"That's — you had no right —"
"I had every right. You are under my roof, and I do not operate on ignorance if I can help it. What I want to understand is why someone who is called strange by her own village returns, repeatedly, into a forest everyone has labeled cursed, for people who do not thank her for it."
"Because Dara had a fever," I snap. "Because her mother had nothing left to try and someone had to go." I take a step toward him before I've thought it through. "You can't call it irrational just because it cost me something. You have no right to dig into my history for data and then question my reasoning with it."
"I'm not." He takes one step forward. "I'm questioning the cost."
"The cost is mine to calculate."
"Not anymore."
He moves — toward me. Directly. Intentionally closing the distance until I take one step back and find the table's edge pressing into my lower spine. Not touching. Not required to. The table sticks in my back and he's in front of me, cornering me. I refuse to look away as my hands find the edge of the table andpress flat. His eyes stay on my face with an intensity that makes my grip tighten.
"You should move," I whisper.
"You're not going anywhere."
He leans forward slightly. Heat brushes against my skin. His eyes drop briefly to my mouth. Then he straightens abruptly. Something is happening to his composure that is unfamiliar, and I'm not prepared to name aloud what's happening to mine.
Suddenly, he steps back. Two clean, deliberate steps. Turns. And leaves. The door doesn't close behind him hard. It's controlled, like everything he does, even now.
I freeze at the table. I feel the tremor moving from my palms up through my wrists and into my arms — and I press them to my chest. When I look up, I catch the shadow under the doorframe. His hand on the frame, the white of his knuckles against the dark stone. He was shaking too.
I look back at the herbs spread across the table. The wildspont is modifed. And somehow that isn't the thing unsettling me most anymore.
6
DRAEKIR
Vuldren finds me before I've finished the first cup.
He doesn't knock either — none of my hunters do, not when they have something worth saying. He steps into the morning room with stillness that he carries when the news isn't good, and I set the coffee down and wait.
"Another one," he hurriedly tells me. "East of the boundary. The patrol found it before dawn, moving through the trees south of the human's cottage."
I rise up to stand.
"Same behavior?"
"Slow. Circling. As if targeted."
I pull my coat from the hook by the door and tell him to hold the perimeter until I return.
Elowen's cottage sits at the edge of Duskmire's outermost plots, close enough to the village to share its smoke on winter mornings and far enough that no one would hear anything that happened inside it after dark.
The structure is modest. Wattle walls, thatched roof with a repaired section over the east corner, a kitchen garden pressedright against the south-facing wall to catch whatever sunlight the treeline allows.
I push it open with one hand and step inside.
Every shelf is organized by type, labeled in a hand I recognize as someone who writes for themselves rather than for legibility. Roots bundled with twine. Glass jars sealed with rendered fat. A worktable worn smooth. A single chair angled toward the window, which tells me enough about how she spends her evenings.
But what's off is the mess — someone searched it.
Not ransacked — whoever did this wasn't careless. They've moved through the space, leaving the surface appearance intact. The jars have been shifted and replaced. The chair is a half-inch from where it left its marks in the earthen floor too.
They were looking for something. I don't know what.
I step back outside, and crouch at the south edge, near where the soil transitions from worked ground to forest floor, and I find the first marking eight inches into the dirt. Same geometrics I sketched from memory a few nights ago. The soil beneath it still smelled faintly metallic. Blood and residue. Carved into a flat stone half-buried under the garden's border. It looks recent.
