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The hart leads them far into the woods, fleeing through the trees while the hounds nip at its heels and the horses thunder behind, until the path is lost, lost, and familiar lands are no more than a memory, and then it runs still more. One by one the huntsmen and hounds fall away, until only the young lord pursues, on his weary, lathered horse, and then even that noble beast founders, crashing to the forest floor with an inhuman scream of pain, sending the young lord to the ground.
He does not break anything in the fall, but the horse is not so lucky; it twists and moans, ridden past the point of exhaustion, and now crippled besides. The cries of equine pain disorient the young lord further, after his own bruising fall, but finally he recovers his senses and turns to the dying beast. No doctor or bone-setter could save the creature now, and so the young lord draws his knife across his mount's throat, ending its agony.
In the sudden silence that follows, the blood soaks into the carpet of decaying leaves.
The young lord wipes his knife dry and puts it away, considering his own situation. His companions are lost, or rather he is lost; he does not know where his pursuit of the hart has taken him. Following his own tracks backward, he hopes to return to familiar lands; it should be easy, for a galloping horse leaves an unsubtle trail. But the forest's twilight murk deceives him, and soon he is further lost. He stumbles on blindly, fearing to stop, fearing what manner of creatures rustle and whisper in the shadows around him. He has no means for fire, and his bow broke when he fell. He would be an easy target for wild beasts -- were it wild beasts producing the sounds he hears.
On and on he goes, brambles reaching out to clutch his cloak, roots of trees rising unseen in the darkness to tangle his feet. The shadows mock his weakness. Exhaustion drags at him, as if it were he, not his horse, who had run for such a distance in pursuit of the hart, and he knows he cannot go on much longer.
Into his fog of disorientation, a voice comes -- singing high and pure, wordless, beautiful, perfect. The sound is a beacon, and he seeks it unknowing.
And then the woods open up, and the voice stops.
Before him is a grassy clearing, blessedly free of the brambles and roots and shadows that have plagued his progress thus far. Moonlight spills down into this open area, edging with silver the tower that stands there. The young lord thinks with trembling relief of fires and beds, a place for him to rest at last.
But from where he stands he sees only one high window, dark and cold and empty, and no sign of a door. He circles the tower on weary feet, praying that this place might be the haven he hoped, but finds nothing else; no windows, no doors, no hint of human presence. And the window he first saw is too far away to be reached.
So dismayed is he by this cruel jest, this taunting offer of safety and rest, that he cries out in pain. And to this, there is a response.
A maiden appears, moon-white and fragile, at the window's embrasure. After the trials the young lord has suffered, she seems to him a vision of perfection, and as far out of his reach as perfection itself. A tear slips down his face at the mere sight of her.
"Traveller," she says, "why do you cry out?"
"Lady," he replies, for surely a creature so lovely as this cannot be of lesser birth, "I am lost in this wood, lost beyond hope. My horse is dead, and I have strayed from my path; I followed the sound of singing, and found myself here. I hoped to find shelter in this tower, and so when I saw it had no door, my disappointment was such that I could not help but cry out."
The maiden looks down at him, head tilted to one side as she considers him. "Disappointment?"
"Lady," the young lord says, "your tower has no door. I would beg your hospitality, for I fear the creatures that haunt the shadows of the wood, but I do not see how I might enter."
"You are right to fear the creatures of the wood," the lady says. "But in the other matter, you are mistaken."
"Then your tower has a door? It is most cunningly hidden."
The maiden smiles faintly. "There is no door."
The young lord ponders this, struggling against his weariness in order to think. "A ladder, then."
"Nor ladder neither."
"Then, lady, I do not see how I might enter."
Her slender ivory hands rise to her neck; she reaches behind herself, into the impenetrable shadows of her tower room, and she brings forth her hair. The unbound tresses spill down the tower's side, a shining waterfall of purest silver that cascades from the high window all the way to the ground below.
"Here is your entrance," she says. "Come to me, and you need not fear the creatures of the wood."
To the young lord, this all seems like a trance, a dream, a thing which cannot possibly be real -- the maiden in the tower, the silver hair, the horrors that wait unseen beyond the forest's edge. And so he steps forward, as a man in a trance, and takes hold of the tresses, and climbs.
When he is halfway up, not yet to the window but a great distance from the ground, the strands begin to move.
For one frozen instant, he believes it is the wind, stirring the maiden's hair. But no breath of air disturbs the moonlight clearing, and a heartbeat later he cannot deny the truth. The silver strands are moving of their own accord.
They wrap about his wrists and arms, twining around his throat while the shadows hiss in malicious approval. He cries out again, this time in fear, and draws his dagger from its sheath, slashing at his bonds, heedless of the risk of falling; from the tower window above comes a shriek of furious, alien pain, and the dagger is wrenched from his hand. He is trapped, entangled, a helpless puppet, and the tresses of hair slide about his body like sinuous fingers, caressing, possessing. The strands around his throat tighten ever more as he is dragged upward, choking off his screams, sending blackness and spots of light dancing across his vision, and his final sight is of the inhumanly perfect face above him, waiting, hungering, ready to welcome him in.