Chapter 2 — The Weight of Knowing

By the time the sun had fully cleared the trees, Riley had walked half of Edgewood, and the walking had not helped.

She told herself it was ordinary — a leader checking on her people before a festival day. And it was ordinary, gloriously so: the baker's chimney already smoking, a pair of young wolves in human skin hauling trestle tables into the square while an old woman scolded them into straightening the legs, a boy chalking wolf-marks onto the cobbles for the evening's games. Two winters ago Edgewood had barred its doors against the pack. Now humans and wolves argued over table placement like in-laws. That was the peace she and Elias had bled for, and on a better morning the sight of it would have filled her up.

This was not a better morning. The dream sat in her like swallowed stone.

She had spent a long time not knowing how her father died. That had been its own kind of weight — the town's soft lie about his heart, the silence where an answer should be. But knowing was heavier, and no one had warned her of that. She knew now exactly what the cavern had been, and what he had gone there to do, and why he had gone alone. She had read it in his own hand: the answer he'd found and been too frightened to use, the circle he would not gather because gathering it meant trusting people with the danger. He had carried the whole world by himself and it had crushed him, and he had called that love.

Riley pressed her thumb to the crescent at her throat, cool and quiet under her hand, and made herself let it go.

"You're doing the thing," said a voice behind her.

She turned. Elias had come up the lane with the unhurried certainty he brought to everything, tall and broad and travel-worn even standing still, the old scar that ran from his brow to his cheekbone catching the light. His gray eyes moved over her face and read it the way he always did, too easily.

"What thing," she said.

"The thing where you carry the whole village around in your chest and call it a walk." He fell into step beside her. "You didn't sleep."

"I slept." She glanced at him. "I dreamed about him again. The cavern."

Elias didn't fill the quiet with comfort, which was one of the reasons she loved him. He just walked, letting her decide how much to say, and after a moment she found she wanted to say all of it.

"I keep thinking about how he went down there by himself," she said. "He knew a better way. He wrote it down. And he still went alone, because he couldn't stand to put anyone else at risk — and it killed him, and it didn't even save her." Her mother's face, half-remembered: a laugh, the smell of bread. Elara Thorn, taken by the forest a drop at a time while a whole village went on believing in a fever. "He had this idea that the only safe hands were his own. I used to think that was strong."

"And now?"

"Now I think it's the loneliest thing a person can believe." She stopped at the low wall at the square's edge and looked out at the tables, the chalk marks, the ordinary morning. "I'm not going to make it a habit the way he did. Whatever's coming — and something's coming, Elias, I felt it at dawn — I'm not meeting it the way he met his."

He was quiet a moment. Then he set his hand over hers on the wall, warm and rough, and did not tell her nothing was coming, because he had felt it too. That was the other reason.

"You won't have to," he said. "That's the whole point of the two of us. You know that."

She turned her hand under his so their fingers laced, and let herself have that — one small refusal of her father's loneliness, chosen on purpose. "I know," she said. "Remind me tonight, when the elders are being impossible."

"The elders are always impossible." A dry note. "It's practically the job."

That won a real breath of a laugh out of her, brief but true. Below them the square was filling — lanterns going up on their poles, a fiddler tuning against the cold, children shrieking through the half-built games. Tonight the village meant to celebrate a season of peace. Riley wanted, more than she could say, to believe they had earned an evening of it.

But her gaze kept drifting past the lanterns to the treeline, where the forest stood dense and green and wrong. Its light was steady this morning. It should not have felt like a held breath. It should not have felt like the days before her mother stopped rising from her bed — and it did, exactly, and Riley had learned to trust that feeling in her bones long before she'd had the words for it.

Silas Blackwood was out there somewhere. He had walked away from Edgewood alive, last season, with the whole of the Thorn history in his clever green-eyed head and a grudge her father had left him half-paid. She had known, even as they watched him go, that he was not the kind of man who went for good.

"He's not gone," she said quietly. "Silas. Whatever this is, I don't think we've seen the last of him."

Elias's jaw tightened, but he only nodded, and did not argue, and did not promise. "Then we'll be ready," he said. "Together. All of us this time — not the way your father did it."

"Not the way my father did it," she agreed, and squeezed his hand once, and turned back toward the square to help her people build a night of light against the dark she could feel gathering at the edge of the trees.