"No." I turn to face him fully. "I am not doing that. I am not distancing myself from you because a town full of people who have been using you as a convenient explanation for things they don't understand have decided it's time to blame you for something specific." My voice has gone sharp. I don't moderate it. "You have been protecting these people for twenty years and they have given you nothing?—"
"They gave me distance." He says it quietly. "That was enough. It kept things simple."
"It kept you alone."
The word sits between us. He doesn't answer, which is its own kind of answer.
"I love you," I say, which surprises us both in approximately equal measure. I hadn't planned to say it. I wasn't performing it, wasn't building to it. It simply walked out of me while I was angry and apparently honesty does that.
His expression — the shift in his eyes, something cracking through the careful surface — makes my chest ache.
"Sybil—"
"I'm not asking you to say it back. I'm telling you why I'm not going anywhere."
Beth findsme at the orchard gate that same afternoon, slipping through the fence gap with the practiced stealth of a child who has made an art form of not being noticed. She has a wad of folded paper tucked inside her coat, and she presses it into my hands with the solemnity of someone passing critical intelligence.
"From his cargo manifests," she says. "From before this season. I've been copying them out when he leaves the wagon."
I unfold the pages. Column after column in a trader's shorthand — dates, weights, prices, abbreviations that mean nothing to me at first and then, cross-referenced against the creature logs in my father's journals, begin to mean a great deal.
Sacred creature captures. Documented, itemized, assigned a price per head. Some entries marked with notations that correspond to exactly the dates my father flagged as significant deterioration events.
"Beth." I look up. "This is proof."
She nods. Her jaw has the same set to it her father's gets when he's proud of a sale, but the motivation is categorically different. "He's been doing it for three seasons. The white ones fetch the most. He has buyers in the cities — nobles who keep them in private estates as ornaments." Her voice is very steadyfor an eleven year old. "He's not going to stop unless someone makes him."
I study the pages, and the tree line. I think about my father's careful handwriting and all the years he spent watching the same damage happen and trying to slow it alone.
"Alright," I say.
Beth looks at me. "Alright what?"
"I'm going to make him stop."
She nods with the satisfaction of someone whose confidence was never really in question. Then she slips back through the fence gap and disappears toward the caravan camp without another word, and I stand at the gate with the manifests in my hand and the particular cold clarity that arrives when you've stopped having a choice about something and started having a plan.
The covenant. The bloodline. The orchard and the forest and everything they were built to hold.
It's mine to fix. It was always mine to fix. My father understood it and I'm beginning to.
I go inside to read the rest of his journals.
10
ROLIN
Itell Sybil to stay at the orchard.
I tell her this clearly, in plain language, with direct eye contact, and she nods in a way that I recognize in retrospect as the particular nod she produces when she has already decided not to comply and is simply waiting for the conversation to conclude. I should have recognized it. I've catalogued enough of her expressions by now to have a working taxonomy, and that nod — chin down, hazel eyes steady, the fractional tightening at the corner of her mouth — meansI hear you and I disagree and we will discuss it when there's time.There is never time. She knows this.
The trader encampment is set two miles into the eastern forest, far enough from Briarhollow to avoid notice, close enough to the sacred boundary to be an insult. I smell it before I see it — woodsmoke, equus dung, and underneath both, the specific distress-scent of caged animals that have been caged too long. My jaw tightens. I move into the camp's outer ring and stay low, reading the layout.
Six wagons in a loose circle. Four men visible, two more by the sound of it inside the largest wagon. Cages stacked on twoof the flatbeds — iron, heavy gauge, the kind that costs real coin because it's built to hold something that will fight. The stag is in the third cage from the left. I know before I see it because the bond surges when I move in range, a wave of anguish and rage that isn't mine running straight up my spine.
Hold on, I tell it, through the bond. I'm here.
I have the first guard handled and the cage locks halfway opened when a corrupted forest cat the size of a draft equus crashes out of the eastern underbrush directly into the camp's center.
