Two and Twenty Dark Tales by Georgia McBride

she eased the door shut, and a lock slid into place.
    How could he forget the lullaby? Every time he fell into a fever dream, he heard that forbidden string of notes and words—that song —calling him back:
    Sleep, baby, sleep,
    Thy papa guards the sheep;
    Thy mama shakes the Dreamland Tree,
    And from it fall sweet dreams for thee,
    Sleep, baby, sleep.
    Sleep, baby, sleep,
    Our cottage vale is deep;
    The little lamb is on the green,
    With woolly fleece so soft and clean,
    Sleep, baby, sleep.
    Always it was her voice, the strange woman’s voice, that sang the words as if she had no understanding that singing anything but the prophecy was taboo. He sighed, and, hugging the building, crept along, keeping an eye out for movement.
    He froze when he saw the guards. Three tall men with bodies like tree trunks, clothed all in black, kicked in the front door of the building he’d just left. The emblem on their backs denoted their rank within the government’s hierarchy. Huntsmen. He heard the startled shout of the woman whom everyone called Abby, but called herself Abbadon.
    His mother? If she was shaking the Dreamland Tree… then his father guarded the sheep? He shook his head. He’d never had a mother or a father that he’d known.
    Marnum swallowed a deep breath and pushed away from the building, hurling himself behind a wagon stopped across the street. Slipping into the shadows beneath it, he crouched, watching the roadway from a dog’s eye view.
    More Huntsmen wearing glossy black boots stomped past.
    Somehow, he had to get out of the workhouse commune. The horse hitched to the wagon stomped a hoof, snorting as someone shifted in the seat above him. Tucking Abbadon’s parchment into his shirt, he grabbed the rigging of the wagon and pulled himself into its gut, wrapping his arms and legs around its skeleton as it pulled out.
    He hung beneath the wagon until his hands and arms were rubbed raw against the wood and metal. Spattered with mud—and worse, since the horse was not far ahead—he hung, the steady rhythm of the horse’s hooves laying down the beat of something that wanted to grow in his head and become more. He pressed one ear against his shoulder, trying to muffle the sound. He was grateful to escape the place he’d grown up and worked in—now, the place he was a wanted man. Wanted for sacrifice because the Elders believed his death could connect the mysterious Pieces of Eight and reunite their people with Infinity itself.
    When the wagon stopped at the edge of a small town, he dropped to the ground, knees bruising against stones in the roadbed, pants soaking up mud. He waited until the driver unhitched the horse and walked away. Checking that the road was empty, he slipped out from underneath cover, stood, and stretched. In the light of a nearby lantern, he read the parchment:
    Infinite ways to test your fate,
    O’er the mountains and hills she waits.
    He paused. “ Find the woman as old as time, she’d said. An old woman who lived under a hill. Ridiculous.” He shoved the parchment back into his shirt. He was no sacrifice or savior—he was little more than a slave. He sniffed—and a foul-smelling slave, as well. “There is no Dreamland Tree. Just a children’s fairy tale. Like believing in magic,” he whispered to himself.
    Two men stumbled out of a nearby building. Raucous laughter and the smell of ale and urine followed, mixed and strong. Slapping each other’s backs, they suddenly drew up short, focusing on something beyond the road’s edge. “Aye… eerie, is it not?” one asked, pointing a wobbling finger at lights that flickered in the distance.
    The other murmured his agreement.
    “They say thems will-o-wisps lighting that hill. That there’s an old woman, lives there still.”
    “Will-o-wisps? Magic?” His friend snorted. “Next you’ll tell me they sing lullabies.”
    “No one sings lullabies no more,” the other lamented. “Music… I miss it.” He opened his mouth to croon