The next morning I go to town for supplies, and Briarhollow is exactly as I remember it — same low stone buildings, same mismatched awnings, same smell of sawdust and smoked meat from the butcher's stall. The dark elf trade banners hang at the far end of the square, that familiar reminder that even out here, even in a small human settlement tucked against the forest, we exist at someone else's sufferance.
I'm at the dry goods stall when Celia Mercer appears.
She looks exactly as I'd imagined — beautiful, polished, wearing a dress too fine for a market morning. Her smile is warm and perfectly maintained and doesn't reach her eyes even slightly.
"Sybil." She says it like we're old friends. "I heard you were back. I'm so sorry about your father."
"Thank you."
"We all assumed you'd handle the estate quickly and move on." Her gaze drops to the practical goods in my hands — the kind you buy when you're planning to stay. "But you're settling in."
There's the blade, slipped in behind the sympathy. We all assumed you'd fail. Around us, people are paying attention without appearing to. The small, quiet pleasure of a town that doesn't have enough happening.
"I am," I say pleasantly.
She lets me go after that, but I feel eyes on my back all the way across the square.
It's at the border of the market road that I see him.
He stands at the tree line where the forest meets the lane. Tall — very tall — wrapped in dark leathers and a heavy fur-lined cloak despite the warmth of the afternoon. Silver-white hair loose around his broad shoulders. Skin the color of charcoal. Eyes that catch the light even at this distance, amber and strangeand not quite right for a face that is otherwise perfectly, entirely still.
A dark elf. Here, at the edge of a human market, watching me like he's been doing it for a while.
The Beastkeeper. Some old piece of childhood memory supplies the name without being asked. He watches me for exactly as long as it takes me to notice him — and then he turns and disappears into the trees.
I walk faster. I tell myself it's because I have work to do.
I don't entirely believe it.
2
ROLIN
The corrupted ones always move wrong.
It is not something most people would notice — a drag in the hindquarters, a head held too still before a charge, the black-eyed flatness where there should be animal fear. I have been reading these signs for sixty years and they read the same way every time: something in the forest is breaking down, and the creatures nearest the fracture wear it first.
I track three of them through the deep woods before dawn and find what I expected. The imbalance near the orchard is not localized anymore. It has spread along the root network, threading through the sacred ground in lines I can feel through my boots — the bond-light dim and wrong, the barrier between the deity's territory and the settlement thinner than it should be in three separate places. Months ago this was a manageable problem. It is no longer manageable in the same way.
The traders are taking too much and taking it too fast. I found another trap site yesterday, close to the shrine territory. Whatever profit they're pulling from these woods they are burning through something that takes generations to replace, and they don't know enough to know that.
I am thinking about how to address it when I come to the forest edge and see Sybil Esquine on her knees in the dirt trying to reset a fence post with a tool that is wrong for the job.
I have been watching her for three days. This is the first time I've allowed myself to get close enough to see her face clearly.
She is angrier than I expected. Not a general anger — a specific, focused anger aimed at the fence post personally, as though the post is the problem and not the rotted socket it sits in, and if she simply forces the issue hard enough the post will reconsider. She tries it twice, loses her grip, and says something under her breath that I don't need to be close enough to hear.
Her recklessness irritates me. This section of orchard borders the forest directly and she is working alone at dusk with no awareness of what has been moving through the trees behind her all afternoon.
I stay at the tree border and watch. I tell myself I am assessing the state of the barrier at the orchard's edge. This is true and also not the entire truth.
The shadowcat comes from the east, which is the one direction she is not watching.
I have tracked this one for a week — a large female, corrupted three months ago, moving further from the deep territory each night. She is the one I have been most concerned about. Fast, silent, and the black-eye corruption gives them a purposefulness that normal predators don't have, a directional wrongness, as if the animal knows it is being used by something that doesn't care whether it survives the use.
Sybil hears nothing until the shadowcat is already moving.
I am through the tree line before the thought completes.
