She ate lunch with Corin and Chloe at the small table outside the orchard cottage. They talked about the bees, the clover health, whether the spring rains would hold long enough for the first honey extraction. Ordinary talk. She let herself enjoy it.
After lunch she went back to the meadow for one more session. Shorter this time. She worked on precision redirects, pushing wind from one direction to another in sharp, clean transitions without the gradual easing she'd relied on before. The results were uneven but promising. Three out of five transitions held without charge buildup. The other two sparked faintly in the upper air, nothing dangerous, but visible reminders that the learning curve still had teeth.
She was wrapping up the final redirect, easing the wind back to neutral, when she felt a presence at the tree line.
She went still. The connection was still open, her awareness extended across the meadow and into the bordering woods, and the disruption was clear. Someone standing just inside the first row of pines on the eastern edge, close enough to see the meadow, still enough to be deliberate about it.
Not Corin. He was at the hives, visible through the orchard. Not Chloe. She'd gone inside twenty minutes ago.
Isla kept her hands loose. Kept her breathing even. Reached into the connection and extended it toward the tree line, light, careful, the way she'd done at the shoreline the night she'd felt the presence on the river road.
The watcher didn't move. They were holding position. Watching. Measuring.
She thought about the note at her door. Three lines in neat handwriting. Details from a past that no one should have been able to put together. She thought about what Rafe had told her the night before, the name Sloane, and what Moira has said about someone who tracked people through records and leverage and patience.
Someone who was now standing in the trees watching her practice.
Instead of pulling back, instead of closing the connection and walking away, she gathered the wind she'd been working with all afternoon and drew it tight. She focused it into a narrow column of pressurized air aimed at the eastern tree line. Then she released it in a single crack that bent the pine tops sideways and sent a flock of starlings screaming out of the canopy.
The presence vanished with the suddenness of fear. Poof. Gone.
Isla stood in the meadow with her heart hammering. The wind settled around her. The pines straightened. The starlings circled once and dispersed.
She'd aimed to miss. A warning, not a strike. But the speed of the retreat told her something important. Whoever had been watching hadn't expected her to push back. Especially so direct. They'd been testing her, measuring her range, her control, her awareness of the boundary between her power and the worldaround it. Cataloguing what she could do. And she'd just shown them she knew they were there and what she could do.
Whether that was smart or reckless, she couldn't tell yet. But as she gathered her things from the meadow's edge and started back through the orchard, her mind was already turning over the shape of it. Rafe's rival. The note. The watcher in the trees. All of it circling the same question.
What did Sloane want with a stormcaller?
17
RAFE
Dex found Rafe at the Ashvane just past three with the kind of walk that meant the information was worth the interruption.
"Malrick's not on a charter," Dex said. "He's renting. A room at a farmstead about a mile past the northern ridge, off the main road. Woman named Hargrove runs it, takes seasonal boarders, doesn't ask questions if the money's good. He arrived two days before we did."
Rafe set down the caulking iron he'd been working with. The hold partition was nearly finished, the new planks fitted clean, Orick sanding the seams below while Pell ran checks on the cargo mounts. Good progress. Three more days and the Ashvane would be river-ready was the hope. But three more days was a long time when the man taking his livelihood apart was sleeping a mile from the town square.
"Who told you?"
"Petch." Dex leaned against the dock rail. "His brother-in-law delivers firewood to the Hargrove place. Said there's been a man there the last week who tips well, drinks better whiskey than anyone on that road should have, and asks a lot ofquestions about town business. Specifically about the lake, the weather, and the fae woman on the western shore."
"He's been asking about Isla by name?"
"Not by name. By description. Silver-blonde hair, lives alone near the water, something unusual about the storms when she's upset." Dex paused. "He's careful. Always has been."
Rafe looked at the sky. Clear, bright, no weather building. A good afternoon. The kind of afternoon where a man should be walking a birch path to a cottage on the lake to sit at a small table with a woman he'd told he wanted to get to know.
"I need you to do something," he said.
"Name it."
"Go to Isla's cottage. Tell her I can't make it tonight." He kept his voice level. His wolf was already protesting, a low pressure behind his sternum that he ignored. "Tell her I found Sloane. I'm going to get answers. I'll be in touch."
Dex studied him. "You want me to walk to the stormcaller's house and deliver a cancellation."
"I want you to deliver a message."
