Alcohol consumption, consensual sexual content, harsh winter weather, death (but in a romantic fantasy way)
One
Salt upon the threshold and sweep the frame with ash.
Set out a bowl of milk, and let the wild hunt ride past.
“Be sure to fasten the windows, Tomasz.” Oj Pavel rapped his knuckles on the chairback and clicked his tongue. “You set out a bowl of milk?”
“I did, Oj Pavel,” Tomasz confirmed. “And marked over the door with rowan wood ash.”
“Salted the threshold?” The old man squinted a gorza-reddened eye at him. Deep wrinkles carved canyons from bushy eyebrows down his sagging cheeks, disappearing beneath a scraggly nest of a beard stained yellow from years of pipe use. “You mustn’t forget to salt the threshold.”
“I haven’t forgotten in all the years I have poured your gorza.” Tomasz draped an arm across the old man’s back, guiding him to the door. He rattled the clay jar in his other hand. “But the longer you are here, the longer the salting is delayed.”
“Only looking out for your well-being, boy.” Oj Pavel’s breath clouded between them, the stale stink of gorza making Tomasz’s eyes water. “The Hunt rides this night.”
“Pah.” He spat twice. “A fairy tale.”
“The truth! We cannot have our favorite innkeeper getting swept up.”
“I’m only the favorite because my tavern sits at the crossroads.” Tomasz shoved the door open. Splinters in the rough wood bit into his palm, sharp as the biting cold. A burst of winter wind punched into the tavern, guttering the flames of candles set across the broad wooden tables. “Outside of the town and its laws.”
They were good laws. Old laws. Laws meant to keep away the beasts in the mountains and the ghosts on the road. They demanded every villager be behind a warded door and a salted threshold by sundown. And while they were stretched in the summer, when the sun lingered, and the horrors stayed away, in the dead of winter, they were not to be ignored.
“Can you blame an old man?” Oj Pavel winked a bleary eye. “You are the only tavern pouring after sundown, of course you are our favorite.”
“I won’t be your favorite when you get locked outside of the gates.” Tomasz guided him down the path.
Despite shoveling the short walk to the road earlier that afternoon, a new blanket of snow covered the flat stones he and Fenra, the wolfwoman who guarded the forest’s edge, had laid in the spring. He shook his clay jar again, pondering the salt. There was more in the shed he could use, but that would require shoveling and salting as he worked. More time outside, more risk on a cold, dark night.
A wolf’s howl rose over the wind, too resonant and canid to be Fenra’s call of warning.
“Come along, Oj Pavel, the guards are waiting.” Tomasz steadied the old man and set him down the road towards their little town.
Clustered at the edge of a dense wood, the town served as a waymarker, little more than a dot on a map to let travelers know they were on the correct route to Wroclasz, a day’s ride to the east, and Drezdûn to the west.
A stopover, or a passthrough, depending on the time of day.
In his youth, Tomasz’s mother had told him the crossroads outside their door marked the border between the lands of two royal houses. But Tomasz had neither seen a royal nor their houses, and so he focused on the inn and its keeping.
For a decade, he poured gorza, laid the stones, and shoveled the walk. In ten years, never once had he failed to salt the threshold and leave out milk on dark nights like this, warding against whatever evil rode the winter wind.
Tomasz waited in the crossroads until Oj Pavel hobbled through the gates, raising a hand in thanks to the guards. One of the guards, Piotr, waved a torch in goodnight before disappearing behind the town’s walls.
A second howl rose in the silence between gusts of wind, whipping Tomasz’s attention south, toward the Szitlau Mountains. The trees lining the road bent and creaked in the gale. Though the night was clear, blizzards were known to kick up without warning, hidden behind the snow whirling in a dervish on the winter wind.
He shielded his eyes, studying the road where it disappeared into the trees. In the fairy tales his mother had told him, the Hunt ran down from the Szitlau, screaming along the road on their way to the sea far to the north. The horde consumed any found in its path, seeking entry into unwarded houses to steal children away.
“We must respect the Hunt,” she had said, “and give them a clear path to sweep up lost souls on the way. Salt the threshold, draw ash upon the frame, leave a gift, and stay clear lest they sweep you up as well.”
A branch snapped overhead. Tomasz whipped around, scanning the roofline of the half-timber inn.
It was not much: the tavern and functional kitchen, four second-story rooms accessible by a wooden stair along the far wall, and a fifth room beyond the kitchen, heated by the stove and hearth.
Set back from the road, the inn was built into a cluster of pine and oak. Low-hanging branches scraped the thatch overhang above the door. Twigs and powder fell to the ground, and the beams groaned under the weight of snow caught on the roofline.
Tomasz added clearing the roof and trimming the lower branches to his list of never-ending tasks, and stepped beneath the overhang. He thumbed the cork from the jar of salt, carefully lining the large oblong flagstone that served as a threshold.He paused at another, louder groan of wood.