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again.”
    Ranna’s eyes twinkled, but something confused came into Malduk’s face. He had saved Alina from the snows once, and somewhere he even felt a fondness for the girl because of it, and he still feared to have the sin of blood on his hands, and his conscience too, feeble as it was.
    Ranna suddenly saw Alina’s antler-handled dagger lying on the milking stool and snatched it up, as her head swung towards the door.
    “What are you going to do, wife?” whispered Malduk.
    Ranna looked back coldly at her husband, and her eyes glittered viciously.
    “Do, man? Do what you should have done seven long years back,” Ranna answered murderously. “Kill the changeling, of course. Or even better, turn the whole village to the job of murdering Alin Sculcuvant for us.”

    Alina Sculcuvant’s sleepy eyes were growing heavy in the freezing barn, blurred by the witch’s brew. She felt as if she were floating, and fairy arms were carrying her away into the forest. The herb potion, which she had just told herself was really honeydew, was hanging heavy in her blood, and her thoughts were already beginning to roam towards dreams.
    “Roma,” she whispered suddenly, rolling the word around her tongue, as if she was eating something tasty. Alina had been thinking of that woman of her dreams, with curling black hair, and the night before in the barn a name had come to her in her sleep. “Roma” was another word for Tsingani, the gypsies in the lands beyond the forest, and it seemed somehow fitting for a goblin or fairy mother. But Alina sighed. Roma wasn’t right, and the memories just wouldn’t come.
    A note came on the wind though that filled the snowy air. It was the song that often came down from the mountains, with the darkness of the Transylvanian night, the call of the wild wolf.
    Alina shivered, yet she felt her heart stir excitedly. So many times, as she laboured chopping wood, or sat with her crook in the fields watching over the bleating sheep, Alina had dreamt of climbing into the soaring mountains and hunting alone and free in the great valleys, or swimming in fresh rivers and bathing her face in new-fallen snow.
    Dreamt of going out, alone and unchallenged by the shepherds and their stupid, fighting children, or the stern rules of the murderous old couple, to whom Alina believed she owed her life. Unburdened of her own dark dreams. She often wondered if it was her mysterious changeling origins that made her think so much of going into the wild, like a real goblin, and she loved listening to wolf song.
    Alina yawned, as her huge hazel eyes closed, and immediately she was out there, running in her bare feet over grass and rock and stone. She felt like a wild animal herself, hunted by something she could neither see nor understand, and suddenly before her was the face she had seen more and more in her sleep. Not the face that came to drink a child’s blood—the vampire—but another face entirely. Its great yellow gold eyes looked back at her, with anger and hunger at first, but then softening to a strange, barely fathomable question. Eyes set above a row of sharp and shining teeth, in a muzzle of pure black.
    As she stared at the black wolf in her dream, Alina heard a sharp creaking from across the barn and opened her eyes again to the real world.
    “Who’s there?” she whispered, sitting up, and thinking nervously of the feeling she had had that morning. Over the years Alina had grown especially used to reacting quickly to sudden noises as she guarded the sheep on the mountain, and her eyes strained to see through the darkness.
    Suddenly a shape was rushing at Alina across the barn, but her beating heart calmed as soon as she saw what it was. Malduk’s black-and-white collie Elak came bounding towards her, and jumped up, covering Alina’s face in warm, wet licks. It made her feel wide awake again, and sent the girl into peels of delighted laughter.
    “Elak, stop it now,” she giggled, pushing him down