He's describing the rune-carved posts he placed along the northern tree line when I realize I've stopped pretending to eat and am just watching him. I pick up my spoon again.
"The attacks are escalating," he says, when Gran sets down her cup, "because something has been disturbing sacred ground within two miles of this boundary. Creatures that were never meant to be touched have been harmed." He pauses. "The imbalance spreads outward from those violations. The animals closest to the orchard boundary absorb it first." Another pause. "It will get considerably worse before anyone stops it."
"And what's being done?" I ask.
His eyes cut to me. "What I can manage."
There's something underneath that — something worn, and old, and unsaid — but he doesn't offer it and I don't push. Not tonight. Gran changes the subject with the skill of a woman who has steered a hundred uncomfortable dinners, and the conversation moves somewhere easier.
I'm helping clear the dishes when I hear Celia's voice outside. Loud and purposeful. I go to the window without thinking.
She's at the end of the lane, talking to two of the market women, and she's looking at our lit window. She smiles as she talks. That warm, practiced smile.
I can't hear the words, but I can seecursedin the shape of her mouth. I can seedangerousandSybil,anddon't you think it's strange?
I stand there and watch her work. She's good at it — that's the honest thing, the thing that makes it worse. She's very good at this.
Behind me, Rolin says nothing. But when I turn back to the kitchen, I find him watching the window too, and his expression has gone flat. Shuttered. The version of his face the town gets — the one that gives them something easy to be afraid of, something tidier than the complicated truth of whatever he actually is.
"She's been saying that for years," Gran says quietly. Not to either of us in particular.
Rolin sets his cup down and stands. "Thank you for the meal, Elspeth." He says her name simply, without ceremony. Gran gets a real look from him then — something almost warm — and then it's gone.
He nods once at me on his way out. Not unfriendly. Not much of anything, except his eyes linger for just a fraction of a second longer than they need to, and then he's gone, his footsteps silent on the lane.
I pause at the kitchen window and watch the tree line swallow him up.
The lonely man, I think,hiding behind the legend they made of him.
I don't say it out loud. But long after Gran has gone to bed and the house is quiet, I'm still thinking it.
4
ROLIN
Ifind the first trap before dawn.
It's set in a hollow between two root systems, a wire snare weighted with a stone and baited with a clump of fur pulled from something sacred — a scraping of white hide that shouldn't exist this close to the boundary, that could only have come from inside the deep forest. Someone has been in territory that no one has any business entering. Someone with enough knowledge to bait properly and enough disregard to do it anyway.
I stand over the trap for a long while.
There are three more within a quarter mile. All of them the same design — efficient, commercial, the kind used by traders moving product in volume rather than hunters feeding families. Each one baited with something sacred. Each one positioned along the invisible lines I have spent years memorizing, the lines that mark where the deity's territory bleeds into the wider forest.
Whoever set these knows exactly where they are.
I dismantle them. I do it carefully, thoroughly, and I stand in the silence of the deep wood and feel the imbalance through the ground like a fever, hotter than it was three days ago. Whatever the traders are taking is weakening the barrier faster thanthe natural deterioration. Weeks, maybe less, before something comes out of the deep forest that I cannot talk back.
Which is how I end up at the Esquine orchard at midmorning with a proposition I am not entirely comfortable making.
She's in the south row when I find her, up on a stepladder with her braid falling over one shoulder, doing something precise and focused on a split branch with a wrap of treated cloth. She doesn't hear me approach, and for a moment I halt at the row's entrance and watch her work.
She's good with her hands. Economical. No wasted motion. The kind of competence that comes from years of physical labor, not from someone performing effort.
"You're going to snap that if you wrap it too tight," I say.
She doesn't startle. That's the second time she's failed to startle when she should, and I find I'm keeping count. She turns on the ladder and looks down at me with the expression she reserves for people whose opinions she hasn't decided the value of yet.
"Good morning," she says, with aggressive pleasantness. "Did you come to supervise, or did you have an actual reason?"
