Something Sweet

The old woman in the tent had been waiting for us. "It took you all long enough. Are you ready to learn your fate?" We had been brought to Barovia for a reason, said Madam Eva. "The cards will tell. I will not."

We drew our five fates ourselves. Lily's card sent us far to the west for knowledge, to "high water aglow with the light of the sun, hidden behind the walls of man". Osric's promised protection in the house of a dragon, where a heart once pure has been corrupted by hatred. Sirius reached for the wrong deck, was called an imbecile twice, and drew power, starting "in an amber palace of darkness". Fëanor drew our ally, a hunter of hunters. And Drew drew where the devil will be found: "in the tomb of the only man he ever envied."

Then we drew our own threads. Osric's blood "marched beneath that banner", and he must kneel and answer for it in the house of the fallen dragon. ("All right. I will.") Fëanor's stone "remembers a fire you have never felt", and one day he must stand in glowing water at dawn and choose. Drew's amber holds a question her blood has carried for generations, its answer deep in the mountains and "bought dearly". And Lily heard it said out loud: "Something sweet has taken root in you, little one. Starve it. It is not yours."

Sirius she turned away. "Your fate has already been read." The card she gave him was blank to the rest of us, but on it he saw a lady of ravens who told him that "what was stolen is not fully owned, and the land can be reclaimed."

By the fire the Vistani told us they pass the mists by an old agreement with the devil. Once they tried to carry someone out, arrived without him, and got a note by wolf: "Naughty, naughty. Don't try that again."

In the morning there was real bacon, and there was Lily, elbow-deep in Osric's pack, fighting him for a pie. Fëanor's magic showed enchantment wound through every pie and a fainter thread of it around Lily's head. Asked to promise she wouldn't eat the pie she was offered, she said: "I don't want you to be kind to me, and me to tell you a lie in response." On the road we grew stronger again, and a Vistani rider called Aragal asked us to bring his daughter a toy from Blinsky's shop in Vallaki.

At dusk: a windmill leaning on its rise, a henge of standing stones behind it, and the smell of fresh pies. Granny came up the road with her cart. "They are enchanting pies, I will admit. So you got me." Then we heard muffled screaming from the cart, and she ran for the mill impossibly fast, shrieking for her sisters. In the cart Lily found a woman bound in a net. "Don't take me out of this net right now. I am cursed. This net is silver. It's stopping me turning." Her mate, a werewolf born, was inside.

The door burst open on three hags. "You shouldn't have poked your nose in, dearies." Offalia turned eyes like ink on Lily: "It would be unwise to attack our best customer." And Sirius spread black raven wings, feathers dripping from his eyes.

We stopped there, in the windmill's doorway, with the hags barely scratched.