I am in significant trouble, I think, and drive the next post into the ground with more force than necessary.
The orchard event is her idea and, in my opinion, a bad one — too much foot traffic, too much noise, too many variables in proximity to a boundary that isn't fully stable. I tell her this. She listens thoughtfully and does it anyway, which I suppose I should have anticipated.
The square fills with townsfolk by midafternoon. Sybil moves through the orchard rows with her hair loose and her sleeves rolled back, showing the workers and buyers what the land can still produce, talking about the harvest with the particular conviction of someone arguing a case she isn't entirely sure she'll win but refuses to concede. I stay at the boundary. I watch the forest and I watch the crowd and I watch her more than either.
Celia Mercer arrives midway through the event, and I watch her move through the crowd the way I watch corrupted animals move through the underbrush. Patient. Purposeful.
The livestock pen gates open all at once.
Capra and thistle scatter into the orchard rows in a bleating, wool-shedding surge. People scatter with them. Three children start screaming. A market table goes over. The pleasant afternoon fractures into the specific chaos that only panicked herd animals can produce, and it's all happening within fifty feet of an unstable ward line.
I walk into the middle of it.
"Thal'sorek."
Stillness spreads outward from me like a stone dropped in still water. The capra stops running. The thistle goes quiet, their red eyes blinking in confused cycles. Everything with four legs and instincts turns toward me and goes calm, because the bond doesn't only work on corrupted animals — it works on all of them, and right now I don't much care who sees it.
The crowd has gone silent. They're all looking at me. I can feel it — the specific quality of human fear, the kind that calcifies into a story people tell later. Saw him stop thirty animals with a single word. Saw his eyes. I know what my eyes look like when the bond is active. I know what it does to people who aren't prepared for it.
Sybil is standing at the fringe of the crowd. She is looking at me, too. But her expression is not the one the others wear. It's thinking, measuring, something working behind her eyes.
"Thank you," she says, into the silence. Loud enough for all of them to hear. "That's twice he's kept this orchard from coming apart."
A beat of heavy quiet. Then someone mutters. Then someone else.
I let the animals go calmly back to their pen, and I don't look at any of the faces, and I tell myself I'm not looking for hers specifically, and I fail at that completely.
5
SYBIL
Igo to find him the next morning before Gran can talk me out of it.
I convince myself it's practical. I need answers about the orchard, about the ward posts, about what my father knew and why he didn't see fit to tell anyone. These are legitimate questions requiring direct answers, and direct answers require finding the man who has them, and Rolin lives in the forest. So, here I am.
The forest is different in the morning. Quieter than I expected, and more alive for it — the sounds are dense and layered, birdsong and rustling underbrush and once, somewhere to my left, the heavy thump of something large moving away from me rather than toward me. I take that as a good sign.
I follow the narrow path Gran described — straight north past the split tiphe tree, left at the creek fork, you'll smell the woodsmoke — and find the cabin in a clearing that doesn't appear on the mental map I had of this forest.
I stop at the clearing's edge.
The cabin itself is modest — low stone walls, a roof layered thick with moss, ivy tangled around the window frames inpatterns that seem almost deliberate. But what surrounds it is not modest at all. A dire raven the size of a large capra sits on the roof peak, watching me with three black eyes. Two worgs lie in the cabin's shadow, their massive heads resting on their forepaws, ears twitching. Something low and dark moves near the woodpile — a creature I don't immediately have a name for, sinuous, four-legged, with the particular economy of motion that means extremely dangerous.
None of them move toward me.
Rolin comes around the side of the cabin with an armload of split wood and stops when he sees me. A long pause.
"You didn't tell me you were coming," he says.
"I didn't know I needed to make an appointment."
He sets the wood down. His expression does that thing it does — not a frown, not quite, more like someone who has already accounted for this problem and is deciding which version of his answer to give. "Come in, then."
Inside is a single room, low-ceilinged and warm from the hearth, every surface organized with the specific efficiency of an individual who has been living alone long enough to develop strong opinions about where things go. Dried herbs hang from the ceiling. There are books — more than I'd expected, stacked in careful piles against the walls, the kind of dense, handwritten texts that suggest decades of accumulation rather than casual reading. On the table, a wrapped bundle of fortisia that he's clearly been working.
In the corner, a iypin with a bandaged foreleg is asleep on a folded blanket.
I look at it, then at him. "It bit you, didn't it."
