Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Every girl in Baiyu Village feared that camphor wood chest.

It was usually kept locked under my grandmother’s bed, opened only for two occasions: a funeral procession or a bride’s departure.

On the day of my nineteenth birthday, it was opened once more.

My grandmother, Rong Duyue, knelt on the floor and peeled back layers of old cloth to reveal a red cloak so dark it was almost black. The edges were frayed, but the stitching looked fresh, as if it had just been mended. As she shook the cloak out, a scent of stale snow mixed with blood rushed at me, making my stomach turn cold.

“Put it on,” she said.

I didn’t take it. Instead, I stared at the dark red smear between the fingers of her right hand. “Where did you go last night?”

Ignoring me, she placed a bamboo basket on my knees. Inside was a piece of cream cake, a bottle of mulberry wine, and a small silver knife wrapped in white cloth. Vines were carved into the scabbard, and the hilt was worn smooth and shiny, as if it had been gripped for many years.

“Put on the red cloak, take the basket, and reach the Cabin in the Woods before dark.” As she tied the strings for me, her breath brushed against my ear, cold as a corpse. “Your grandmother is sick. She’s waiting for you.”

Goosebumps instantly broke out across my back.

“Aren’t you my grandmother?”

Rong Duyue looked up at me. Her cloudy eyes suddenly seemed bright under the dim lamp, like two glass beads soaking in sewage. She smiled, the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth deepening. “There is another one in the forest.”

I had grown up hearing the village legends about the “other grandmother.”

They said an old woman who ate people lived in the Black Pine Forest outside Baiyu Village. Every twenty years, the village had to choose a girl with a red mark behind her ear to put on the red cloak and visit her with cake and wine. Those who returned alive could ensure favorable weather and prosperity for the village for the next twenty years. Those who didn’t return were assumed to have been taken by wolves.

The problem was, in the last hundred years, no girl had ever come back.

I also had a red mark behind my ear. I’d had it since birth, like a drop of blood pressed into the flesh.

A knock suddenly sounded at the door.

Before I could move, my grandmother had already gone to open it. Standing at the door was Xing Zhaoming, the youngest hunter in the village and my childhood fiancé. A bow was slung across his back, and a layer of snow rested on his shoulders. When he saw the red cloak on me, his face turned visibly pale.

“Is it really today?” his voice rasped.

“The clan elders decided it,” Rong Duyue said flatly. “It’s just as well that you’re here to see her off.”

Xing Zhaoming looked at me for a long time. He pulled a copper bell from his robe and tied it to my wrist, then drew the small silver knife from the basket and handed it to me. “If you meet a wolf in the forest, don’t be afraid. Stab it right in the heart.”

I asked him, “Will they let me back through the village gates?”

His eyes flickered away. It was a long moment before he spoke. “Don’t look back before dawn.”

I suddenly understood.

They weren’t sending me to visit the sick. They were sending me to die.

But before I could react, Rong Duyue gave me a shove from behind. Snowflakes lashed against my face, biting and cold. The thick wooden gates at the village entrance were already open, revealing the boundless Black Pine Forest beyond. The wind howling out of the woods sounded like countless people gasping in my ear.

I looked back once.

My grandmother stood within the threshold, her face buried in the shadows of the lamp, leaving only her greyish mouth visible. Xing Zhaoming stood beside her, his hand gripping his bow tightly, but he didn’t look at me again.

The moment I stepped into the forest with my basket, I heard the heavy thud of the bolt sliding home behind me.

It sounded like the final nail being driven into a coffin.