Prologue

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By sunset, Talia had decided the forest hated them. The trail had vanished hours ago beneath ferns as high as her waist, and every direction looked the same: black-barked trees, pale new leaves, roots like old fingers curling out of dirt. A dry wind moved through the branches overhead.

“Orrin,” she called. “We need to turn back.”

Her husband climbed ahead of her along the slope, one hand pressed to the rock wall, the other gripping the strap of his pack. “We passed that split cedar twice already. Turning back only gets us more lost.”

“Going forward hasn’t exactly made us found.”

He glanced down at her with a thin smile. “You always get sour when you’re hungry.”

“I get sour when I’m cold, hungry, and being dragged through a cursed forest by a man who refuses to admit he’s lost.”

She had not wanted to cross the forest. No sensible person did. The traders in Cael had warned them away from it with the frank seriousness you only get from the kind of people who did not enjoy being ignored. The paths changed, they said. People walked in circles for days. Fires died without reason. Wanderers forgot their own names. Voices carried where no voices should be.

Orrin had laughed. He always laughed at stories meant to frighten children and travelers. Then he had bought a map from the oldest man in the market. The map had been useless.

“Careful there,” Talia said as he stepped around a jut of loose stone.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re standing on moss.”

“I can see that.”

“Moss is slippery.”

“Thank you, Talia. I had wondered why my feet kept sliding.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but the sound that came next was not her own.

A crack, followed by that which needed no sound to make her heart rip from her chest – the silence of Orrin’s boot skidding out from beneath him.

His hand slapped against the rock, fingers clawing for grip. For one painfully short breath, Talia saw his eyes widen beneath the brim of his hat. Then he was gone.

“Orrin!” She lunged and caught only air.

His body struck the slope below with a sound that emptied her. Once. Twice. Then the trees swallowed him from sight.

Talia scrambled down after him, sliding more than climbing – branches grabbing at her sleeves and tears burning her eyes. “Orrin!” Her voice broke against the trees. “Orrin, answer me!”

She found him at the bottom of a narrow ravine, crumpled among stones. For a moment, she couldn’t move.

One of his legs lay twisted beneath him at an angle no leg should bend. Blood darkened the side of his tunic. His eyes were open, but they didn’t seem to see her.

“Orrin.” She dropped beside him and lifted his face into her hands. “No, no, no. Look at me.”

His lips parted. No sound came.

She pressed her shaking fingers to his throat and found something faint beneath the skin. A flutter. A failing pulse.

Blood marked him everywhere and nowhere all at once. Across his sleeve. In his hair. Along the stones beneath him. One cheek was scraped raw, and dark bruises had already begun to rise along his jaw and collarbone. Talia moved her hands over him helplessly, searching for the place to press, the tear to close, anything that might reverse what was happening.

“Orrin…” She stripped off her outer coat and gathered it against his middle, against his side, against every place she could reach, leaning over him as though her touch alone might hold him together. “Stay with me.”

His eyes drifted toward her for only a heartbeat before sliding away again.

Her own breath came fast now. She looked around wildly, as if the trees might offer an answer. Herbs. Bark. Anything. She knew how to skin a deer, snare a rabbit, coax fire from damp kindling after a thaw – but this… this was beyond her.

She looked back at him. “I… I don’t know what to do. I…” The words barely escaped her. She swallowed hard. “All right,” she said, even though not all was right. “I’ll get help. I’ll… get help.”

Orrin’s fingers twitched against her sleeve.

“I’ll come back,” she said. “I swear it. I’ll come back.”

She took three stumbling steps away, wiping her eyes and smearing his blood across her cheek, then she turned and ran.

The forest deepened around her. She ran until her chest burned. She ran until her legs gave out. She shouted for help until her throat felt torn raw, but the forest answered only with dry branches creaking overhead and the thin hush of wind through spring leaves.

At some point, the ground rose. At some point, the trees thinned. She found herself on a ridge she didn’t remember climbing, staring down into a valley hazed with the last gray of evening. Her lantern had gone out. Her pack was gone. Blood streaked the backs of her hands, and she did not know if it was Orrin’s or her own.

“Orrin!” she screamed into the dark.

No answer.

Dawn came. Dawn passed. By mid-morning, Talia found the ravine again. She knew it by the split stone at its lip and by the broken branches along the descent. She slid down the same leaf-choked path, heart hammering so hard it sickened her.

The place where Orrin had fallen was empty.

For several breaths, Talia stared. There was blood on the stones. Blood on the leaves. The shape of his body remained pressed into the soft earth. But Orrin was gone.

She searched the ravine until the sun climbed high enough to thin the morning haze. She called his name until she could barely form it. She found no trail. No drag marks. No scraps of torn cloth beyond the ones already caught in the branches from his fall.

By late afternoon, she had begun to worry the forest had taken him.

By dusk, she believed it.

She walked out two days later alone.

The first person to find her was a merchant selling eggs near the northern road. Talia remembered the man’s face going pale. She remembered a woman asking her questions in a voice that sounded far away. She remembered being laid beside a hearth and someone spooning broth between her lips.

She didn’t remember telling the story. But she must have. Because by the next morning, everyone in the village knew her husband had fallen in the forest. Everyone knew she had left him there. Everyone knew nobody could survive that fall. And everyone knew there had been no body to bury.

On the fourth evening after her return, Talia sat alone near the back of the inn, a mug of mead rested untouched between her hands. Her thoughts drifted, as they always did, back to Orrin. She missed the sound of his voice saying her name.

“Talia.”

She almost didn’t look up. For a heartbeat she thought it was only his voice echoing so loudly through her memories that it had now seemed to fill the room.

Only when she’d heard it a second time did she lift her head.

Orrin stood in the doorway.

For a long moment she simply stared. Her mind refused to reconcile the man before her with the one she’d left beneath the cliff. She rose so quickly her chair scraped across the floor.

“…Orrin?”

He managed the faintest smile, though it never reached his eyes.

“You…” She watched him in disbelief as he crossed the room toward her. He paused just an arm’s length away. She reached out. Touched him. Felt him. Made sure he was really there. She searched his face, then his jaw, his collarbone, the places that were once scraped raw and darkened with bruises. Her gaze dropped to his sleeves, his side, the front of his tunic – anywhere blood had marked him, anywhere she’d searched for some way to hold him together.

There was nothing. No torn skin. No bruising. No stiffness in the way he stood. Not even the faded yellow of an old wound nearly healed.

Her hands stopped searching. “You… you fell.”

“I know.”

“You were… dying.”

“I was.”

“I tried helping. I tried, but—”

His finger touched her lips. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him in close. “I thought I’d lost you. I though—” She pulled back, his jaw in her palms. “How? How did you…”

His smile faded. He looked toward the floor, fingers tightening around one another as though wrestling something heavy.

“I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Silence settled between them.

Then, he looked up, eyes meeting hers. “There was… a family in the forest.”

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