Chapter 2 The Forest Knows First

The morning after the dream was always the hardest to move through.

Vee kept her hands busy the way she always did, opening the shop at half past seven, arranging the front display with fresh sachets of sleep blend and the last of her autumn tinctures. She sold a jar of joint salve to old Maren from the top of the hill. She advised young Petra against combining the valerian drops with the tonic she had bought from the traveling merchant the week before. She swept the front step twice because the wind kept blowing leaves back onto it and she needed something to do with her hands.

By midday the restlessness in her body had not settled. It had gotten worse.

She locked up the shop at noon, which she almost never did on a weekday, and took the forest trail behind the eastern row of houses. She told herself it was a harvest run. Her stock of wood sorrel was genuinely low and there was a good patch of it growing along the creek bed half a mile into the trees. These were true things. They were also not the only reason she was going.

She had been thinking about that smell since four in the morning.

The forest trail was narrow and familiar, worn down by her own boots over six years of the same walks. The trees closed over it quickly once she passed the last fence line, tall pines and old beech pressing in on either side, the light coming through in long slanted columns that shifted as the wind moved the branches overhead. Vee had always found the forest easier than town. It did not require anything from her. It was simply itself, completely and without apology, and she respected that.

She followed the trail to the creek and crouched beside the water, filling her basket with wood sorrel and letting the sound of the current do its work on the noise inside her head. The water was cold and clear, running fast with the recent rains. She worked methodically, the way she did everything, and for a little while the restlessness loosened its grip.

Then she saw the tracks.

They were pressed deep into the soft mud along the bank, a few feet from where she was crouching. Four of them in a line, each one roughly the size of a large serving plate, with the distinct impression of four toes and a wide central pad. She stared at them for a long moment without moving.

She knew animal tracks. Six years of forest walking had taught her the difference between a boar print and a deer print, between the long narrow signature of a mountain fox and the round heavy impression of a bear. She had seen bear tracks twice in her years in Ashveil and reported them to the forestry office both times.

These were not bear tracks.

The shape was canine. Unmistakably canine. But the size was wrong by an order of magnitude that made her stomach do something uncomfortable. The largest wolf on record in this mountain range would have left a print perhaps half this size. Whatever had made these marks was not something that belonged in the Ashveil forest.

Vee crouched beside them and studied them without touching. Fresh, she thought. The edges were still crisp. Whatever made them had been here in the last several hours, which meant it had been here while she was sleeping. While she was standing at her workroom window in the dark, looking out at the treeline and convincing herself it was an elk.

She stood slowly, basket over her arm, and looked into the trees downstream.

Nothing looked back. At least not that she could see.

The sensible thing was to turn around, walk back to town, and call the forestry office. She knew this. She stood beside the tracks for another full minute and did not move toward the trail. The restlessness that had been sitting in her body all morning had shifted into something else, something she did not have a clean word for. Not quite fear. Something older than fear, like a tuning fork struck against a note her bones remembered even if her mind did not.

She followed the tracks downstream.

She knew it was not sensible. She followed them anyway, moving carefully along the bank, keeping the prints in sight, noting where they deepened, a heavier landing and where they lightened, something moving fast, then slower. Whatever this was, it had not been running. It had been moving with purpose, stopping occasionally, then continuing on.

The tracks led her to a small clearing she had been to before, a flat circle of ground where the creek bent and the trees thinned enough to let in a full column of afternoon light. She stepped into it and stopped.

The smell from the night before hit her immediately, stronger now and layered with something additional she could not name. Dark and green and electric, like the air before lightning arrived.

Her wrist began to ache.

She looked down at the silver scar and watched it flush faintly pink along its length, as though blood was moving beneath it in a way that had nothing to do with her heartbeat. She pressed her palm over it instinctively and the ache deepened for a moment before fading back to its usual silence.

Her breath was coming a little faster than the walk warranted.

"You should not be out here alone."

Vee spun around.

A man stood at the tree line on the far side of the clearing. Tall, broad through the shoulders, dressed in dark clothing that had seen better days. He looked like he had been walking for a long time. There was a stillness to the way he stood that reminded her of something she could not immediately place, the way a large animal stands when it has decided not to move rather than when it simply has no reason to.

His eyes were fixed on her with an attention that made the back of her neck prickle.

"I did not hear you coming," Vee said, keeping her voice level.

"I know," the man replied quietly. He did not move toward her or away from her. He simply stood at the tree line and watched her with those steady, too-focused eyes. "You should still go back to town."

Vee looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at the ground between them, where the large canine tracks led directly to the place where he was standing.

She looked back at his face.

"Whose tracks are those?" she asked.

The man said nothing. A muscle moved in his jaw. He looked at her the way people looked at something they had been searching for long enough that finding it did not feel entirely real.

"You are bleeding," he said instead of answering, nodding toward her wrist.

Vee looked down. A thin line of red was tracing the path of the silver scar, bright against her skin, welling up from nowhere.

When she looked up again, the man had crossed half the clearing without making a sound.