Veil of Betrayal (Part III)

Synopsis

Dawn comes thin and gold through the canopy, and for the first time Riley Thorn can remember, the forest does not greet her. It only watches. The bioluminescent veins under the bark stutter like a candle in a draft. The whispers she has read the way other people read weather now arrive in pieces — a word half-formed and swallowed, a rhythm reaching for its own shape and losing it. The pendant at her throat should warm to her. It stays a small dead weight, her father’s last gift gone strange against her skin. In Edgewood the fear has already found its shape. The town hall is too full and too warm, and under the churn of voices runs something worse than open anger: fear held quiet, looking for somewhere to land. Clara has seen marks burned into the trees at the wood’s edge — not carved, burned, as though something set them there from the inside. Harold calls it shadows and stories, and asks the room the question that has been waiting to be said out loud: if the forest is troubled, whose doing is that, and what have the wolves not seen fit to tell us? The doors bang open before he gets an answer. A scout, out of breath: figures at the wood’s edge, cloaked in red, eight of them or nine, in armor that does not look made so much as grown. At their head is a tall man whose smile arrives half a second before any warmth could have, and leaves before it. He gives his name as Silas Blackwood. He and his associates are travelers of a sort. They heard the forest here was troubled and thought they might lend their expertise — protection, freely offered, while Edgewood sets its house in order. In return, only passage. Only a chance to study the wood’s little peculiarities. His gaze drifts, unhurried, and rests a beat too long on the crescent pendant at Riley’s throat. That night Riley opens the study she has kept shut since the funeral and finds, behind a false panel under the desk, six volumes in her father’s dense and careful hand. Most of it is what she expects: measurements, observations, a man in love with a thing he means to understand. Then the notes change. In my desperation I sought out the ones they call the Crimson Hunters — mercenaries who trade in stolen magic, the last door left to a man with no doors. Their leader gave his name as Blackwood. Green-eyed, soft-voiced, patient as a spider. He promised me Elara’s life. The price was the forest. I refused him. God help me, I refused too late — because in the bargaining I told him too much. He knows now what our line is. He smiled when he understood it. I have handed our enemy the map to my own daughter, and I cannot take it back. The unrest in the trees was never the danger. It was the bait. And the man at the treeline has been waiting years for the girl who wears what Marcus Thorn carved for her. Book Three of the Midnight Heiress series.