Chapter 1 The Woman Who Remembered Nothing

The nightmare always ended the same way.

Silver light, flooding everything until there was nothing else. A voice she could never quite hold onto, low and certain, speaking her name like it meant something beyond the letters. And then the howl, long and mournful and so full of grief it pressed against her ribs even in sleep, cutting off mid-cry, as though something had reached into the night and stolen the sound right out of the air.

Vee Vael woke at four in the morning with her hand pressed flat against her chest and her breath coming in shallow pulls.

She lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling of her small bedroom above the shop, waiting for her heartbeat to settle back into something reasonable. The wooden beams above her were familiar. The smell of dried lavender and pine resin drifting up from the workroom below was familiar. The distant sound of wind moving through the Ashveil mountain pass was familiar.

She was here. She was awake. The dream was already dissolving the way it always did, leaving behind nothing useful. Only the feeling.

She sat up and pushed her dark hair back from her face.

The scar on her wrist caught the moonlight coming through the curtain gap. It ran along the inside of her left wrist in a thin silver line, smooth and old, like something that had healed long before she had any memory of receiving it. She had stopped asking questions about it years ago. No one in Ashveil knew where it came from. The town physician had looked at it once, turned her wrist over in his hands, and told her it was unlike any burn or cut mark he had seen. She had thanked him and not brought it up again.

Vee was good at leaving things alone.

She dressed in the dark, pulling on her worn work trousers and a loose linen shirt, and padded barefoot down the narrow stairs to the workroom. Sleep was not coming back. It never did after the dream, and she had long since stopped wasting time waiting for it.

The workroom was her favourite place in the world, which she understood was a modest thing to admit. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling in dense rows, valerian, motherwort, yarrow, wood sorrel, half a dozen varieties of mountain sage. Glass jars lined the shelving along the back wall, each one labelled in her small, precise handwriting. Her worktable sat at the center of it all, scarred from years of use, stained in colours that told the story of everything she had ever made on its surface.

She lit the oil lamp on the corner of the table and began sorting the harvest she had brought in the previous afternoon. The work was repetitive and grounding, exactly what she needed at four in the morning with the residue of someone else's grief still sitting in her chest.

The people of Ashveil knew her as dependable and a little distant. She had lived among them for six years and could name every family on the main road, knew which children had which ailments, knew who needed valerian tea for their nerves and who needed something stronger for their joints in winter. She was woven into the town in the practical way a useful person becomes woven into a place. But there was always a slight gap between her and the warmth of it, a pane of glass she had never worked out how to remove.

She did not know if that was her nature or her circumstance. She did not know much about either, if she was honest.

Vee had arrived in Ashveil at twenty-two with nothing but a small pack, a working knowledge of plant medicine, and a complete absence of history. No family she remembered. No town she had come from. A physician in the valley had suggested the memory loss was the result of trauma, physical or otherwise, and had recommended rest and time. She had taken the rest. Time had done its work in some ways and none at all in others.

She remembered nothing before Ashveil. She had made her peace with that, mostly.

She worked through the sorting in comfortable silence, separating stems from leaves, setting aside anything too dry to be useful. The lamp threw warm light across the table and the wind outside had softened to a murmur. For a little while her mind was quiet.

Then she noticed the smell.

It came through the window above the herb cabinet, something wild and dark and green, like soil turned up after heavy rain, but with a strange metallic edge underneath. Not unpleasant. Unfamiliar. She set down the bundle in her hands and stood still, her head tilting slightly without her deciding to tilt it.

It was gone before she could fix it in her nose. Just the night air again, and pine, and the cold breath of the mountain.

Vee stood at the window for a moment and looked out at the dark treeline at the edge of town. Nothing moved. The forest sat the way it always sat, dense and indifferent, keeping its business to itself.

She told herself it was an animal. A boar, maybe, or one of the elk that sometimes drifted down from the higher elevations as autumn pushed toward winter. She was not afraid of the forest. She had walked those trails hundreds of times and knew them better than she knew most people.

Still. She stood at the window longer than she needed to.

The scar on her wrist pulsed once, faint and warm, like an ember catching breath.

She looked down at it. The silver line lay still and silent against her skin, the same as always. She rubbed her thumb across it and felt nothing but the slight smoothness of old scarring.

She dropped her hand and went back to the table.

There was work to do and morning was coming and she was a woman who believed in both those things more than she believed in the uneasy feeling currently sitting at the base of her throat like a stone she had not swallowed on purpose.

She reached for the next bundle of yarrow and kept working.

Outside, deep in the tree line, something very large moved through the dark without making a sound.