawn, his gray beard poorly groomed, and his eyes darted nervously toward the shadows outside the door.
"Get in, quickly," he grunted, pulling us inside and barring the door behind us. "You're crazy to name that thing out loud."
We showed him the feather. He looked at it with a mixture of revulsion and dark fascination.
"Yes," he murmured. "I've seen another one. Near my neighbor's chicken coop. The day all his hens were found dead, but it didn't eat them. Just... emptied them."
"Emptied?" Margot asked, a look of disgust on her face. "What does that mean?"
"It means what I said, girl." Guillaume ran a trembling hand over his chin. "Without blood. Without life. As if someone had drunk their souls. It all started there."
"And then people disappeared?" I asked. "Sophie, Jean-Pierre, and now Nicolas. Does it happen every night?"
"No, thank heaven," the blacksmith replied, shaking his head. "It's unpredictable. Sometimes weeks pass without anything happening. Then, in a single night, he takes someone. Always at night. Always when there's less moon."
"How long has this been going on?" I asked, trying to reconstruct a timeline.
Guillaume took a moment, his eyes lost on a distant point. "The chicken coop... was almost two months ago. The disappearances started shortly after."
Two months. The timing seemed like a clue. "What else happened in this village two months ago?" I pressed. "Something out of the ordinary."
The blacksmith's gaze hardened, veiled by a shadow of anger and grief. He approached one of the barred windows, peering at the dark hills where the manor ruins stood out against the sky.
"Two months ago the madness from Paris arrived here," he said, his voice now a low, deep growl. "The Great Fear, they called it. Peasants with pitchforks and torches, drunk on rage and bad wine." He turned toward us, his eyes burning with a dark fire. "They stormed the manor. The Count de Gueule-du-Corbeau... he wasn't a saint, but he was a just man. He gave work to half the village. But it didn't matter. They dragged him out with his family and they..."
He stopped, as if reliving the scene. "They massacred them," he hissed, "in the name of the Revolution. I could hear their choruses from down here... they sang of 'equality' and 'brotherhood' while they tore his family to pieces. Nonsense." He shook his head, a deep disgust curling his lips. "It was just an excuse for a massacre."
"They spared no one," Guillaume continued, his gaze lost beyond the window, toward a fiery memory. "Not even the servants. Village boys and girls who worked there. Then they set fire to everything." His voice lowered, becoming almost a spectral murmur. "That night, from this door, I saw the flames. Orange tongues of fire licking the sky above the forest, as if hell itself had come to claim the hill."
The silence that followed was heavy, filled only by the crackle of our breathing. The image of that fire was too vivid, too real.
"So that path..." I asked, my voice lower than I wanted, "the one that starts after your forge, does it lead to the manor?"
"It led," he corrected me. "No one uses it anymore."
"It looks abandoned for years, not two months," I replied, thinking of how desolate it appeared. "It seems unnatural."
"It is," Guillaume said with tomblike gravity. "Nature reclaimed that place with strange, wild haste. The brambles grow before your eyes. The air up there is heavy, cold. No one dares set foot there anymore." He paused, an expression of deep sadness crossing his face. "Almost no one. Only the village women. They went a few days later... to give those poor souls a proper burial."
I stared at him, a terrible suspicion beginning to take shape. "The women?"
"Yes," he nodded. "And the bravest ones. They defied the superstitions. Sophie... the miller's daughter sang for them, while they buried them. A melody so sad it would break your heart." His eyes shifted to Margot, then back to me. "Old Jean-Pierre insisted on building the coffins himself, especially the Count's. He said he owed him at least that."
The knot in my stomach tightened until it hurt. The pieces were fitting together into a horrible mosaic.
"And then there was also that young man..." he murmured, frowning. "He had an exceptional talent with wood. He carved small crosses for the graves, true masterpieces for a boy his age. It was his way of saying goodbye."
"His name was Nicolas," I said, my own voice sounding distant, as if it came from another world.
The blacksmith's eyes widened slightly. "Yes, right. Nicolas. How do you know?" But he didn't wait for an answer. The same terrible awareness that was freezing us was beginning to make its way into him too.
It was Margot who said it aloud, her voice flat and devoid of all emotion. "The singer who sang for them. The carpenter who built their coffins. The carver who sculpted their crosses." She looked at us, first me then Guillaume, and her conclusion fell into the room like a guillotine blade.
"It's not choosing them randomly. I think it's punishing them. All the people who were taken distinguished themselves by honoring the Count's memory with their talent."
A silence heavy with horror fell over the room. Guillaume collapsed onto the bench, his massive face now ashen. "But... but that makes no sense," he stammered. "Punish them? For an act of mercy?"
"Maybe it's not a punishment," I replied. Right at that moment, a sound made us all jump. It came from above us.
A single, slow scratching. Like a claw testing the consistency of the wooden beams of the ceiling.
We froze, our hearts ceasing to beat. More silence. Then, again. Scratching. Slow, deliberate, inquisitive above our heads.
Guillaume's small terrified eyes slowly rose toward the dark ceiling.
"It's on the roof," he hissed, his voice barely a breath of terror. "It heard us!"