Dust swirled in the thin slant of afternoon light that fell through the cracked window of Grandmother Lisel's cottage. The glass was old, warped in places so that the world beyond bent slightly at the edges, a trick of the light that Evangeline Moss had stopped noticing years ago. Today she noticed. Today every warped edge seemed deliberate.
She stood just inside the doorway, her hand still on the iron latch, listening to the cottage breathe. It had always breathed, of course. Old timber houses did that, settling and popping in the heat. But she had not set foot inside this threshold in nearly a year, and the sound was strange to her now, almost like a tongue clicking against the roof of a mouth.
The latch clicked shut behind her.
Inside, the air held the particular stillness of a room that had been left alone too long. Dried lavender, a memory of pipe smoke, dust. Beneath those familiar scents lay something colder, something with weight, as if the room itself had been holding a breath and had only just remembered to let it go. A spider had spun a pale curtain across the corner of the mantle, fine as a whisper and just as easy to disturb.
Evangeline crossed the room in three careful strides. Her boots found the familiar creak in the floorboard by the cold hearth, and she paused there, one hand resting on the back of the wooden settle. The settle had been her grandfather's, and her grandmother had refused to let anyone move it after he passed, which was fourteen years ago now. Evangeline could still remember him sitting there on winter evenings, reading by lamplight, his great knuckled hands turning the pages with the patience of a man who had outlasted most of his sorrows.
The thought made her throat tighten, so she set it aside.
She had not come for memory. She had come for answers.
The packing had been her mother's doing, of course. From the city, hours away by rail and then by cart, a letter had arrived with the neat, impatient hand of a woman who could not understand why her daughter delayed. The letter had said, Empty the cottage, dear. The solicitor cannot hold the deed forever. There are papers that need signing and a roof that needs mending for the next tenant. It had not said, Your grandmother has been gone eight months and there is nothing left of her here that can hurt you. It had been kind enough to leave that unsaid.
Evangeline had read the letter twice, set it on the kitchen table, and walked out into the woods behind her grandmother's house without quite deciding to. She had walked until the trees thinned and the ground turned soft beneath her boots, and then she had stood there, listening to nothing, until the light began to fail.
Now she was here. The light was different, but the cottage was the same.
She moved through the sitting room first. There was the loom in the corner, its shuttle still threaded with half-woven cloth the color of moss and bone. There was the case of pinned butterflies behind glass, their wings faded to ghosts of their original blues and coppers. There was the shelf of jars along the east wall, the lids furred with dust, the contents still recognizable: dried elderflower, yarrow, comfrey, a single black-glass bottle with a stopper of red wax.
She touched nothing. She had the unsettling sense that the room was being touched by her, that every surface registered the fact of her palm passing near it, that the dust itself held some memory of her grandmother's movements and was now adding hers to the record.
The ledger on the writing desk caught her eye.
It lay open at the center of the desk, as if Grandmother Lisel had stepped away only moments ago and meant to return. The page was crowded with her grandmother's small, meticulous handwriting, every letter formed with the careful pressure of someone who knew the cost of a smudged line. Evangeline's grandmother had been a scholar of small things, of marginalia, of footnotes. She had been the kind of woman who corrected a typesetter with a polite smile and a ruler.
Evangeline did not touch the ledger. Not yet. Instead she moved to the window and unlatched it, letting in a thread of cooler air. The village was out there somewhere, half a mile down the lane, smoke rising from three chimneys. She could hear, very faintly, the rhythmic clang of a farrier's hammer.
She turned back to the room.
There was a door she had not opened in a year. It stood to the left of the fireplace, half-hidden behind a faded screen of painted silk. The screen showed a heron standing in reeds; the paint had cracked along the heron's neck, splitting the long beak into two unequal halves. She had loved that screen as a child, had run her finger along the heron's eye and felt the grain of the silk beneath.
She had not opened the door beyond it since the morning her grandmother had disappeared.
Evangeline crossed the room and pulled the screen aside.
The door was already ajar.
She pushed it open with the back of her hand. Beyond was a narrow room, perhaps eight feet across, with a single window set high in the wall. The window had been shuttered for years, but a slat had slipped and a pale bar of light fell across a stack of wooden boxes, illuminating the grain of the wood and the thin layer of something that might have been ash.
Her grandmother's study. The room where the work had been done.
The boxes held tools, Evangeline knew. Calipers and rulers, quills and ink pots, a brass compass that had once belonged to her grandfather and then to her grandmother, and now, presumably, would belong to no one. There were rolls of paper tied with ribbon, and smaller cases of pigments that smelled faintly of rust when the air shifted.
But it was not the boxes that drew her eye.
It was the notebook on the desk.
The notebook was small, no bigger than her spread hand, bound in dark leather that had gone nearly black with age. The cover was unmarked. The clasp was a simple hook of tarnished brass that fitted into an eye of the same metal. There was no title, no name, nothing to suggest what the book contained.
Evangeline picked it up.
It was heavier than it looked. The leather was cool against her palm, and the clasp gave way at her touch with a faint click, almost polite.
Inside, the first page read:
The seventh of October, in the year of our departure.
Evangeline almost smiled. Her grandmother had always dated her journals in peculiar ways, as if every notebook were a small country with its own calendar. She turned the page.
I begin again. The grove is restless. The warden has come three nights now, and I have given him what comfort I can, which is little enough. Maren says I am too soft with the thing. Maren has always believed in fewer kindnesses than I.
Evangeline's hand tightened on the page.
Maren. That was her mother's name, but also the name of someone her grandmother had spoken of in the same breath as the Embergrove Pact, a name Evangeline had only ever heard in fragments, half-caught at doorways when the conversation stopped the moment Evangeline entered. Her mother. The Maren who had left. The Maren who had refused the pact when it was offered, who had married a city man and never spoken of the grove again.
Her grandmother had written of her in a journal that was not the official ledger. In a journal that had been hidden, or at least not displayed.
Evangeline read on.
The grove will not wait for me to be ready. The warden has begun to mark the boundary stones with a kind of ash that resists the rain. I have collected samples, but they crumble when I try to study them. Maren would know what to do. Maren always knew. But Maren is in the city with her husband and her bright, brittle daughter, and I cannot ask her to come back to this.
Evangine's breath caught.
Bright, brittle daughter. Her grandmother had never used those words aloud. She had always spoken of Evangeline with a kind of careful pride, as if Evangeline were a glass she did not trust herself to lift.
She turned the page.
The handwriting shifted. Where before it had been careful, almost prentice, now it was looser, the letters leaning forward as if hurrying toward something. The ink was darker. The date at the top of the page read The eighth of October, in the year of our departure, and beneath it:
The cipher has changed twice since I last set down my pen. I do not know who is rewriting it. I do not know whether the rewriting is happening on the page or in my hand. I have tried to copy the symbols exactly as they appear, but when I look away, the shapes have moved. I have marked them in the margin with the names I think they answer to.
Evangeline stared.
The margin was crowded with small drawings. They were not quite letters. They were not quite anything she recognized. Some of them resembled the runes carved on boundary stones she had passed as a child, stones she had always been told not to touch. Others looked more like the marks she had seen her grandmother make in the dirt with a stick while listening to the wind, marks that vanished by morning.
She turned another page.
The handwriting had changed again.
It was her grandmother's, but it was her grandmother's as Evangeline had never seen it, jagged and uncertain, the letters breaking apart as if the hand that formed them were being shaken. The ink had been wet when the words were written. There were smudges. There were places where the nib had pressed too hard and torn the paper.
The cipher moves when I am not looking. It moves when I close my eyes. It moves when I open them again. I think it is trying to tell me something. I think it has been trying to tell me something for a very long time, and I have been too slow to hear it. Maren would have heard it. Maren would have listened. But Maren is not here, and I am afraid.
Evangeline turned the page.
The page was blank.
She turned the next. Blank. The next. Blank.
The notebook stopped there, as if the story had been interrupted mid-sentence. The clasp of the brass hook clicked faintly in the stillness, almost like a tongue clicking against the roof of a mouth, and Evangeline realized she had been holding her breath.
She let it out slowly.
She set the notebook on the desk. She did not close it. She watched the page, and the page did not change, and yet she had the distinct, prickling sensation that something on it had shifted when she looked away.
She turned back to the first page, to the entry about Maren, and she read it again, and the words were the same, and yet they were not quite the same. The letter M at the start of Maren's name was a fraction taller than it had been. The period at the end of the sentence sat slightly to the left.
She looked up.
The bar of light from the high window had not moved. The dust had not settled. The air in the room was exactly as still as it had been a moment ago.
And yet something had changed.
Evangeline closed the notebook and held it in both hands. The leather was warm now, as if it had been resting in sunlight, though no sunlight had touched it.
She thought of her grandmother's careful pride. Her grandmother's measured voice. Her grandmother's habit of saying some things are not for the telling whenever Evangeline had asked about the grove, about the warden, about the small, strange ceremonies her grandmother performed at the equinoxes and solstices, the ceremonies Evangeline had been forbidden to attend.
She thought of the letter from the city, neat and impatient.
She thought of the heron's split beak on the painted silk.
She opened the notebook again.
The cipher in the margin had rearranged itself. Three of the symbols had moved. One of them had split into two, as if a single mark had given birth.
Evangeline sat down on the edge of the desk, the brass clasp pressing into her palm, and she began to read the cipher as best she could, copying what she could decipher into the back of the notebook with a pencil she found in a cup on the desk. The pencil was her grandmother's. It was still sharp.
The first symbol, she thought, might mean name. The second might mean given. The third was new. She did not know what the third meant. She only knew that when she copied it, her hand felt strange, as if someone were guiding it.
She copied another. And another. The afternoon light moved slowly across the floor of the study, and the cottage breathed around her, and the cipher moved when she looked away.
When she looked back, the page had changed again.
She did not close the notebook. She sat very still, listening to her own pulse, and she waited for the page to finish telling her what it had to say.
Outside, the farrier's hammer had gone quiet. The lane was empty. The smoke from the three chimneys had thinned to pale threads against the sky, and the slat of light from the high window had crept across the desk until it fell across the open page, illuminating the cipher that was not quite a cipher, the handwriting that was not quite her grandmother's, the words that were not quite words at all.
Evangeline read them.
The cottage answered with a sound she had not heard before, a long, low exhalation through the chimney, as if the walls had been holding their breath for a hundred years and had only now found the throat to let it go. Smoke drifted down into the study in pale ribbons and then dissolved, leaving behind the scent of cold hearth ash and something older, something that smelled like river water at dusk and the underside of stones.
Evangeline did not move. She watched the last line of symbols on the page arrange themselves into a pattern she could almost read. Her grandmother's pencil was warm between her fingers.
She was still watching when the knock came.
It was not a polite knock. It was the knock of someone who had walked a long way in a short time, three hard strikes against the wood of the front door, spaced so close together they almost sounded like one.
Evangeline rose from the desk. The notebook stayed where it was, open to the page that would not stop writing itself.
She crossed the hall with the lamplight following her, and she saw through the small glass pane beside the door the silhouette of a woman with a satchel across her chest and her hair tied back in a knot that had come half undone. The woman was breathing hard. Her shoulders rose and fell.
Evangeline opened the door.
Wren Halloway stood on the step with bracken caught in the hem of her coat and a smear of peat on her jaw. She looked at Evangeline the way a dog looks at a door it has been circling for an hour, with relief and impatience tangled together so tightly they were hard to tell apart.
You took your time, Wren said. I have been knocking at the lane gate for twenty minutes and shouting your name until the crows started screaming back.
Evangeline did not point out that she had not heard any of it. She stepped aside and let Wren in.
Wren came through the door with the particular grace of someone who knew exactly how much space she took up and had decided it was the right amount. She dropped her satchel onto the bench in the hall, pulled a leaf from her collar, and looked up at the staircase and then at the kitchen and then at the door to the study, which stood ajar with the lamp inside it throwing a long, warm blade of light across the floorboards.
So this is it, Wren said. She was not asking. She was confirming something she had already decided.
This is it, Evangeline said.
Wren crossed the hall in three strides and pushed the study door open the rest of the way. She stood in the doorway and looked at the notebook on the desk, and at the cipher on the page, and at the slat of light that had crept across the desk and lay now across the open journal like a finger pointing.
She did not speak for a long time.
Then she said, in a voice that had lost some of its edge, It has started.
It has, Evangeline said.
Wren turned from the desk and faced her, and there was something in her expression that Evangeline could not quite read. Not fear, exactly. Something more careful than fear. Something that looked like a person making sure the floor was still there before they trusted their weight to it.
You got my message, Wren said. About Aldermere. About the fever.
I got it, Evangeline said.
Wren nodded. She did not ask why Evangeline had not answered. She did not need to. The answer was standing in the room around them, in the lamp, in the chimney, in the notebook that would not stay still.
I should have come sooner, Wren said. I meant to. I had the road mapped out twice. Then the moss bridge on the east side of the Embergrove went bad, and the ford at Thornwick rose half a foot overnight, and my mother had one of her turns, the kind where she does not know my name for three days and then she does and cries about it, and I had to wait. I am telling you this so you understand I am not careless. I am telling you this so you do not think I forgot.
I never thought you forgot, Evangeline said.
Wren looked at her for a moment. Then she pulled the satchel up from the bench, brought it into the study, and set it on the corner of the desk with the kind of deliberateness that meant she wanted to see what was on the page while she was near it.
She unhooked the clasp. Inside were bundles of dried herbs tied with twine, a small clay pot sealed with wax, a roll of bandage cloth, a bone comb, a tin of rendered fat, and a sheaf of pressed flowers bound with a red thread. Beneath all of it, wrapped in a square of oiled canvas, was a bundle of stems that smelled, when she peeled back the canvas, of green stems and cut grass and something almost like rain.
Willow, Wren said. Meadowsweet. A little valerian, because the children in the village have not been sleeping, and a little yarrow, because the men who work the south quarry have been bleeding from small cuts in a way that does not stop. She paused. There is comigane too. I brought it because I thought you might need it and I did not want you to have to find it yourself.
Evangeline did not reach for the bundle. She stood where she was, with her back against the doorframe and her hands at her sides.
How did you know I was here, she said.
Wren glanced at her. The question, in Wren's grammar, was the wrong shape. It should have been phrased differently, with more context, with a different verb. Wren heard the shape of it anyway.
I had a dream, Wren said. She said it the way one says I had a cold, or I had a coin in my shoe, flatly and without ceremony. Two nights ago. I dreamt of a cottage with three chimneys and a slat of light in a high window and a woman at a desk who was not yet a woman and who was reading a book that was writing itself. I woke up and I packed my bag. I have been walking since the small hours of yesterday.
She looked at the desk.
It is a useful dream, she said, in a voice that was trying very hard to be dry and was not quite managing it.
Evangeline looked at the notebook. The cipher had moved again while Wren was speaking. The pattern she had almost read had rearranged itself into something she did not recognize at all, but which her hand, she thought, if she were to pick up the pencil, would know how to write.
Why did you come, she said.
Wren looked at her. The peat smear on her jaw had not moved. Her hair had come further out of its knot. Her eyes were the color of wet bark, and they did not blink.
Because you are my friend, Wren said, and because you are the only person in this county who has ever trusted me with a thing she did not understand, and because I have spent the last year walking the edges of the Embergrove with my mother in one hand and a sick village in the other and I have come to the conclusion that there is no use pretending the world is the kind of place where we get to wait until we are ready. She stopped. Then she added, in a different tone, the one she used when she wanted to be honest and knew honesty would sting, Also because I am out of yarrow and the apothecary in Aldermere will not speak to me since the fever business and I had to come somewhere.
Evangeline made a sound that was almost a laugh.
Wren looked pleased with herself for a moment, then she looked back at the notebook.
Tell me what it says, she said.
Evangeline crossed to the desk. She picked up the pencil, which was warm again, and she stood over the page, and she did not write, but she looked.
The first symbol, she said, I think it means name.
Wren came and stood beside her. She smelled of the forest floor, of woodsmoke, of the long walk.
The second, Evangeline said, I think it means given. As in, a name given to something. Or to someone.
And the third? Wren said.
Evangeline did not answer. She looked at the third symbol, which had been one symbol when she first sat down and was now three, arranged in a tight column at the right edge of the cipher like a sentence that had been waiting for someone to read it aloud.
I do not know, she said.
Wren was quiet for a moment.
I do not like not knowing, she said.
Nobody does, Evangeline said.
Wren looked at her, and there was a flicker at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile but was the shape a smile would take if it were being very careful.
You have changed, Wren said. You have not been here a day and you have already changed. Your voice is in a different place than it was when you left.
I have not changed, Evangeline said. I have only just arrived.
That is what I mean, Wren said.
She turned back to the desk and began to unpack her satchel properly, laying the bundles of herbs out on the corner of the desk with the care of a woman setting a table, and the smell of them rose into the warm air of the study and joined the smell of the hearth and the river-stone scent that the cottage gave off when it breathed.
Wren's hands were quick. Her fingers knew the bundles by touch. She untied the twine around the willow bark and felt the stem with her thumbnail and made a small sound of approval or disapproval, Evangeline could not tell which.
When she had laid out the herbs, she took the clay pot and unsealed it and sniffed at it and resealed it and put it aside. She unwrapped the bandage cloth and folded it into a square. She ran the bone comb through a lock of her own hair that had come loose from the knot, twice, three times, and then she tucked the lock back behind her ear and looked at Evangeline.
There is a thing I have to tell you, Wren said, and I would rather tell you now while the page is not looking.
Evangeline waited.
Wren sat down on the edge of the desk, in the same place Evangeline had sat an hour before. The brass clasp of the notebook pressed into the heel of her palm. She did not seem to notice.
When I came down from the ridge yesterday, she said, I stopped at the Standing Stone meadow because the light was going and I wanted to see if the rowan had taken. The rowan I planted there last autumn, for my father. The light was almost gone. I stood there, and I heard the stone speak.
She said the word speak as if she had considered using a different one and rejected it.
Not in words, she said. In a sound. A sound like a door being opened very slowly in a house that has been shut for a long time. It came from the base of the stone, where the roots are. It said one word, in the old way, in the way the stones speak when they speak at all. It said your name.
Evangeline felt the room tilt, very slightly, and then steady itself.
My name, she said.
Your name, Wren said. She did not look away. She did not blink. She said it twice, in the old way, once when the stone was speaking and once in her own voice now, and the second time was no different from the first, because Wren's voice, when she was being exact, had the cadence of a thing that had been rehearsed a long time.
Evangeline sat down on the stool by the hearth.
Wren looked at her from the desk.
The cottage, Wren said, has been waiting.
The word waiting sat in the room for a moment before it settled.
For me, Evangeline said.
Wren nodded.
How long, Evangeline said.
Wren looked at the notebook. She looked at the page. She looked at the cipher that was still moving, very slowly, the way a tide moves, in the corner of her vision.
A hundred years, Wren said. Give or take the years your grandmother held it in trust.
The lamp on the desk gave a small, soft pop, like a knuckle cracking. The slat of light from the high window had moved another inch across the floor. The cottage breathed.
Outside, the farrier's hammer had not resumed. The lane was still empty. The smoke from the three chimneys had begun, very faintly, to thicken again, as if the fire in the kitchen had been fed while neither of them was looking.
Wren was watching her. Wren was watching her the way she had watched her when they were children and Evangeline had said something true and unexpected and Wren had not yet decided whether to laugh or to be afraid.
You do not have to decide anything now, Wren said. I only came because I thought you should know. And because I had nowhere else to put my yarrow.
Evangeline looked at her. She looked at the bundles of herbs on the corner of the desk. She looked at the notebook, which had stopped moving while Wren was speaking, and which was still now, with the cipher on the page held in place as if by a hand laid over it.
Thank you, she said.
Wren shrugged. The shrug said, do not, and also said, you are welcome, and also said, we will see about this later.
Evangeline stood up from the stool. She went to the desk. She picked up the pencil.
She did not write anything. She only held it, the way one holds a thing one is not yet ready to set down.
Outside, a wind came up the lane from the east, from the direction of the Embergrove, and it carried with it the smell of the forest at the hour when the day gives up, and the cottage took a breath, and the lamp steadied, and the page waited.
The pencil turned once between her fingers, the graphite catching the lamplight in a small grey flash, and then Evangeline set it down.
She did not set it down on the desk. She set it down on the notebook, across the cipher, the way a finger laid across the lips of a sleeping child. A small ritual she had invented for herself without knowing why.
The cottage ticked. The clock on the shelf had resumed, its second hand swinging in its small brass arc. The rain outside had stopped, or perhaps only thinned to a mist so fine it had become indistinguishable from the air. Through the window the lane was a darker grey than the sky, and the farrier's chimney had gone out, and the ash-tree in the gap had not moved.
Wren was watching the drawer.
The drawer under the cipher, the one that had opened on its own a few minutes ago, was open still. The ring of dried rowan berries lay in it like a small crown set down in haste. The map was under the berries, half visible, the parchment yellowed and the ink the colour of old tea. The blood-type seal was in the corner, a circle within a circle within a circle, with a single letter at its centre that Evangeline could not read from where she stood but knew, without looking, was an M.
For Moss.
Wren had not moved toward it. Wren had not moved at all since the drawer had opened. She stood with her hands at her sides and her shoulders drawn up a fraction, the way a person stands when they are listening to something they cannot quite hear.
That was the seal, Wren said. She did not point.
Yes, Evangeline said.
It is the one she used. On the maps she made for the council, before. Wren paused. I only saw it twice. Once on a map my father borrowed, and once on a deed that came to the village in the year I was twelve.
Evangeline looked at the drawer. She did not move toward it. She was aware of the notebook under the pencil, of the weight of it through the wood of the pencil, and she did not move toward the drawer because she understood, in the way one understands a thing one has been told many times as a child, that some things must be asked for before they can be touched.
She thought of the journal entry. The blood-type seal. The map marked with it. The rowan ring, which was a ward, which was a key, which was a permission.
She thought of her grandmother.
The lamp steadied. The clock ticked. The wind from the Embergrove died, and the ash-tree by the gate was still.
Then she went to the drawer.
She did not reach in. She stood over it, the way she had stood over the notebook, and she let her hand hover a moment above the rowan berries. The smell of them came up to her: dry, faintly bitter, faintly sweet, the smell of late autumn and of the rituals her grandmother had taught her without calling them rituals. Wreaths for the kitchen door. Posies for the threshold on the quarter-turn of the year. A single berry placed, when one was small and frightened, into the palm of the hand and told to hold it and not to drop it.
The berries did not move. The map under them was still.
She picked up the ring.
It was lighter than she had expected. The berries were strung on a thread of waxed flax, knotted three times at the join, the way a sailor's knot is knotted when the binding must hold. The knot was old. The flax was dark with handling. The berries themselves were small and hard and the colour of dried blood, and they clicked against each other faintly when she turned the ring in her fingers.
Under the ring, the map.
She did not pick up the map yet. She set the ring on the desk, beside the notebook, and she stood looking at the parchment. It was folded twice. The creases were dark with age. The ink along the fold had flaked in places, and where it had flaked the parchment was almost translucent, and she could see, very faintly, the grain of the desk beneath it.
The blood-type seal was in the lower right corner. It was the size of a thumbnail. The outermost circle was a thin, unbroken line. The middle circle was broken in two places, at the north and the south, the way a road is broken on a map to indicate a ford or a gate. The innermost circle was whole. The letter at its centre was the M, done in the old script, with two peaks like the humps of a small, lacing animal.
She put her hand on the map.
The cottage took a breath.
It was not the breath of the room. It was deeper than that, and slower, the way the earth breathes in spring when the frost is going out of it. The lamp flame leaned. The clock hand paused on the tick. The air in the room thickened for an instant, the way air thickens before a storm, and then thinned again, and the lamp steadied, and the clock ticked on.
The map unfolded under her hand.
Not violently. Not the way the drawer had rattled open. Slowly, with a small dry sound like a leaf uncurling, the first fold gave way, and the parchment lay flat on the desk beside the notebook, and the drawing on it was visible.
It was a map of the Embergrove.
Evangeline had seen maps of the Embergrove. She had drawn one herself, for the council, two summers ago, when she was still an apprentice and the task had been given to her as a test of patience. Hers had been careful and accurate and dull. It had shown the grove as a single green mass, ringed by the river, and it had marked the paths in faint red, and it had marked the four cairns in small black crosses, and it had been, in its way, a good map and a useless one.
This map was not that map.
This map showed the grove as a single living thing. The outer ring of trees was drawn as a wall of small, careful strokes, each leaf distinct, each stroke the shape of a flame. Inside the ring, the four cairns were drawn not as crosses but as small hearths, each with its own thread of smoke rising from it, and the threads of smoke met in the centre of the grove in a knot that was the same shape as the knot on the rowan ring. Between the cairns, the paths were drawn not in ink but in a paler line, the colour of bone, and they branched and rebranched and crossed each other in a way that was not a way but a sentence, and the sentence was not a sentence but a song, and the song was not a song but a binding.
In the centre of the grove, where the threads of smoke met, there was a figure.
It was not drawn. It was pressed. The parchment was depressed there, as if a thumb had been laid upon wet paper, and the depression was the shape of a small, lacing animal with two peaks on its head.
Wren made a sound.
Evangeline looked up.
Wren had come to the desk. She was standing on the other side of it, her hands flat on the wood, and she was looking at the map the way one looks at a thing one has been told is not there and has found to be there after all. Her face had gone pale. Her eyes were very wide.
That, she said, is the Alder King.
Evangeline looked at the figure. She looked at the M in the seal. She looked at the ring of rowan berries on the desk, and at the notebook under the pencil, and at the journal on the shelf, and at the lamp that had steadied, and at the window through which the lane was a darker grey than the sky.
The wind came up again. From the east. From the direction of the grove.
It brought with it the smell of the forest at the hour when the day gives up. It brought with it the sound of a wood-pigeon, calling once from the far side of the valley and not again. It brought with it, very faintly, the smell of smoke.
Not the smoke of the three chimneys in the lane.
The smoke of the four cairns, burning without fire, in the heart of the grove that was not on any map she had drawn.
Wren was still watching the figure. Her hands on the desk had gone white at the knuckles.
He is looking at us, she said.
Evangeline looked at the figure.
The depression in the parchment was very slight. It was the shape of a small, lacing animal. It was the same shape as the M in the seal. It was the same shape as the knot on the rowan ring. It was the same shape as the cipher on the notebook, and the cipher on the notebook was the same shape as the writing in her grandmother's hand, and the writing in her grandmother's hand was the same shape as the letter at the beginning of every entry in the journal, and the journal had been written for her, and the map had been drawn for her, and the rowan ring had been strung for her, and the notebook had been placed in the drawer for her, and the drawer had been locked for her, and the key had been hung on the nail for her, and the key had been waiting for her since before she was born.
He was not looking at them.
He was looking at her.
Evangeline put her hand on the map.
The parchment was warm. Warmer than the lamp could have warmed it, warmer than the room, warmer than the body of a woman standing over a desk in a cottage at the edge of a wood at the end of a day in the late autumn. It was warm the way a hand is warm when it has been held out for a long time in the cold and has at last been taken.
She did not pull her hand away.
She stood with her hand on the map and her eyes on the figure and she understood, in the way one understands a thing one has been told many times as a child, that the pact was not a thing she had inherited.
It was a thing she had been asked to keep.
The lamp steadied. The clock ticked. The wind died. The smoke from the four cairns in the heart of the grove thinned to a thread, and the thread unravelled, and the grove was still.
On the desk, the notebook turned a page.
The cipher was gone. The page beneath it was blank, and the pencil was no longer on it but beside it, and the pencil had been set down very carefully, so that the point was not broken, and the eraser end was toward the cipher as if to say, when you are ready, begin.
Evangeline picked up the pencil.