Page 1 of Devil's Deal

Chapter one

Sacrifice

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I’m running through the dusky forest. Tall ferns whip my face, but I have no air to scream or even moan with pain. Every breath hurts, my lungs and stomach burning with effort. I don’t know how long I’ve been running.

All I know is that I’ll never make it.

I grab the trunk of an oak to turn faster, veering left. The rough bark scratches my palm, the salty sweat stinging. Please, I beg in my mind, but I know no one will answer. The chasm of helplessness in my chest grows bigger with every whoop of laughter behind me.

“Run, little devil! It will be over soon!”

I don’t dare look back. I know I stand no chance. They are older than me, their long legs navigating the undergrowth with ease and confidence. They cackle and howl like wolves. I’m terrified. My heart can’t beat any faster, my body can’t grow any tenser.

A wild raspberry bush leaves gashes on my bare arm as I hurl past it. I have no air left to hiss with pain.

“Run, run! Lead us to your beastly father!” Daga’s scream is raw with rage and much closer than the others.

Panic slams into me. I try to speed up, but my legs are already blurs of white in the dappled green. I’m twelve years old, fast and strong for my age. But I can’t compete with a fourteen-year-old girl who eats to satiety every day.

My breath wheezes out of me, as loud as the bellows in the smithy. Daga’s father is the village smith. When my mother went to him because her sickle broke, he gave her a price twice higher than normal. She paid in silence, keeping her head low.

But that was a few moons ago. It’s autumn now. Late autumn that leaves frost on the grass at night. It’s chilly today, but I don’t feel the cold, my body heating up from exertion.

“I’ll get you, devil’s spawn!”

That’s Jaromir, Daga’s beau. He’s sixteen and the biggest of my three chasers. He’s an apprentice at the smithy, and his parents own the largest field by the village.

He could have caught me hours ago, but Jaromir likes to draw out the pain. Last fall, he tied me up and lowered me into an old well hardly anyone uses these days. I hung there from a rope, half-submerged and shaking from the cold, until my mother found me in the evening.

He could have just thrown me in the river where the current is the strongest, but then, I’d be dead in minutes.

And I don’t think he wanted to kill me back then. Just make me suffer.

“The devil can’t save you, witch!”

My chest burns so badly, I want to cough. Every breath is a struggle. I know I’m doomed. Before, they only tormented me for fun. They called me a witch back then, too, but it wasn’t for real. Not like it’s now.

I’m not the devil’s child. Everyone knows my father, Ratko, was a good-for-nothing bard. He left shortly after I was born and came back two years later so sick, he only spent a week in my mother’s cottage before he died. Wiosna told me. I wasn’t old enough to remember him.

Point is, everyone knows who my father was. And yet, they keep calling me devil’s spawn and a witch. My hair is red like the sunset, so they whisper I’m the daughter of Weles, Master of the Underworld. I wish I could explain how stupid that is.

Weles is the lord of the night, with hair as dark as a raven’s wing and eyes like black pits of despair. His skin is pale from dwelling deep in the roots of the Great Oak, and his mantle is spun from shadows. I don’t look like him at all.

I get my hair from my real father. Even though Ratko’s mane was brown, my mother says there were shades of rust in his beard. My features I get from her, my skin golden from the sun and freckled, my cheeks full and red like apples.

Right now, it’s not about my hair, anyway.

Everything lurches, and I lose control of my body with a sinking jolt of terror. I trip over a protruding root. For a moment, the world tilts around me, slow and dark, my arms flying to the sides. If I just get ahold of something, anything to stay upright…

I’d even take the devil’s hand right now.

Because even though I know it’s pointless, I’m still fighting. As long as I run, there is a chance.

But if I fall…

I grab a low-hanging branch and catch my balance. Just as I hear Daga’s triumphant shout right behind me, I set off again, diving into a cluster of ferns taller than me. She grunts in disappointment, but really, all she has to do is keep running.

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