Agnet does not return. I don’t know how long I have sat here dreaming, but the shadows have grown thick, and a sharp smell is drifting up from behind the curtain. I open the door to find that night has fallen. The sky is clear and dotted with stars so green they glint like emeralds against ink. The moon is strong, washing the village in a silvery haze. Looking up, I see that she is full. A comet arcs past her face, scratching the velvet night with a pale scar that throbs and does not fade.

***

Where can she be at this late hour? Agnet is not one to shirk her duties or gallivant about. The only place I can think of is her parent’s house, up on the northern rind of the village where the forest begins. I make my way there, careful not to slip in the dark on the evil slime coating the street. Rounding the miller’s hut, I see old Ulric standing in his doorway. He seems agitated, and he holds a poker in his fist.

When I call to him, the old fisherman startles and raises the poker like a weapon. “Who’s there?”

“Ulric, it’s me. Kaspar. What’s wrong?”

The poker comes down, but he remains alert. Frightened. “Have you seen Sabine?”

His second daughter, a friend of my sister’s. As I come closer, I can see his face better in the light. The old man’s lip is swollen and cracked with dried blood.

“What happened?”

“Something has taken my Sabine,” he says. His rheumy eyes dart hither and yon, as if he expects an attack from the shadows.

He isn’t making sense. “Someone took her? Who?”

“No, no. The girl’s bewitched. Not herself. God preserve us.”

I touch his arm to calm him, but he flinches. Stumbles back. “Easy, Ulric. Tell me what happened.”

“She was sitting by the fire, the darning in her lap, when she became upset and animated about something. She said someone was singing and wasn’t it the most glorious sound we had ever heard. I heard nothing. My wife has been deaf for ages, and she heard nothing. Sabine dropped the stocking she’d been mending and went to the door. She said she had to know who was singing like an angel. When I tried to stop her, she became violent. Her eyes were like that of a wild animal. She knocked me to the floor and threatened to do the same to her mother. Can you imagine?”

“What on earth came over her?” I do not know Sabine Dulfgutter well, but she is a mild mouse of a girl.