9

The Eternal Return

“Come on, Sultan.”

Peter bent over Sultan’s neck and whispered in his ear. “I’m tired too, but we should get back to Father.”

That was true, but it was also true that, despite himself, Peter had been unsettled by Agnes.

Locking herself and her mother away every night seemed a desperate measure, and her talk of the Shadow Queen might just have been village gossip, but as he rode through the deserted streets, the darkness began to eat at him.

He steadied himself and rode on, but it was not long before he began to catch himself peering into the shadows that curled at the street corners. Then he’d snatch his eyes away again, like a frightened child. The darkness seemed to press in on him from all sides, ominously. What if it was true? What if the Shadow Queen was true, and was coming to take them all?

Peter and his father might not ever have seen her, but they had met plenty of people on their travels who said they had.

Was it last year? Or the year before? Peter couldn’t remember, but once, he and his father had been passing through a district away to the southeast, nestled up against the Karpat Mountains. They had stopped in a village for the night. All evening, as they sat in the inn, there was talk of only one thing. The Shadow Queen. The locals spoke in hushed whispers, as if she was standing at the window of the inn, intent on catching anyone maligning her.

“She’s a thousand years old!” someone said.

“Rubbish! She was born at the beginning of time. She has no age.”

“Yes,” someone else agreed. “And she’s ten feet tall and has a hundred teeth! She can devour five children at once!”

“Ah!”

The audience grew fat on these morsels, while more beer was drunk and songs were sung. Peter found himself glancing over his shoulder, and after a while he moved closer to the fire.

The following day was a Sunday, and as it turned out, Palm Sunday, but Peter and Tomas were surprised to hear the locals call it Shadow Day. They were even more surprised when they learnt that they would be seeing the Shadow Queen herself later that day. After all the talk the previous night, it seemed absurd to hear the villagers discussing her imminent arrival.

Tomas announced that it was time to leave, but Peter was intrigued, and eventually he persuaded his father to stay for an hour more.

“Very well,” Tomas said abruptly. “Maybe then you’ll see what sort of superstitious buffoonery we are talking about.”

They found a heavy oak, climbed to one of its massive lower branches, and watched.

They didn’t have long to wait before the Shadow Queen arrived. All morning the villagers had been busy. Everyone had something to do or somewhere to be, but finally, just after noon, they made their way outside the village to a large field that led down to a wide, fast-flowing river. Here, on the grass, a large bonfire had been built, of birch logs on willow branches, kindled by hay from the village barns. Some people milled about, while others had much to do. Finally there was a sudden lull in all the hustle and bustle and a hush spread across the pasture.

Then, so quietly that at first Peter wondered if it was just the wind, came the voices of the village.

“The Shadow Queen! The Shadow Queen!”

Not a cry, but a thousand awed whispers that spread through the crowd. Now even Tomas sat up and shifted his position to get a better view. All eyes turned to the edge of the village, where a cart slowly trundled out to the field. It was pulled by a single white horse, driven by a young woman. And in the back of the cart sat what could only be the Shadow Queen.

Tomas began to laugh.

The Shadow Queen was made of straw. A simple effigy dressed, strangely, in a man’s clothes. She was a life-size figure, though, and she lolled about as the cart rolled awkwardly out into the field.

“The Shadow Queen!” Tomas said mockingly, but Peter threw a twig at him and glared. It was never a good idea to make fun of strangers, they knew that well enough.

The cart reached the margin of the field, near the bonfire and the river. Tomas and Peter got down from their tree and went to watch the rest of the ceremony.

Solemnly, the Shadow Queen was sawn in half, and the two halves thrown onto the blazing bonfire, which snapped and cracked, sending blackened stalks of straw high into the warm spring air. Eventually the fire burned through, but there was one last ritual to observe. The ashes were gathered and cast into the river, where they sped away south, never to be seen again.

Peter tried to ask the villagers about it, but the answers he got only confused him more. Was that really the Shadow Queen he had seen? Who had been burnt? Was it just a straw dummy? Everyone he asked gave him a different answer, but it seemed that the locals knew it was just a straw figure, though somehow, at the same time, it was the real Shadow Queen too. In burning her, here, at the start of spring, they had sent her away, sent her underground for the spring, the summer and the autumn, so that she would plague them no more. At least until St. Andrew’s Eve, and the start of winter. Then, as the long cold nights spread across the land, she would return, bringing illness, plague and pestilence with her once more. Evil would wash before her in a wave of malevolence.

Peter was unable to understand how the villagers made sense of it—the frightening figure of hideous power described in the inn the previous night was such a far cry from the laughable doll that had been sawn and burnt in the field.

As Peter got talking to more locals, there were those who claimed to have really seen her, up in the mountains, or in the depths of the forest, or lurking in the graveyard.

As he was being told that the clothes the figure wore were those of the most recent widow’s husband, intended to keep him from “coming back,” he noticed that Tomas was rolling out of the village on their own cart, having decided to waste no more time.

“Stop him from coming back?” Peter asked the man. “What do you mean, coming back?”