“How is this possible?” Jenifer was angry. “We are far from where we made camp.”

  They changed direction and began climbing a gradual incline thick with clover. The lilting song seemed to follow them, chasing them up the hill until they reached the crest and gazed down into a dense thicket, only to find the terrible mournful call was now directly in front of them.

  Again and again, they changed direction, finally rushing through the forest in a blind panic, pulling each other along. Eventually, out of breath, hair plastered with cold sweat to their foreheads, the sisters crashed through a final line of trees and found themselves on the oozing bank of a wide, stagnant pond.

  They reached for each other in the dark. A white mist shimmered over the surface of the murky water. It gathered and coalesced, gradually solidifying to form a group of four women. They were skeletal, their eyes too big for their faces and their hair blowing out behind them in thin wisps. Their hands were like claws, their bare feet knotted with tendons.

  “All the time I’ve spent alone in the forest, all the long, hard nights beneath the trees, I’ve never come face to face with the wraiths,” Jenifer whispered. Her expression was an odd mixture of terror and awe. “My string-sisters and I fled if we heard them. We always found ourselves safe and grateful come daybreak.”

  The wraiths stood two abreast at either side of the pond, which was foul-smelling and coated with a thick, slimy substance that glistened inky blue in the purple moonlight. Between them, the women held a large sheet, twisting it in their gnarled hands as they wrung it over and over. It was a sheet that would never come clean in the filthy pond water. Lowen suspected even if they washed the thing in a clear mountain stream, the cloth would still be spotted with those scarlet stains, livid beneath the thin light of the moons. Some said the spectral washerwomen were the souls of monstrous mothers who had murdered their babies. Now they were cursed to wash away the stains of their crimes for eternity.

  Until it started again, Lowen was unaware the women’s loud, keening song had stopped. Now it raised every hair on her arms. The wraith’s jaws opened too wide as they sang, their heads tilted at an awkward angle. The insides of their elongated mouths were wet and black. She tightened her grip on Jenifer’s arm, frightened they would draw the wraith’s attention.

  Jenifer nodded slowly at her, understanding completely. They took a step back together, unable to look away from the singing women steadily and methodically wringing out their bloody sheet. Beneath the suspended cloth a ruddy pool was clotting on the surface of the water.

  “We see you.”

  The wraiths spoke as one, their voices like splintered nails on glass.

  “We see you. We know you.”

  Lowen froze, eyes watering, unable to move her feet even though Jenifer was pulling insistently at her arm. The washerwomen stopped twisting the dripping sheet and pivoted towards her, their expressions blank and startling.

  “Help us wash the sheet. Help us wring it dry. Help us. Help us. Help us, Lowen.”

  Lowen stifled a cry but Jenifer was finally able to make her move her leaden feet. She pushed her back towards the dark of the trees, away from the hovering white faces, their skin pulled taut over too-long skulls. Away from the call of the keening wraiths.

  “The sheet must be washed.”

  “The sheet is dirty.”

  “Help us, Lowen.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  They ran, stumbling madly through the trees, ignoring the unseen branches that whipped against their faces and slashed thin cuts across their cheeks and foreheads.

  Morning came just as Lowen was beginning to believe it never would. The sun was a pale, ragged light. It outlined the silhouettes of the trees in flickering gold, melting away the cold, white mist curling about their branches. Jenifer stopped at a particularly wide alder tree. It was strangely stooped and bent, like an old man.

  “I know this tree,” she said. “Krenn is not far from here.”

  Her cold relief was so intense, Lowen thought she might fall down. She swayed slightly and leaned against the old-man alder, one trembling hand pressed to the lichen-spotted trunk.

  “Now I am glad I did not have a deer to carry on my back,” Jenifer said.

  Lowen gulped down the thin, early morning air, fighting for breath. “I have never run so fast before. My legs won’t stop shaking.”

  A long moment passed before Jenifer spoke again. “Those hags spoke your name, Lowen. Why do you think that was?”

  The colour drained from Lowen’s face and a chill crept over her skin. Jenifer’s question was one she had been asking herself over and over even as she ran, scared for her life while her mind replayed the memories of all those childhood stories told about the keening wraiths. She could not explain the feeling, the bones-to-guts certainty, that the hideous wailing washerwomen knew her secret, had been drawn to it. They hadn’t been beckoning to her, but to the forbidden child in her womb.

  “Jenifer,” Lowen said, fear and weariness making her reckless. “I need to tell you something.”

  “Let me begin. I am the eldest sister, it is I who should start such things.” Jenifer squared her shoulders and looked directly into Lowen’s eyes. Lowen fought the urge to turn away. “I wish to apologise for my despicable actions at the Changing of the Moons. I should have said that yesterday. Before the wraiths appeared and chased us through the forest half the bloody night.”

  Lowen tried to speak but Jenifer continued. “I had enjoyed rather too much mead that night, which is a poor excuse for the vile things I said. I shouldn’t have insisted you reveal your intention, it was none of my business.”

  Lowen was momentarily lost for words. She gaped at her sister. “You’ve never spoken to me this way before,” she finally said. “You’ve never apologised after a fight.”

  “Well, maybe I should have. Hearing the wraiths call for you made me realise if you failed to live through the night, if morning found you at the bottom of that filthy pond bound in their cursed sheet, I would have been wracked with remorse.”

  “I forgive you,” Lowen said, brightening despite her exhaustion. “You are my only sister, I will always forgive you. I only hope you are of the same mind because there is something you don’t yet know—”

  Lowen faltered when she realised Jenifer was no longer listening, her gaze drawn to the rocky ground visible over her shoulder.

  “Am I so dull I cannot command your attention for more than a minute? What are you looking at?”

  Lowen turned and scanned the ground, picking out a patch of grass damp not with morning dew, but with blood. The spreading pool of bright rust was horribly out of place against the cool green of the surrounding turf.

  “Is that a boar?” Jenifer wondered.

  She strode towards it, one hand hovering above the knife hanging at her belt, and Lowen followed. As they rounded the grey outcrop of rock guarded by old-man alder, they found it, split from snout to flank and laid open on the ground as though purposely displayed. Slick, purple organs still quivered in their fleshy casements.

  “Was it killed by a larger animal?” Lowen said.

  A long curve of blood was sprayed across the smooth slate face of the outcrop. The smell was repulsive. A thick, animal stench overlaid with the bitter iron tang of blood and viscera.

  Jenifer nodded as she knelt beside the ruined corpse, inspecting the scene with a detached, almost clinical curiosity. “It certainly wasn’t cut open with any kind of knife. This unfortunate beast was ripped apart with teeth and nails, though I see no evidence any part of it was eaten. It’s still warm.”

  She reached for something Lowen couldn’t see, lodged in the underside of one limp, meaty thigh and hanging from the boar’s body at a crooked angle. When she retracted her hand it was red and wet, stained to her wrist as though she was wearing a scarlet glove. Jenifer held the object up to the light, turning it over as she considered it.

  “This is a claw,” she finally said. Lowen shivered. “Yet It does not belong to any animal I have hunted in this forest.” She stood, tucking the grimy object into a pocket of her breeches. “It is much too large. It must have belonged to something monstrous.”

  The air grew still between the sisters. Only the wind could be heard overhead, snaking a gentle path through the branches.

  “We should hurry home,” Lowen whispered.