Whispers of the Past (Part V)

Synopsis

The forest has been silent for three nights, and Riley Thorn has not slept properly since. It is not the quiet of a wood at rest. It is the quiet of something holding still because it is afraid. Edgewood feels it before anyone can name it. Doors that used to stand open are shut at supper hour. The veins of light in the bark flicker and gutter in no rhythm at all, and each time they go dark the cold presses a little closer to the village. Even the wolves have gone stiff and uncertain in their human skins, as though a thread that always tied them to the forest’s magic has begun to fray in their hands. And Clara’s son, who is not yet seven and has not slept in a week, says the shadows have started asking for him by name. Riley knows her father’s journals now. She has used most of what he left her — the circle, the shared way, the lock of living balance that ended the cycle of blood. But there are pages she passed over because they frightened her even in victory, where his careful hand goes cramped and hurried and he writes about something he calls only the Veilborn. Not the dark the forest cages, he insists, but a wound in the cage itself: cut there long ago by someone who reached in to take a piece of that dark for a weapon, failed as anyone must, and left a breach with a hunger of its own. The one man alive who might know where that reaching began is sitting in a cell under the Eldertree Bastion — gaunt, stripped of every scrap of stolen power, and entirely unsurprised that she has finally come down the stairs to see him. He has an offer. It is a good one. That is precisely the problem. Outside the walls the village is looking for someone to hold responsible, and inside the pack a challenge that has been circling Elias since the cycle ended is about to stop circling. Book Five of the Midnight Heiress series.