Bound to the Time-Mage

The morning light spilled across the shelves of the apothecary like a slow tide, the dust turning gold where it drifted through the air. I balanced on a stool behind the counter, reaching for a cracked leather tome someone had tucked too far back. The shop smelled of lavender and pine resin, the way it always did after I mixed sleep sachets for half the village. Familiar. Safe.

A child sneezed near the door. The startle sent my hand skittering along the shelf, my fingers catching on the edge of a stack of books that someone had precariously leaned against a jar of starseed powder. The jar tipped, the books slid, the stool wobbled. I made a graceless sound and threw out my hands.

It should have all fallen. The starseed jar should have smashed, the powder should have fanned out like a frost, the books should have thumped against my face and chest and then to the floor. A dozen small disasters.

Instead, the world went silent.

The tick of the clock on the wall stopped mid-click. The little motes of dust hung motionless, each one a pinprick of light in the air. The books hovered, mid-fall, the top one angled toward my chin, a paper corner bent like a blade. The jar was tipping, the powder inside a pale crescent held inside an invisible hand.

My breath didn’t leave me. It sat in my chest like a weight.

I didn’t think. I moved.

My fingers curled around the jar and set it upright. My other hand eased the stack of books back to the shelf, pressing the spines into place one by one, the leather warm under my palms as if human hands had just left them. The stool ceased its wobble when I slid my foot a fraction of an inch. I took that trapped breath and let it out, slow, careful.

Sound rushed back in like a wave. The clock clicked. Somewhere down the lane, a cart rattled past. The child sniffled again, freshly fascinated by the basket of herb bundles his mother had brought to the counter. The jar was steady. The books were steady. My body was not.

My heart raced, fast enough to make my fingers tremble. I stepped down from the stool and pressed my palm flat to the counter as if the solid wood could steady the thrum in my veins. The counter was smooth, worn from years of palms and elbows and discreetly passed coins. Safe. Safe.

“Elara?” The boy’s mother peered around the shelf. “Are you well?”

“I—yes,” I said, and somehow my voice worked. “Clumsy, that’s all.” I offered a smile I hoped looked normal. “You’ll sleep wonderfully with the lavender-elm mix, Mira. Brew it gently.”

She relaxed and reached for her purse as the bell above the door gave a soft ring. I didn’t look up at first. I had to drag my hand off the counter and smooth my apron and make my face behave. Then I did, and the air changed.

Kael filled the doorway without trying to. He didn’t wear his breastplate in the mornings, not when the streets were still full of ribbons and chatter from festival preparations, but even in his dark tunic he seemed armored. His shoulders were broad under the fabric, his posture as straight as a steel rod. Sunlight caught on the brown of his close-cropped hair and the scar near his temple that most people pretended not to notice. He had a blade at his hip because he always did. His presence tugged at the attention of everyone in the room, including mine.

“Captain,” Mira said, her voice immediately softer. She dipped a little, flustered by the nearness of the village guard’s captain and his steady way of looking at people. He nodded to her, then to me.

“Elara,” he said.

I felt a prickle beneath my skin, the echo of the stillness still humming there. I had the absurd fear that he could see it, that it marked me in some obvious way. My mouth was dry.

“Captain Kael,” I answered. The formality made me feel safer. I slid Mira’s bundle across the counter and tucked coin into the till with the care of someone who had never almost shattered an entire jar of starseed powder in front of witnesses. My hands were steady now that they had something ordinary to do.

Kael’s gaze flicked to the bookshelf. To the jar. To me. It wasn’t the kind of look that lingered where it shouldn’t, but it took in everything. The clock ticked. The air felt too thin.

“Everything all right?” he asked, innocent enough. He wasn’t a man who joked, not with me, not with anyone outside the guardhouse. If he said something, he meant it.

“Fine,” I said. I lifted the stool and tucked it under the counter as if that would erase the wobble from a moment ago. “Just a little morning chaos.”

Mira gathered her son and thanked me again, the bell chiming as she left. The shop emptied to the quiet that comes in the spaces between errands and chores. Kael didn’t move closer. He didn’t have to. He stood where sunlight cut a strip across the floor and watched me the way he watched the line of the forest after a wolf sighting. Not hostile. Assessing.

“What brings you here?” I asked, because silence under that gaze made my skin itch.

“Elder Toren sent me for comfrey salve.” His tone was even, threaded through with a gravelly base that made simple words feel heavier than they should. He reached into his belt pouch and set coins on the counter without looking at them. He was still looking at me.

“Of course.” I turned to the shelf where I kept the salves, and the familiar act of selecting a jar, checking the label, and wrapping it in cloth steadied my heartbeat to something almost normal. My fingers brushed the jar’s cool surface. I hesitated for a blink, half expecting the air to still again at the simplest motion. It didn’t.

When I faced him, his eyes dropped to the wrapped jar in my hands, then returned to my face. They were gray-blue, like stormlight over the lake, and too observant by half. “Did you cast just now?” he asked, mild, as if he were asking if I had brewed a new tea.

My mouth went dry again. “I—no. Why?”

“The air felt… odd.” He said the last word like he didn’t want to give it more weight than it deserved. A muscle in his jaw flexed as if he were resisting some impulse to say more. He tilted his head slightly, not enough to be invasive but enough that I knew he was watching me even harder. “Could have been a draft through the windows. A trick of the light.”

The words hit with the ease of practiced dismissal. I felt an irrational flare of heat under my skin. A trick of the light. My fingers tightened around the jar before I forced them to loosen.

“I dropped some things and caught them,” I said, aiming for airy, batting the memory of dust-motes frozen like stars out of my head. “Not much of a trick. Just quick hands.”

“Mm.” His gaze didn’t shift. Something like curiosity flickered, then flattened into a neutral line. He took the salve with careful fingers, our hands brushing. The contact was brief, and ordinary, and somehow I felt it all the way up my arm. He smelled faintly of leather and clean sweat and steel oil. Solid things. Present things.

“You’ve always had a… distinct signature,” he said, as if the observation were as harmless as saying my hair was dark. “Different than the other hedge-mages.” His eyes moved past my shoulder, to the shelf, to the clock. Back to me. “Be mindful. The elders dislike surprises.”

“I know,” I said, and my voice didn’t betray the way my pulse skipped. “I’m always mindful.”

He held my gaze a fraction too long, as if deciding whether to challenge that. Then he nodded, a single sharp gesture. “Good.” He tucked the salve away. “Festival patrol starts soon. Keep your door barred if things get rowdy.”

“I will.”

He stepped back, the sunlight catching on his jaw. For a heartbeat, he looked at the shelf again, the spot where the jar had not broken, where the books were neat in their row. His expression didn’t change. Only his eyes did, narrowing just a little, thoughtful. Suspicious.

“Trick of the light,” he repeated, this time in a tone that would allow me to agree and let it lie. “Have a steady morning, Elara.”

“You as well, Captain.”

He left with the bell chime sounding soft behind him. I stood with my hands on the counter, palms flat again, feeling the echo of stillness hum low under my skin like a secret. Outside, the festival banners snapped in a breeze, children shouted, and the world kept time.

Inside, I breathed and tried to convince myself that nothing had happened at all. But the clock ticked, and I counted each beat as if I could keep it in its place by will alone.

By dusk the village was a ribbon of color and noise. Lanterns swung from lines strung between cottages, glass baubles catching firelight in scarlet and gold. The main green had been turned into a tangle of stalls and tables, steaming with sugared nuts and spiced meat, with plums in syrup and bread still warm from ovens. Fiddles started and stopped in bursts while children wove between grown legs with painted faces. I kept to the edges with a basket of sachets looped over my arm, letting the chatter push and pull around me.

The warding stone sat at the far end of the green, near the start of the fen path where the grasses gave way to dark water. We touched it every spring, a simple tradition: a palm on cool granite, a vow whispered against it to keep the borders safe through planting and first harvest. I had done it every year since I could walk. Its surface was smooth and veined, etched with runes long gone soft with time and thousands of hands. Tonight candles circled its base, a ring of light against the gray.

I could feel it before anyone else. A weight, a pressure, like a storm rolling under the skin, except it wasn’t wind or rain; it was something older. The hair on my arms lifted. The hum in me answered, low and warning, and the air tasted metallic on my tongue.

Elder Toren lifted his hands to quiet the crowd. His voice carried, steady as it always had, weaving a prayer of thanks for winter’s end and steady rains. As he spoke, laughter still bubbled at the edges, impatient children pulled free of their mothers to be first to touch the stone. I shifted my basket to my other arm and told myself the unease was nothing—nerves, the echo of the morning.

The ground shuddered.

It wasn’t violent, just enough to rattle crockery and make a few lanterns swing hard on their lines. The music strangled into silence with a bow scraping too sharply across strings. People laughed, thin and uncomfortable, and then the second tremor came, deeper. It rolled up through my soles into my knees, into my spine, until my teeth clicked together.

Screams darted through the crowd. The warding stone groaned.

I turned in time to see it split.

A thin fissure ran from the base upward, a dark line that widened with a wet, ugly sound. The runes around it flared once, a pale blue, then went dead. A single shard pinged loose and fell into the circle of candles, snuffing one out in a curl of smoke. The shock rippled outward, the crowd pulling back in a broken wave.

I couldn’t move. My magic stretched toward the stone like a thread caught on a nail. Something in the crack breathed, slow and wrong. The image hit me so hard I swayed: black water choked with twisted roots, a shape moving under it like a shadow dragged against the current, and trees bending toward it as if listening.

“Elara!” Someone grabbed my elbow. I flinched and turned into Lysa’s wide eyes. “Come away from there.”

I nodded but my feet pressed forward before I pulled them back. The hum in me rose to a pitch, not pain, not pleasure, just pressure. I pressed my free hand to my sternum. The stone was a wound that bled soundlessly, and I could feel its pulse.

“Back!” Kael’s voice cut through the crowd with the finality of a blade. He pushed forward with two of his men, palms out, not shoving, not rough, but unyielding. People moved. He set himself between the stone and the mass of bodies without looking like he’d moved fast at all.

His gaze found mine over the shifting shoulders. For a heartbeat the rest of the green blurred. There was something sharp in his eyes, and it wasn’t fear. It was calculation, and the memory of my shop that morning flickering like candlelight behind his pupils. He looked at the crack, then at me again, and I felt absurdly naked, as if the resonance had written itself across my skin.

“Keep the line,” he said to his men, then pitched his voice toward the elders. “Elder Toren. Inside. Now.”

Toren had gone pale, the lines around his mouth cut deep. He nodded, hands trembling as he gathered the other elders with him, their ceremonial sashes looking foolish and thin in the face of the stone’s dead runes. They formed a stumbling procession toward the meeting hall, Toren speaking to me as he passed without really seeing me. “No one touch it,” he said, and his voice caught.

Kael’s hand brushed my forearm as he moved to follow. Not lingering. Not soft. Present. “Stay back,” he said, and then his jaw tightened. “Stay close,” he amended under his breath, just for me, as if he couldn’t decide whether I was the risk or the answer.

“I can feel—” I started.

“Later.” He didn’t say it cruelly. He didn’t look away from my face until I nodded. Then he was gone, stride eating the distance to the hall, his presence cutting through panic like a plow through wet field.

The village murmured, then buzzed, then fell into a hushed waiting that made the night feel thin. Children cried. Someone started a prayer under their breath and others took it up in ragged pieces. I stared at the stone until my eyes watered. The crack seemed to widen when I looked directly at it, and when I glanced aside, it stilled. The pressure in my chest made each breath a measured thing.

By the time Kael emerged with the elders, the lanterns had been relit and the candles at the stone replaced. Toren’s face was composed into something like authority again, though his hands betrayed him at his sides, fingers flexing against nothing. The other elders arranged themselves like a wall behind him.

“Silverwood,” Toren called, and the whispers snapped out. “The tremor was felt across the green. The warding stone has… suffered a fracture. We will take all proper measures.” He swallowed, the movement visible in the lanternlight. “Captain Kael will lead a patrol to the fen at first light to determine the source.”

A ripple of relief moved through the crowd—orders, a plan, something to hold onto. Kael stepped forward. “We’ll set watches along the south path tonight. Keep your doors latched. Keep the children inside.” His eyes swept the faces, landing on me for a fraction, then sliding on. “If you see anything out of the ordinary, you send for us. No heroics.”

The smallest of smiles tugged at a corner of his mouth, there and gone, at his own choice of words. He hadn’t forgotten the morning. He wasn’t letting it go.

People began to disperse in clusters, clinging to the familiar acts of putting tables away and gathering dropped cups, of pretending the ground had not moved under their feet. I stayed where I was until the pressure inside me eased enough to let me breathe without counting. The stone sat quiet and broken. The crack gleamed black as oil.

Kael broke off from his men, cutting across the green with a directness that made people step aside before he reached them. He stopped at arm’s length, close enough that I could see the nick on his lower lip and the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw. Close enough that his scent—iron and pine resin and wool—was a weight all its own.

“You felt it,” he said, not a question.

“Yes.” My voice sounded thin. “It… pulled.”

He nodded once, as if that matched something he’d already decided. “I want to know what you saw,” he said quietly. “But not here.” His gaze flicked toward the elders, who were watching the stone with the brittle attention of people who didn’t know what they were looking at. “I don’t want Toren hearing your guesses and calling them omens.”

Heat touched my neck. “It wasn’t a guess.” I didn’t mean to sound defensive. It bled through anyway.

He studied me, the way he did a map spread on a table. “Then we’ll call it something else.” He stepped back, the line of his body easing as he pulled the captain over himself again like a cloak. “Lock your door. I’ll send for you at dawn.”

The tremor had shaken everything loose in me. His steadiness set things back into place in a way that annoyed me and soothed me at once. I nodded. “All right.”

He turned to go, then paused and looked at the stone one more time. His eyes narrowed, the scar by his temple a pale slash in the light. “Tricks of the light don’t crack stones,” he said under his breath, to himself more than to me, and the words slid under my skin and lodged there.

I watched him walk away to his men, watched the elders confer with stiff spines, watched smoke rise from the snuffed candle that wouldn’t stay lit. The hum in me settled into a steady throb like a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.

When I finally turned toward home, my basket felt too light, and the path seemed shorter than it had ever been. Every door I passed had a hand at the latch. Every window shutter had a sliver of eye behind it. The festival’s ribbons hung limp, color drained in the dark.

Behind me on the green, the warding stone stood with its new mouth open to the night. I didn’t look back again. I didn’t need to. I could feel it all the way to my bones.

I didn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, the crack burned into the dark behind my lids, thin and black and patient. The hum in me wouldn’t settle. It sat under my ribs like a trapped bird, beating and beating, answering a rhythm I could not hear.

I lasted until the first blue edge of dawn pressed against my shutters, then I gave up pretending. I dressed by touch, wrapped my shawl around my shoulders, and unlatched the door. The green was empty, dew turned to silver in the early light. The warding stone stood in the center of it, alone, a presence that pulled at my gaze as surely as a hand on my chin.

Something in me uncoiled as I stepped closer. Not relief—recognition. The pull sharpened with each footfall, a thread tugging tight between sternum and stone. It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t kind. It was inevitable. My heart adjusted to a slower beat I could feel under my feet, a pulse in the ground, a low throb that wasn’t mine.

I stopped a few paces away. The fissure had widened in the night or my eyes had learned how to see it. It cut up through the runes like a wound that had decided not to scab. Cold bled out from it. The hairs on my forearms stood up. My mouth went dry and metallic, like I’d bitten a coin.

I lifted my hand before I knew I would. Heat raced under my skin. The air around the stone had weight; it pressed into my palm and pressed back. The hum inside me surged, ready to meet it. When my fingers hovered over the crack, the world wavered.

Sound stuttered. The drip from the tavern roof stretched and slowed, then hung in a bead that refused to fall. The breeze paused. The flare of dawn held to the horizon without climbing. Time didn’t stop; it leaned.

The fissure breathed.

My vision tunneled, and the green fell away. In its place came black water crowded with roots like pale fingers. The trees around it weren’t trees; they were bent spines, knotted and wrong, leaning toward the slow, viscous current as if listening. Moss hung in wet curtains. The sky was the color of ash after rain. The air had weight, heavy with rot and a sweetness that made my stomach tighten.

Something moved under the surface. Not fast. Not shy. It glided like an eel through grief, long and dark, and wherever it passed, the water puckered and the reeds went gray. I couldn’t see its shape, but I felt it watching me. A pressure settled against my chest like a palm. My breath stopped without my permission. The hum in me flared high, raw and bright, and the thing answered.

It wasn’t a sound. It was a chord struck along my nerves, a thrum that traveled from the base of my skull to the soles of my feet, ringing through bone. The world pinched in. The warped trees leaned harder, their branches dragging over the surface like hands. A ripple swelled, slow and deliberate, and for a terrified second I thought it would break the skin of the water and show me its face.

I pulled back.

My hand snapped to my own chest, the shawl rasping under my fingers. The green slammed back around me, too bright, too ordinary. The dew glittered. A robin clicked once in the hedge, a sound that made me want to cry. The bead of water fell from the tavern roof and spattered on the packed earth.

I stood very still. The pressure in the air eased by a degree, but it didn’t vanish. It felt like a door left cracked open in a house where I’d thought all the rooms were mine.

Not natural, I thought, and the thought was solid enough to stand on. Not earth shifting under its own weight. Not a winter’s chill settling cracks in old stone. The thing in the water had turned its head. It had felt me. And I had felt it.

My hand shook. I curled it into a fist. The runes carved into the stone looked dull and old, their edges softened by centuries of touch. The crack cut through one that meant hold in the old tongue—I’d traced it as a child when Toren lectured us on names of protection and binding. Its two halves no longer met. The idea of it made my stomach turn, like seeing a bone protruding from skin.

“Don’t be foolish,” I told myself, except my voice barely made it past my lips. It wasn’t a warning not to touch. It was a warning not to run, not to look away and pretend. My magic—the part of me I’d kept banked and small—was awake and listening. The longer I stood there, the more the hum settled from panic into awareness, a kind of tuning. The cold from the crack seeped through my shoes and settled into my ankles.

I took a step closer, then another, until the chill bit the tender skin above my insteps. I didn’t reach for it this time. I let it reach for me. The pressure sifted through me, testing, curious, old. Old in the way deep water is old. There was intelligence in it, and hunger braided through the intelligence, not animal, not mindless. Patient.

An image flickered across my vision, quick and sharp: roots clutching at a set of carved stones half-sunk in mud, sigils eaten by rot; a hand, not bone but something like it, pressing against a surface that wasn’t quite water; a boy’s face I didn’t know, mouth open in a scream I couldn’t hear as time thickened around him.

I snapped my eyes open. The crack had not moved. The world had the gall to look the same. I let out the breath I’d been hoarding in a thin rush and pressed my knuckles to my lips until the sting steadied me.

The tremor was not natural. The words had shape. They settled into me with weight and fit. The stone’s warding had not simply failed; it had been met by something that understood wards and decided they were less interesting than hunger. The pull I felt wasn’t invitation. It was recognition, a call and answer across a distance I could not measure. If I could feel it, then it could feel me. The thought ran cold fingers up the back of my neck.

A footstep sounded behind me, careful on wet earth. I flinched and turned. The green was still empty. The noise had come from my own weight shifting, from my nerves jangling like struck wire. I laughed once, a sound with no humor, and swallowed it down.

Dawn pushed a little higher. Light slid along the crack’s edges and made them gleam. I wrapped my shawl tight, took two steps back, then one forward again because retreat felt like offering my back. I stayed there and watched the stone breathe. I did not look away. I did not pretend.

The wind shifted. It came off the fen, damp and cool, carrying with it a smell I had never noticed so clearly before—wet peat, crushed reeds, and something sweet under it that I knew now as rot and magic intertwined. It curled into the hollow at the base of my throat. I closed my eyes for one count and opened them again.

“Not natural,” I said under my breath, as if saying it aloud would make it real to someone else. It made it real to me. My pulse steadied. The trapped bird feeling settled into readiness. I thought of Kael’s mouth tightening, of the elders’ thin sashes, of Toren’s hands shaking and trying to hide it. I thought of the vision of the hand under dark water and knew I would not be sent home with a pat on the head and a warning to stay inside.

The pull eased enough to let me step back without feeling like I was tearing something. I did, one step, then another, never taking my eyes from the fissure. The pressure followed but did not pursue. The door stayed open.

When I finally turned, the world tilted and righted itself. The village roofs caught the first clean gold of morning. Someone’s chimney started to smoke. The ordinary sounds of Silverwood began to wind up, familiar and steady as a loom.

I looked back once at the stone. The crack looked thin and black and patient. I could feel it in my bones. I could feel it knowing me as surely as I knew it.

I went to meet the dawn with a truth lodged under my skin like a splinter: the tremor had been a knock. Something had knocked. And I had answered.

Kael was already on the green when the sun pulled itself free of the horizon. He stood with two of his lieutenants, heads bent over a chalk sketch of the warding stone and its runes scrawled on a slate balanced on a crate. He looked like cut granite beside them—taller than both, shoulders squared, sword strapped high and neat. His hair was damp like mine, as if sleeplessness had shoved him out of bed and into his armor. At the edge of the square, women shook crumbs from their aprons and a boy chased a dog that didn’t want to be chased. It all looked so ordinary that I wanted to take the slate from his hands and smash it, just to see something react.

He saw me before I reached him. His mouth thinned, then smoothed. “Elara,” he said, as if my name was a question he hadn’t asked and didn’t want answered.

“I need a word,” I said. My voice found a steadiness I didn’t feel.

His men stepped back the way men do when they think they’re being polite and are mostly grateful not to be involved. He nodded to them, then to me, then to the stone. “Make it quick.”

The crack hummed against the inside of my teeth. “It isn’t natural,” I said. “The tremor. The damage to the wards. Something moved in the fen—something old. When I touched the stone, it… it answered. I saw—” My mind tried to slide away from the images. I forced it back. “I saw water gone wrong. Roots like hands. I felt something watching through it.”

His eyes sharpened for one heartbeat. Then the lids lowered a fraction, and the captain returned, smoothing curiosity into caution. “You touched it.”

“I didn’t break it.” The heat in my chest spiked. “It reached for me. My magic responded. I felt it. And before you say it, I know the difference between my own head and something else pressing inside it.”

“You’ve had visions before,” he said. Not a question. His gaze dipped to my hands, the way I kept them twisted in my shawl. “You told us once that the world goes quiet around you when you’re frightened.”

“That was when I was ten and dropped a kettle.” I took a step closer to him without meaning to. The cedar smell of his coat and the clean bite of steel filled the space between us. “This isn’t a trick of nerves. The warding rune for hold is split, Kael. We learned those names together in Toren’s garden. Do you remember? You drew yours too hard and cracked the slate.”

His mouth twitched. “I remember.”

“Then you know what it means that it’s broken,” I pressed. “If the wards were just old, they would crumble at the edges. They wouldn’t—” I caught myself before I said breathe, because it would make me sound unhinged. “They wouldn’t answer when I came near. This is intention. It’s coming from the fen.”

His jaw worked, a small, stubborn movement. “We’re already preparing to scout the fen. My men will check the banks and the old causeway. We’ll report to the elders. You don’t need to involve yourself.”

“I am already involved.” My voice rose and I didn’t care. “Whatever is in there knows me. It felt me the way I felt it. If I can sense it, I can find it. I can help.”

He glanced at the slate, at the careful lines he’d drawn around the cracks, then back at me. The crease between his brows deepened. “Elara. I don’t doubt your intentions. I don’t doubt your… abilities.” The word sounded like it scraped his tongue on its way out. “But unstable parlor tricks don’t belong at the center of a guard operation.”

My breath hit the hard edge of that phrase and cut. “Parlor tricks.”

“I’m not saying you haven’t been useful.” He lifted a hand, palm out, as if he anticipated me stepping closer again and wanted to put space there without touching me. “You can help by staying back. Keep to the village. Let trained people handle this. If you start… doing whatever it is you do around an active ward, you could make it worse. You could stir it up.”

“It’s already awake,” I said. “Standing here pretending we can look at it long enough that it gets shy won’t put it back to sleep.”

A muscle jumped in his cheek. “I don’t need lectures. I need to keep people alive. And that means minimizing unpredictability. You admit yourself you don’t always control what happens.”

“That’s why I’m trying to learn,” I snapped. Shame and fury burned along the bones of my face. People were looking at us now, not openly, but with the careful sideways attention given to an argument in public. I lowered my voice. “If I’m unpredictable, it’s because you all taught me to hide it until it leaks out. I’m telling you what I felt. I’m telling you it’s connected to me. If you shut me out, you won’t just be rude. You’ll be wrong. And slow.”

He stared at me. His gray eyes were cool, but not empty. Something moved there—recognition, or regret, or the ghost of the boy who had cracked a slate by pressing too hard. Then his shoulders settled in that way that meant the captain had decided. “Stay out of the fen,” he said. “This is guard business. If you have information, bring it to me or the elders. Do not go near the stone again. Do not meddle.”

“Meddle,” I repeated, softer. The word fit in my mouth like a stone.

His gaze held mine a second longer. For a heartbeat I thought he’d reach for my arm, that he’d say something else, softer to match the anger he’d thrown. He didn’t. He turned and said to his men, “We’ll start at the south bog. If the causeway’s rotten, we’ll double back along the ridge.” He didn’t look at me again.

The hum inside me tightened into a line so fine I thought if I plucked it, it would cut my fingers. I stood while they walked away, the clink of buckles and the scrape of leather fading. The warding stone breathed behind me. The village spun up its morning. A woman laughed. The dog finally let the boy catch it and rolled, exuberant, on the grass.

The anger ebbed and left something harder. It didn’t feel like hurt. It felt like a decision setting into place, clean and sure the way a gear slots into the next one and begins to turn. He could tell himself whatever he needed to about me to make his fear quiet. He could decide that I made the situation untidy. He could be wrong.

I turned back to the stone. The crack winked dark as an eye. I imagined the fen water, the pressure like a hand, the not-hand pressing against a surface that wasn’t quite water. My palm tingled with the memory of cold. The part of me that had always wanted to be small and kind and useful said, Go home. Wait for permission. The rest of me, the part that had answered without asking, lifted its chin.

“Fine,” I said under my breath. “Guard business to the guards.”

I pulled my shawl tighter and walked off the green. Not toward my door. Toward Toren’s, where the old books smelled of dust and winter apples and neglect. If there was a name for what I’d felt, he’d have it hidden in the back of a shelf. If there was a way to make the hum answer with something other than fear, I would find it. I would make what he called tricks into tools. I would make them into the only keys that fit this particular lock.

Kael’s dismissal slid into me and settled, a grit that kept me from going smooth and quiet. When I pushed open Toren’s gate, I didn’t look back at the green. I didn’t need to. I could feel all of it—the crack, the hum, his eyes on the slate and not on me—like new bones growing under my skin.