Chapter 1 — Echoes of the Past

The dream came back the night the forest changed its song, and Riley knew both at once for what they were — not a nightmare and not weather, but a summons.

She was small again in it, or felt small, standing at the edge of a moonlit clearing while her father knelt at its center over a circle of carved and glowing symbols. Marcus Thorn's dark hair was streaked with gray and wild about his face, his usually steady hands trembling as he poured a thread of silver light into the grooves at his knees. She knew this clearing now. She knew what the symbols were, and what he was doing at them, and how it ended — she had spent a whole hard year learning it, drop by terrible drop. That was the cruelty of the dream. It let her stand there understanding everything and still unable to move.

"Dad," she said. "Don't. You don't have to do it alone."

He looked up, and his hazel eyes — her eyes, the same flecked green and gold — found hers across the light, and they were full of a sorrow so old it had worn smooth. "To break the chain," he said gently, "a sacrifice must be made." It was the thing he had believed to the end. It was the thing that had killed him. "I'm doing this for you, Riley. There's no other way."

"There was another way," she told him, the way she always told him now, too late, every time. "You wrote it down yourself. You just wouldn't trust anyone to help you carry it."

But the dream never heard her. It never had. Marcus set one hand flat against his own chest and the other above the burning grooves, and the light rose to swallow him, and in it Riley saw the shapes she had seen every time since childhood — long serpentine forms with hollow, glowing eyes, coiling up out of the earth to meet him. Only now she had names for them, or almost. She knew they were not the thing itself but the reaching of it, fingers of a vast dark testing the lock her family had spent generations feeding.

"Remember," her father said, as the light took him. "You must finish what I couldn't."

And then, as it always did, the clearing went black, and out of the black a voice came that was his and not his, closer than her own skin. Not a plea this time. A warning. Riley.

She woke with her heart slamming and the grey of morning at the edges of the curtains.

For a long moment she only lay still and breathed, one hand pressed to the crescent-moon pendant at her throat. It was warm under her palm, the steady living warmth it had carried since the night at Mistfall, since the Veilborn was sealed and the forest let go of its fear. That warmth had been a comfort for a season. This morning it felt like something holding its breath.

The dream she could account for. She dreamed of her father often; grief did not keep tidy hours. What she could not account for was the sound.

She rose and crossed to the window and pushed the curtain aside, and Edgewood lay below her in the mist exactly as it should — smoke unspooling from chimneys, the new meeting hall pale against the dawn, the young oak in the square a smudge of green. It was the forest beyond the rooftops that was wrong. All year, since Silas closed the breach with the last of himself, the veins of light that threaded the trees had glowed a slow, steady, healing green, and the whispers that rode the wood had softened to something almost kind. Now the light stuttered — flared and guttered, flared and guttered, like a heart that had forgotten its own rhythm — and under it the whispers had changed again.

Riley stood very still and listened, because she had learned, over five hard seasons, to read the forest the way other people read weather.

These were not the frightened whispers of the years when the cage was failing. They were not the pleading, fragmented cries of a wood in pain. They were something she had never heard from the forest in her life, and it took her a moment to name it, and when she did the cold went all the way through her.

The forest sounded tired. It sounded like a voice that had been holding one long note for a thousand years and had finally, quietly, begun to let it go.

"Not yet," she whispered, though she couldn't have said to what. "Not so soon."

She had known this was coming. She had said as much to Elias on a hilltop months ago, with her hand on a sealed stone and the whole village waking below them — that the Veilborn had been only one face of it, that beneath the Eclipse and beneath the Veilborn and beneath every horror they had ever faced lay the thing all those faces rose from, older than the forest, older than the cage. She had felt it turn over once in its ancient sleep and settle. Someday it wakes for the last time, she had told him, and I don't yet know what it'll cost to face it. She had said it out loud precisely so she would not be carrying it alone when the day came.

She had simply not expected the day to come so soon, or to announce itself so gently.

Her gaze went, as it had gone a hundred times this season and always flinched away, to the small locked chest at the foot of her bed. Inside it, wrapped in oilcloth, lay the last of her father's papers — and folded among them, the smallest journal of all, the one not written in his hand. She had known whose it was the moment Lila pressed it into her palm at Mistfall. Your mother's, Lila had said, gentle as she ever got. It was tucked inside his. I think he meant you to have it, when you were ready.

Riley had not opened it. For a season she had told herself she was letting the grief settle first, and for a season that had even been true. But she knew the shape of a coward's reason when she was living inside one. Her father had written, near the end, that if it ever came to her to face the deepest of this she would need her mother's inheritance as much as his — some knowing older than his own, carried in Elara's line. Riley had not wanted the deepest of this to come. So she had left the journal shut, as if a thing not read could not be true.

Out in the wood, the light shuddered and the tired whisper rose and fell.

"All right," she said to the empty room, to her father, to the forest, to the woman under the oak whose face she barely remembered. "All right. I hear it."

She dressed quickly and fastened the pendant at her throat and did not, quite, take the journal from the chest — one impossible thing at a time — but she stood over it a moment with her hand on the lid, a promise she wasn't ready to keep in words. Then she pulled on her boots and went out into the cold to find Elias, because whatever was waking under the forest, she had made herself a vow after her father died and kept it through five seasons of dark: she would not walk toward it alone.

The village was quiet as she moved through it, neighbors nodding her a good morning, none of them yet feeling the change in the air the way she felt it in her teeth. Let them have the morning, she thought. There would be time enough, and too soon, to tell them the rest.