The Toy Was Already There

Rain on the harvest festival in Daggerford, the one night a year the town fills with strangers. Widow Ashka plays her flute in the square while her daughter Petra dances barefoot. Balasar asks Sister Maren about two missing dragonborn, and learns a group of them stayed at her inn months ago asking about the house on the hill. Genji tracks the man who burned down his monastery to a stablehand's story: he went up to that house looking for riches and never came back.

Remi finds thirty-two burnt tally marks on the stable wall. Toby tells him what they count. His wife got out of the house once, with her lips sewn shut, and died thirty-two days ago. Lucy buys Petra a hand-carved wooden violinist from Bram the dollmaker, and Petra runs off to plan a thank-you present of her own.

Hours later Ashka is pounding on Lucy's door. Petra's gone, and Ashka is sure she climbed the hill to fetch Lucy a present from the house. Every window is lit. Corpses crawl out of the weeds. Inside, the front door locks behind them, and a warning in blood says there's a beast beneath the house. Dinner is steaming for eight and nobody has touched it. And in the den, on the toy shelf, sits the same wooden violinist Lucy bought that evening. Genji picks it up, and the stuffed wolves climb down off their mounts.