The Embergrove Pact: The Healers Hands

The fire in Wren Halloway's hearth cracked low, and the cabin smelled of pine resin and dried thyme. A black iron pot hung above the coals, steam curling from water that had gone brown with yarrow and comfrey. Wren knelt beside a low cot near the window, where Evangeline Moss sat with her sleeve rolled to the shoulder, watching the woods through a pane of warped glass.

"Give me your arm," Wren said, and her voice carried the clipped patience of someone who had patched enough wounds to know the worst ones always hid beneath the cleanest skin.

Evangeline extended the limb without protest. The gash ran along the outer forearm, shallow but ragged. Thorn points had opened the flesh in three places, and dried blood crusted the skin in dark lines. The edges were pink and angry, hot to the touch.

Wren reached for a clay bowl of clean water and a strip of linen, then paused, her fingers hovering. She tilted her head and studied the wound the way a forester studies a broken branch, searching for the direction of the split.

"This will sting," she said.

"I know."

"I'm not asking."

The linen came away grey with old blood. Wren worked in short passes, dabbing rather than wiping, her brow drawn low. The cabin held the quiet sounds of her breathing and the distant complaint of a branch against the roof. When the wound lay clean, she set the cloth aside and reached for a poultice that smelled of crushed marigold and something sharper beneath.

"Hold still."

Evangeline held still.

Wren packed the wound with a fingertip, firm and even, pressing the herbs against the raw flesh until a dull heat bloomed beneath the skin. Evangeline's jaw tightened. Wren watched the flinch and did not slow.

"You have dirt in the deeper tear," Wren murmured. "I should have cleaned this hours ago. Why didn't you say something at the spring?"

"It was not a priority."

"Not a priority," Wren repeated. "You had a thorn buried to the quick and you decided it was not a priority." She reached for a needle and a length of gut thread. "When we were children, you once hid a sprained wrist for a fortnight because you said fussing over it would waste the morning."

"I was nine."

"You were nine, and you are twenty-three now, and you are still doing it." The needle hovered. "Bite the leather."

Evangeline took the folded strip between her teeth without being told. The first stitch went in clean, a small bright flare of pain that faded into a deeper ache. Wren's hands moved with the economy of long practice, the needle dipping and rising in a rhythm older than any formal training. Her fingers were calloused at the tips from years of bark and bramble, but the work was delicate, and the thread drew the torn flesh together with the kind of neat precision that comes from doing a thing until the body forgets it was ever difficult.

Evangeline breathed out through her nose. The leather creased between her teeth.

"Almost done," Wren said. "Two more."

The second pulled tighter. The third knotted off with a small, decisive tug. Wren cut the thread with a short blade and sat back on her heels, examining her work. The wound sat closed, the thread dark against the reddened skin, the edges already beginning to swell with the first promise of a scab.

"There," Wren said. "You will have a scar."

"Good."

"Glad you approve." Wren set the blade aside and reached for a jar of rendered tallow, beeswax, and a whisper of lavender. She smoothed a thin layer over the stitching with her knuckle, and the sting dulled beneath the grease. "Keep it clean. Change the dressing tomorrow. If the red spreads past the stitches, you tell me before you decide it is not a priority."

Evangeline removed the leather from her mouth and let her arm fall into her lap. The skin around the stitches throbbed in time with her pulse, a slow metronome of bruised tissue.

"You have done that well," she said.

Wren's mouth twitched at the corner. "I should hope so. I had an excellent teacher." She began to pack away the bowl and the linen, her movements efficient. "Or I had three years of trial and error and a very patient woman from the next valley who let me practice on her goats."

"You never mentioned a teacher."

"I never mentioned a great many things." Wren's voice stayed light, but her eyes stayed on her hands. "You were busy. You had your maps to draw and your city to haunt."

The fire shifted. A log crumbled at one corner and sent a cascade of sparks up the chimney. Outside, the wind stirred the pines, and the shadows of branches crawled across the floor in slow, tangled patterns.

Evangeline watched her friend. The lamplight caught the angles of Wren's face, the sharp line of her jaw, the small scar at the edge of her hairline from a fall she had taken at seven. Three years had changed Wren in ways that had nothing to do with time. She had always been slight, but she had thickened now into the kind of compact strength that comes from hauling water and splitting kindling. She had always been quick, but she had learned a steadier patience, the patience of someone who waits for things to grow.

"You were not always a forester," Evangeline said.

"No."

"You were not always an herbalist."

"No."

"You studied in the city. I remember the letters."

Wren's hands paused over the cloth she was folding. The linen hung between her fingers, forgotten.

"You were studying to be a physician," Evangeline continued. "You wrote to me about the lectures. The anatomy theatre. The smell of carbolic soap in the infirmary. You said you had found your purpose."

Wren set the linen down. She rested her hands on her knees and looked at the fire, and the light put copper into her brown hair.

"I did find it," she said. "For a while."

The cabin was quiet except for the fire and the wind. Wren did not speak for a long moment. When she did, her voice had lost its briskness and settled into something rougher, older.

"I was two years into my training. I had a room above a chandler's shop on Barrow Street. The landlady's cat used to sit on my windowsill and watch the pigeons. I woke at five. I walked to the infirmary in the grey. I held retractors while the surgeons cut. I learned the names of every bone in the hand. I could recite the layers of the abdominal wall in my sleep." She paused. "I was good at it. Not gifted. Good. There is a difference."

Evangeline did not interrupt.

"Then one night I was called to a birth. A difficult one. The mother was young, barely seventeen. The child was breach. The midwife had done what she could. I did what I had been taught. I turned the child. I delivered her. She did not breathe. I tried the techniques I knew. The back-slaps. The cold water. The clearing of the airway. None of it worked. The mother was screaming. The father was praying. The midwife was holding my shoulder and saying nothing at all."

Wren's voice stayed level, but her knuckles had gone white on her knees.

"I held that child for eleven minutes. I counted. I have never told anyone that I counted. I held her until she went still, and I put her in her mother's arms, and I walked home through the streets at three in the morning with carbolic soap on my hands and the smell of her in my hair. I did not sleep that night. I did not sleep the next night either."

She exhaled.

"I went back to the infirmary. I stood in the corridor and I listened to the surgeons talking about their rounds, and I thought, I cannot do this. Not because it was too hard. Because I would do it too well. Because I would give it everything until there was nothing left, and then I would break, and the breaking would come at the worst possible moment, and someone would suffer for it." She looked at Evangeline. "So I left. I came home. I told my father I was done with the city. He did not argue. He took me into the woods and showed me which mushrooms were safe and which would kill you, and I learned that the body wants to heal if you give it half a chance."

"And your father?"

The question landed softly. Wren's gaze returned to the fire.

"He is gone," she said. "You know that."

"I know he walked into the deep woods three winters past. I know he did not come back. I do not know why."

"No one knows why." Wren's voice closed like a door. "The Grove took something from me once, when I was young. It gave me something too. A trade. A way to be useful. That is all I know."

Evangeline studied the stitching on her arm. The thread had begun to dry against her skin, stiffening into place.

"You could have stayed," she said. "You could have finished your training. You were strong enough."

"No." Wren shook her head. "You do not understand. I was not strong enough. I was made for this place. The city was a detour. A long one, and a useful one, but a detour." She reached for the jar of tallow and began to smooth more of the salve along the edges of the bandage. "I learned the body in those years. I learned what it can do and where it fails and what it asks for when it is broken. I learned the names of things. I learned patience. I learned that healing is mostly waiting, and that most people cannot wait."

She tied off the bandage and sat back.

"When you came up the path tonight, you were bleeding and you would not let me look at it. You sat at my table and you asked me about the pact as if your arm was not dripping onto my floorboards. You wanted information. You wanted to know about the Alder King. About the terms. About what it would cost." She met Evangeline's eyes. "So I am telling you. It will cost what it costs. I cannot tell you the price in advance. No one can. The Grove does not bargain the way the city does. It does not give you a contract and a witness and a stamp. It listens. It weighs. And then it decides."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you refuse. And you walk back to the city and you draw your lines on your maps and you try to forget that you ever heard the wood speak. Some can. Most cannot."

The fire popped. A coal rolled from the grate and glowed on the hearthstones until Wren crushed it beneath her heel. The cabin smelled of herbs and resin and the faint, metallic note of old blood.

"You are the last of your line," Wren said, quieter now. "Your grandmother understood the pact. Your great-grandmother before her. The names go back further than I can count. You carry something in you, Evangeline. The Grove knows it. The Alder King knows it. That is why the moth-wing boy came for you. That is why the path opened. That is why you are sitting in my cabin with a stitched arm and a question you have not asked."

"What question?"

"The one about whether you can trust me." Wren smiled, and the smile reached her eyes for the first time since Evangeline had walked through the door. "You can. I am bad at a great many things. I am good at this."

Outside, the wind rose and the pines bent, and somewhere deeper in the wood a sound moved that was not the wind, and not an animal, and not entirely silent. Wren's hand moved to the iron poker beside the hearth, and her grip tightened, and her eyes stayed on the door.

Wren did not answer. Her eyes stayed on the door, and the set of her jaw told Evangeline everything she needed to know about what might be out there. Then Wren rose, slow and deliberate, and crossed to the far wall of the cabin where the herbs hung in bunches and the dried roots dangled from iron hooks. Her hand went to a particular bunch of dried yarrow, and she pulled it aside as if it were a curtain, and behind it there was a seam in the wood that Evangeline had never noticed.

"Help me with this."

Evangeline rose, and the chair scraped against the floorboards. Her arm ached, but the pain had settled into something dull and ignorable, a throb that matched the rhythm of her pulse. She crossed to the wall and put her good hand against the wood beside Wren's, and together they pressed, and a section of the wall swung inward on hidden hinges. Cold air came out, and the smell of old paper and amber and something faintly electric, like the air before a storm.

"What is this?"

"What my mother left me." Wren's voice was low, and she did not look at Evangeline. "And her mother before her. And her mother before that. The Halloways have kept this room for longer than the village has had a name."

The doorway opened onto a space that should not have fit inside the cabin. Evangeline could see the dimensions of the outer walls, and this room pushed past them, deeper than the cabin's footprint, and the ceiling was higher than the roof should have allowed. The light inside was wrong. It came from the walls themselves, a faint amber glow that pulsed like a slow heartbeat, and in that light there were shelves, and on the shelves there were jars.

They were the jars that had haunted Evangeline's dreams since she was seven years old and had crawled beneath the floorboards of her grandmother's cottage and found a single one, small and round, with something silver and weightless drifting inside it. She had never told anyone. She had carried the image of that jar like a secret stone in her chest, and seeing the hundred of them now, ranked on shelves of dark wood that climbed the impossible walls of the hidden room, was like watching her own held breath finally exhale.

Wren struck a match and lit a tallow wick on the shelf nearest the door. The flame steadied, and the amber light from the walls dimmed in deference to it, or perhaps simply because they were no longer alone in it.

"They are memories," Wren said. "Preserved. Some of them are mine. Most of them belong to the women who came before me. The Halloways do not write down what we learn. We keep it."

Evangeline stepped closer to the nearest shelf. The jars were all shapes. Some were tall and slender, the glass cloudy with age. Some were squat and round, the glass clear as river water. Some were stoppered with cork, some with lead, some with wax the color of old blood. Inside each one, suspended in liquid the color of autumn leaves, there drifted a shape.

"Touch one," Wren said. "If you want to."

Evangeline reached out with her good hand. The glass was cold, colder than the room, and the amber liquid inside seemed to thicken at her touch, to lean toward her fingers like a cat pressing into a palm. The shape inside the jar was a leaf, brown and curled, but it was not still. It turned in the liquid, and as it turned it unfolded, and what unfolded was not the leaf but a moment, a fragment of someone else's life.

A woman stood at the edge of a clearing. She had hair the color of autumn bracken and hands marked with the soil lines of a forester. She was young, younger than Evangeline, and she was watching something in the clearing that Evangeline could not quite see. The woman turned, and her face was Wren's face, thirty years younger and without the scar at the corner of her mouth, and her eyes were full of a terror so clean it looked like joy.

Evangeline pulled her hand back. The leaf folded. The amber liquid stilled.

"That was the night my mother went into the wood and did not come back."

"I did not mean to pry."

"You did not." Wren's voice was rough, and rougher still. "I told you to touch it. That is the point of the room. You do not keep a memory in a jar so it can stay quiet. You keep it so someone else can see what you saw."

Evangeline looked down the length of the shelves. Hundreds of jars. Hundreds of moments. Each one a woman who had stood at some threshold and chosen, and her choice preserved in amber for the next woman in the line.

"My grandmother," Evangeline said. "Lisel. She would have had one."

"Yes."

"Can I see it?"

Wren hesitated. It was the first time Evangeline had seen her hesitate about anything, and the hesitation sat strangely on her face, like a coat that did not fit. Then Wren moved down the line of shelves, her finger trailing along the labels written in a small, neat hand on strips of leather tied around each jar's neck. She stopped at a jar near the end of the second shelf, and she lifted it down, and she held it for a moment before she turned and offered it to Evangeline.

The jar was heavy. The glass was old, old enough that the surface held the faint ripples of hand-blowing, and the amber liquid inside was darker than the others, the color of strong tea, the color of forest floor after rain. Inside it there drifted a moth.

The moth was white, and its wings were spread as if it had been caught mid-flight, and as Evangeline watched it, the moth's wings moved. Slowly. As if the air inside the jar were a wind only it could feel.

"This was the night the pact was made," Wren said. "Or renewed. The Halloways do not get to know which. We are not the keepers of the pact. We are the witnesses."

Evangeline held the jar up to the strange amber light. Inside the liquid, the moth turned, and as it turned, the glass of the jar warmed in her hands, and the cold receded from her fingers, and for one breath she thought she could smell her grandmother's perfume, the rose and ink and old paper that had clung to Lisel's clothes and her hair and the corners of the cottage where Evangeline had grown up.

"You have the look," Wren said, from somewhere behind her.

"What look?"

"The look she had when she came here. Forty years ago. I was eight. She sat where you are sitting now and she asked me to help her carry something into the wood, and I did, and I never forgot the weight of it."

"What did you carry?"

"A name." Wren's voice was very quiet. "The name of the man who was going to break the pact. She had found it written in a place where it should not have been written, and she was going to take it to the Alder King, and she was going to ask him to do something about it, and she did not come back for three days."

Evangeline turned the jar in her hands. The moth turned with her, its wings whispering against the glass. She could feel her own pulse in the curve of the jar's belly, slow and steady, the rhythm of someone who had walked a long way and was not yet at the end of it.

"What happened to the man?"

"He stopped writing things in places where they should not be written." Wren's mouth twitched. "Or he learned to write them better. The Halloways do not get to know that either."

Evangeline set the jar back on the shelf, carefully, the way one sets down something that has been lent. The moth kept turning. She watched it for a moment longer, and then she turned back to Wren.

"You said you were going to tell me what the Alder King wants from me."

"I said I was going to tell you what he wants. I did not say I knew."

"Then tell me what you think he wants."

Wren leaned against the shelf. The jars behind her chimed faintly as her shoulder touched the wood, a sound like small bells heard from very far away. The amber light caught the angles of her face and made them sharper than they were in the firelight of the cabin.

"I think he wants what the Grove has always wanted. He wants the pact kept. He wants the boundary held. He wants the names to stay in the place where they belong, and the wood to stay the wood, and the city to stay the city, and the line between them to be drawn by someone who knows how to draw a line."

"I am a cartographer's apprentice. I draw lines for a living. That is not the same thing."

"No. It is not." Wren's eyes held hers, steady and unblinking. "But it is not nothing, either. And your grandmother knew it. And her mother knew it. And the moth-wing boy knows it, and that is why he came for you in the market, and that is why you are here."

Evangeline looked around the room. The jars. The amber light. The shape of her grandmother's moth turning slowly in its glass. She thought of the apothecary in the city where she had first smelled the perfume on the wind, and the map she had been drawing when the boy with the moth wings had appeared in the doorway, and the day her grandmother had died, which had been the day the old map had arrived in a plain envelope with no return, and which had been, she now understood, the day the pact had begun to fray.

"The moth-wing boy," she said. "Who is he?"

"He is what the Grove makes of the children who are taken too young. He is what the wood remembers when the wood is hungry."

"He was not hungry when I saw him. He was afraid."

"Then he remembers being a child who was afraid, and he wears that memory the way you and I wear our clothes." Wren pushed off the shelf. "Come. We have been in here too long. The air does not love company, and the memories do not love being watched by someone who has not paid the price of keeping them."

Evangeline looked once more at the jar with the moth inside. The white wings turned. The amber liquid glowed.

"I want to come back," she said.

"Then come back." Wren moved toward the door. "That is what the room is for. That is what we are for. The Halloways keep the door. We do not choose who walks through it."

Evangeline followed her out, and the cold of the hidden room gave way to the warmth of the cabin, and the smell of herbs and resin and old blood closed around her again like a hand she had not realized she was holding. Wren swung the wall shut behind them, and the yarrow bunch swung back into place, and the cabin was just a cabin again, with a fire and a kettle and a woman who knew things she had not yet said.

Outside, the wind had died. The pines stood very still. And somewhere in the wood, closer now than it had been an hour ago, the sound that was not the wind and not an animal and not entirely silent had stopped, as if it had heard its name being thought and had decided to wait, very patiently, to see what would happen next.

The kettle screamed.

Neither of them had moved to set it. The iron sat on its hook above the flames, swinging gently as if someone had only just lifted their hand from the handle. Steam rose in a thin white column, and the cabin filled with the wet, mineral smell of water that had boiled too long and was beginning to taste of the kettle itself.

Wren stared at the iron. Then she crossed the room in three quick steps and pulled it from the fire. The steam died. The cabin settled.

"That was not me," she said, flatly, and set the kettle on the stone hearth.

Evangeline was still standing where she had stopped, her boots tracking dust on the floorboards. Her hands were cold. The hidden room behind the yarrow-bunch had been colder still, and the chill had not left her. She watched Wren pour two measures of dried chamomile into mismatched cups, watched the leaves sink and bloom, and felt the words she had carried up the stairs and down again arrange themselves in her throat like a line of birds waiting to take flight.

"You did not tell me the whole of it," she said.

Wren's hand paused over the second cup. The kettle tilted. A thin stream of water hit the rim of the cup and ran over the side and hissed on the wood.

"No," Wren said. "I did not."

She set the kettle down. She did not look up.

Evangeline sat on the low bench by the fire. The wood of it was smooth from years of use, and the legs were uneven, and it rocked slightly when she leaned back. She did not lean back. She held the cup Wren had given her but did not drink.

"My grandmother," she said. "Lisel Moss. You knew her."

Wren sat across from her on the stool by the workbench, her own cup balanced on her knee. The firelight made her face all planes and hollows, and her eyes were the color of the stream in winter, when the water goes clear and you can see every stone.

"I knew her," Wren said. "When I was small enough to sit in her lap. Before the wood took her."

"Before the wood took her," Evangeline repeated. The words tasted strange. They were the words everyone in Thornmere used when they spoke of those who had vanished into the Embergrove, but no one had ever explained to Evangeline what they meant. She had thought it was a manner of speaking. A polite fiction for a polite town. She had been wrong about many things.

"The Pact," Wren said. "You know the shape of it. The wood gives. The wood takes. The Warden stands between."

"Yes."

"There has always been a Warden. There has always been an heir. When the old Warden dies or disappears, the heir takes the place. The wood knows. The wood waits."

"My grandmother was the Warden."

"She was the last. The last true Warden Thornmere had. She walked the paths, and the wood spoke to her, and the children who wandered in came back out. Mostly they came back out. The ones who did not come back out, she remembered. She remembered every one." Wren's thumb traced the rim of her cup. "When she did not come back, the Pact had no heir. Your mother had gone south. You were a baby. The wood waited."

"For what."

"For you."

The fire popped. A knot of resin burst in the log and threw a brief spray of sparks against the iron grate. The cabin smelled of chamomile and pine pitch and the deeper, older smell of Wren's stores, the dried things in their jars, the tinctures in their bottles, the small deaths she kept on her shelves.

"How long does it wait?" Evangeline asked.

"The wood is not like us. It does not count the way we count. A season to us is a breath to it. But the Pact has terms." Wren's eyes came up. They were steady, and they were not kind. "An heir must be present before the autumn equinox, or the wood takes back what it gave. The fields. The orchards. The wells. The town. Thornmere itself, stone by stone, root by root. The wood will swallow it whole, and the memory of it will be a cold spot in a clearing that no one will be able to name."

Evangeline's hands had stopped being cold. They were hot now. Her whole body was hot, the way a fever makes you hot, except her mind was perfectly clear.

"The autumn equinox," she said. "When is the autumn equinox."

"Six weeks," Wren said. "Give or take the weather."

The fire settled. The chamomile smell thinned. Outside, somewhere, a bird called once and did not call again.

"Six weeks," Evangeline said. Her voice sounded like someone else's voice. It was steady, and it was not hers. "And no one told me."

"No one told you because no one knew where you were. Your mother kept you in the south. She thought distance would keep you safe. She was half right. Distance kept the wood from finding you, and it kept the town from finding you, and it kept you from knowing what you were. But the wood found you anyway. It always does."

"The boy," Evangeline said. "The moth-wing boy. He was in my room in Thornmere. He was under my cot. He came to me, not to anyone else."

"He came to the heir."

"I am the heir."

"You are the heir."

The cup was still in her hands. She looked down at it. The chamomile had gone cold. The blossoms had opened and faded and sunk to the bottom in a soft, brown drift.

"Why did my grandmother not come back," she asked. "If she was the Warden. If she was the one the wood spoke to."

Wren was quiet for a long time. The fire burned. A log shifted and sent up a thin line of smoke that smelled of green wood and something older.

"She went in to bring out a child," Wren said, finally. "A boy. The son of a farmer on the south edge. He had wandered in chasing a fox. The wood does not like foxes. The fox came out alone. The boy did not. She went in after him. She went in singing the old songs, the ones the Wardens sang, the ones that keep the paths open. She sang until her voice gave out. Then she sang in her head. Then she did not sing at all."

"You were there."

"I was nine. I sat on the porch of this cabin with my father and we watched the trees. We watched for three days. On the third night the wind changed and the air smelled of apples, and we knew she was not coming back. My father took me inside. He poured me a cup of milk. He said, "The door will be yours one day. Not yet. Not for a long time. But one day." I have been waiting for that day ever since."

"How old are you now," Evangeline said.

"Twenty-four."

"How long have you been waiting."

"Fifteen years." Wren's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "I am patient by nature. The wood has taught me. The wood is very patient."

Evangeline set her cup down on the floor beside the bench. The wood of the floor was warm from the fire. She pressed her palms flat against her knees and felt the bone of her own kneecaps through the fabric of her trousers.

"Six weeks," she said. "I have six weeks to become what my grandmother was. To learn the paths. To learn the songs. To learn how to walk into the Embergrove and walk out again, and to bring the lost with me when I do."

"Yes."

"And if I do not."

"Then Thornmere dies. And everyone in it. And the wood will spread, because a wood with no Warden is a wood with no conscience, and it will take and take until there is nothing left to take."

The wind rose outside. It had been still for an hour, and now it was not. It pressed against the shutters of Wren's cabin, and the shutters trembled in their frames, and the bunch of yarrow on the hidden door swayed as if someone had brushed past it on the other side.

"The moth-wing boy," Evangeline said. "You said he was a memory the wood wears."

"He is."

"Can I speak to him. Can I ask him what he remembers."

"You can try. He is not reliable. He is not even fully a person anymore. He is a shred. But the shred remembers the whole cloth, and sometimes the cloth will speak through the shred if the shred trusts you."

"Does he trust me."

"He came to your cot in Thornmere. He let you see him. That is more than he has done for anyone in fifteen years."

Evangeline thought of the cold of the hidden room. The smell of apples and dust. The jar on the shelf with the moth inside. The small, pale shape on the floor that had looked at her and had not blinked.

"What was his name," she asked. "When he was a person."

Wren was silent for a moment. The fire cracked. The wind pressed. The yarrow swayed.

"Tobias," she said. "Tobias Renn. He was the son of Maren Renn, who kept the orchard on the south edge. He was seven when he went in. He would have been twenty-two this autumn."

"Tobias Renn," Evangeline said. The name fit in her mouth like a coin from a country she had not yet visited. "I will remember it."

"He is not a ghost," Wren said. "He is worse than a ghost. He is a thing the wood has made out of a memory, and the wood does not let go of its things."

"I will remember that too."

Wren looked at her across the fire. The chamomile had gone cold in both their cups. The light from the flames was low and gold, and it made the cabin feel smaller than it was, and older than it was, and more important than a single cabin in a single wood had any right to be.

"You have six weeks," Wren said. "You have me. You have the hidden room and the door and the moths that remember. You have the paths, if you can learn them. And you have a choice."

"What choice."

"You can walk away. You can go south again. You can find your mother and tell her you are not the heir, that you do not want to be the heir, that the wood can have Thornmere for all you care. The Pact does not compel. The Pact is not a chain. It is an agreement, and agreements can be refused. The wood will not love you for refusing. But it will let you go. It always lets the refusers go. It is the accepters it keeps."

Evangeline looked into the fire. The logs were blackening at the edges. The flames had shrunk to a low, blue-tipped bed of coals that hissed and settled. She thought of Thornmere. She thought of the square with its worn stones and its single well. She thought of the inn where she had eaten lamb and bread the first night, and the woman who had served her who had looked at her strangely and then looked away. She thought of the boy in her room, and the cold of him, and the way he had turned his head when she spoke.

She thought of the Embergrove. She thought of the paths that ran between the trees like veins between muscles, and the sound that was not the wind and not an animal and not entirely silent. She thought of her grandmother walking into the wood with songs in her mouth, and the songs running out, and the wood closing behind her like water.

"No," she said.

Wren lifted her cup and drank the cold chamomile in one swallow and set the cup down on the floor beside her stool.

"No," Evangeline said again, and this time her voice was her own. "I am not walking away. I am not going south. I am not telling my mother I am not the heir. I am the heir. My grandmother was the Warden. My mother ran. I will not run."

"The wood will test you," Wren said. "It tests everyone."

"Let it test me."

"It will take things from you. Things you love. Things you did not know you loved. It will show you what it took, and it will not give them back, and it will expect you to keep walking."

"Then I will keep walking."

Wren looked at her for a long moment. Then she reached behind her on the workbench and picked up a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth. She set it on the floor between them. It was the size of a loaf of bread, and it was tied with a cord of braided hemp.

"These are the songs," she said. "Not all of them. The ones your grandmother left with my father. He left them with me. I have been waiting for you to come and take them too."

Evangeline reached for the bundle. The cloth was cold under her fingers, and the cord was rough. She untied it. Inside were sheets of paper, yellowed and soft at the edges, covered in a handwriting that was small and precise and slanted slightly to the left. The ink was brown. The words were not words she recognized. They were older words, in an older hand, and the letters had a shape to them that made her think of branches and roots.

She turned the first sheet over. On the back, in a different hand, in a different ink, was a single line. The handwriting was shaky. The ink was newer. The words were in the common tongue.

"If you are reading this, Lisel, I am sorry. I could not come back. The wood will explain. Forgive me. Forgive the wood. Forgive the boy. He did not mean to wander so far."

The cabin was quiet. The fire had burned down to a single log, and the light was low, and the shadows were long, and outside the wind had risen again, and the trees of the Embergrove moved against a sky that was darkening toward a night that would be cold and full of stars and full of the sound that was not the wind and not an animal and not entirely silent.

Evangeline folded the note and slipped it into the pocket of her coat. She retied the bundle and set it on the bench beside her.

"Six weeks," she said.

"Six weeks," Wren said.

"Then we begin tomorrow."

"We begin tonight. There is no time for tomorrow. There is only now, and the wood is patient, but we are not."

Wren rose from her stool. She crossed to the fire and laid another log on the coals, and the flames licked up around the bark and caught, and the cabin filled again with the smell of pine and the warmth of old wood burning. She crossed to the shelf by the door and took down a small jar of dark liquid and set it on the table. She crossed to the hidden door and pushed the yarrow aside and swung the wall open, and the cold of the hidden room breathed out into the warmth of the cabin like a long-held breath.

"The moths remember," Wren said. "And the wood is listening. Come. We have six weeks, and we have not a moment to waste."

Evangeline rose from the bench. The bundle of songs was in her hand. The note in her pocket. The cold of the hidden room was on her face, and the warmth of the fire was on her back, and between them she stood, the last heir of Lisel Moss, and the wind rose, and the trees moved, and the wood waited, very patiently, to see what she would do next.