Chapter 3 — Uneasy Omens

Elias had spent his whole life learning to read the wood, and by midday he understood that for the first time it was not only speaking to him and Riley. It was speaking to everyone.

He'd walked the treeline after they parted, the way he did most days, and the signs were laid out plain as tracks in snow for anyone who knew to look. Birds broke from the canopy in panicked spirals and would not settle. A doe stood at the edge of the frost-killed grass, trembling, staring back into the trees as though something had called her name in a voice she half wanted to answer. The veins in the roots pulsed and failed, pulsed and failed. And under all of it lay that long, low, exhausted note Riley had named at dawn, threading up through the soles of his boots and into his teeth.

He was pack leader; his instinct was to put himself between his people and the trees. But you could not stand between a village and the ground it slept on.

A rustle in the brush brought his hand to his blade out of habit, and then old Harlen came shuffling out of the undergrowth under a great bundle of kindling, and Elias let the tension go.

"Morning, Harlen. You're far out for a cold day."

"No rest for these bones." The old man straightened with a grunt, and Elias saw that his eyes were red-rimmed and hollow. "Truth is, I don't much like sleeping, of late." He hesitated, then said it the way men his age said things they were ashamed to say. "The dreams, Elias. Every night this week. I'm walking out into the trees, deep as I've ever gone, and I can't stop my own feet, and there's a — a pulling. Like the wood wants me in it. Like it's lonesome for company." He shook his head. "Old fool's fancy. Don't mind me."

But Elias's stomach had gone cold. "You're not the only one," he said, keeping his voice level. "You did right to tell me. Stay close to the village, Harlen. Sleep with your shutters barred if it helps, and if the pulling gets worse, you come to me or to Riley. Any hour. Understand?"

Harlen nodded, some of the fear easing out of his shoulders just for being heard, and shuffled off toward home. Elias watched him go and thought: it has never reached this far before. The Shadow Spirit had wanted vessels; the Eclipse had wanted a life at the stone; even the Veilborn had struck at the ones who came looking for it. This was different. This was the wood reaching out to every mind within its shadow at once, not to take, but — if he'd read the old man's dream right — to call. As though it wanted all of them to come in and see something. As though it had grown too tired to keep its secret one more winter.

He turned back toward the square with that thought sitting heavy in him, and nearly walked into the next one.

A boy stood at the edge of the cobbles, no more than eight, rigid as a fence post, his small face turned toward the trees and gone slack and empty. Elias knew him — Clara the healer's son, a bright quick child who was never still, and who was, right now, more still than any living thing should be.

"Hey, now." Elias crouched to the boy's height, gentling his voice the way he would with a spooked pup. "What are you doing out here on your own?"

The boy's head turned, slow, and his eyes when they met Elias's were wrong — too dark, too deep, looking through him at something a long way off. When he spoke, the voice that came out was his own child's voice shaped around words that were not a child's at all.

"It's waking," the boy said. "The last time. It's so tired." A pause, and something almost like longing crossed the small blank face. "It wants to go home."

The cold in Elias went straight to the bone. "Home," he repeated softly. "Where's home, lad?"

"Down," the boy breathed. "Under everything. Where it was, before they put the stone on it." His small brow creased, as if the words hurt. "It just wants to go back down and sleep. And they won't let it. They never let it."

Then he blinked, and the depth went out of his eyes all at once, and he was only a cold and frightened little boy standing too near the trees. He looked up at Elias and his lip wobbled. "I don't — I want my mum," he said, and started to cry, ordinary child's tears, and Elias gathered him up and carried him back toward the warm heart of the village with his own pulse loud in his ears.

He was halfway across the square, murmuring nonsense comfort to the boy, when he caught the look Alaric gave him from across the well.

Alaric stood with two of his own — a wolf and a human, both wearing the particular hard set of face that had been spreading through a certain quarter of the pack all season. His amber eyes went from the weeping child to the trembling trees to Elias, and Elias could read the whole thought crossing them plainly enough: another sign, another omen, and whose doing is it. Silver threaded Alaric's dark hair; he was not a young man, and grief had aged him past his years, and Elias had known him long enough to know that under the anger the man carried was a wound that had never once closed. It did not make him less dangerous. It made him more.

Alaric didn't come over. He only held Elias's gaze a moment longer, then turned and said something low to the two beside him, and they went with him toward the hall, and the very set of their backs said this will be spoken of.

Elias let out a slow breath. He'd felt this before — the pack's unity thinning at the edges, hairline cracks running out from the place where fear pooled. It had frightened him then and it frightened him now, because he had learned that the dark outside the walls was only ever half the danger. The other half was what fear did to the people inside them.

Clara came hurrying across the square, drawn by her son's crying, and Elias put the boy gently into her arms and did not tell her, yet, what the child had said in a voice that wasn't his. Time enough for that. He looked past her to the far side of the square, where Riley had just come out of the study with a smudge of old dust on her cheek and her father's papers under her arm, and something in his chest settled at the sight of her, the way it always did.

Whatever was waking under the wood, they would not be the ones surprised by it. Not this time. He crossed the square to meet her, and the forest breathed behind him, long and slow and tired, like a thing waiting to be understood at last.