Lily awoke with a start, her forehead damp with sweat and her heart racing. Another horrified scream broke the early morning silence and she leapt out of bed, realising that the screaming wasn’t an echo of a nightmare, but was coming from just underneath her window, out in the stable yard.

She stumbled across the room to grab her leather boots and threw her heavy green cape on over her night-clothes. She was too terrified to bother about public perception. She had to discover the source of those awful, ear-splitting screams.

Lily ran out into the yard. It was still early and the sun was just starting to rise. The moorland was covered in a thin layer of gossamer mist that was glittering and swirling around the inn. As she hurried towards the stables, the first thing she saw was the crowd. Everyone else, too, must’ve been roused by the screams and had come together to investigate, all crowded into the small patch of cobbled yard facing the stable. A couple of women were clutching each other and one of them had her face hidden, as if she couldn’t bear to look at whatever had captivated everyone else. As Lily grew closer, the crowd seemed to sense her and parted, though she had no idea why.

Until she saw the source of the commotion.

A horse lay in the stable, the hay surrounding it soaked with crimson blood. The horse itself was covered in fatal wounds and had been dead for some hours. The wounds were no longer bleeding and the blood surrounding it looked tacky, rather than wet and glistening. Lily wretched. She was bent double, attempting to catch her breath when she caught the scent of death and retched again.

No. Lily’s mind was reeling, trying to make sense of the horror before her eyes. No, it can’t be… It can’t…

Her head was spinning, her eyes stinging with the threat of tears. Bile rose in her throat and it felt like her legs were thigh-deep in a marshy bog; every movement was slow and strained and painfully sluggish.

No, no, no, please don’t let this be true. It can’t be… It can’t. I won’t let it. It’s not real. It’s not true…

It was. It was Morrigan.

Her Morrigan.

The loyal steed who had faithfully carried her across the moors and through the marshes only yesterday. Today, she was dead.

Nauseous, Lily stumbled forward to the horse’s body. She sobbed until her throat rasped and closed up, panicked flutters coursing through her body. Underneath Morrigan’s head, a piece of paper had been left behind. Lily pulled it and the blood-soaked paper came free. On it, there was a strange symbol; it was crudely drawn but looked like a tree encircled by the sun. Beneath the sketch, two words were written in scarlet ink.

Stay Away

It was a warning. A threat to force Lily to abandon the rescue mission. Without her horse she was not only distraught, distracted, but also vulnerable and slow. Painfully slow. Morrigan had been the sole reason they had been able to escape their pursuer; now, Lily realised, if he caught up with her again, she had no chance of outrunning him. Not to mention that she still had to cover the rest of the miles between The Old Silent Inn and Kelseth, and now she had to do it on foot.