Chapter 6 The Symbol on the Tree

Vee did not sleep well.

She lay in the dark above the shop and stared at the ceiling with the particular wakefulness of someone whose mind had decided that night was a good time to audit everything it had collected during the day. The man in the storeroom below. The tracks by the creek. The way her wrist had bled without warning, cleanly and without pain, like a seal breaking on something that had been closed for a very long time.

She rose before dawn, dressed quietly and went down to the workroom.

The storeroom door was closed. She could see the thin line of lamplight beneath it, which meant he was awake too. She moved to the worktable and began the morning preparation with the methodical focus that had always served her better than conversation before sunrise.

She had been working for perhaps twenty minutes when she noticed the notebook.

It was sitting open on the far end of the worktable, turned to the page where she had been sketching the previous afternoon. Without fully deciding to do it, she had filled half a page with careful reproductions of the symbol she had seen carved into the tree line at the edge of her property. A crescent inside a broken circle, drawn six times from slightly different angles, the way she drew plants she was trying to understand.

The symbol nagged at her in the specific way that things nagged when they were not entirely unknown. She had felt that particular nag before, usually about places or words in languages she did not recognise but felt she ought to. She had learned to pay attention to it even when it led nowhere.

The storeroom door opened.

Kael stepped out looking like a man who had also not slept. He looked at her, then at the notebook open in her hands, and went very still. It lasted only a second before he smoothed it away but she caught it.

She turned the notebook toward him.

"You know this," Vee said. It was not a question.

Kael crossed the workroom and sat down on the stool without being invited. "Where did you see it?" he asked.

"Carved into the tree line at the edge of my property," Vee said. "Three of them in a row, about shoulder height, on the eastern side. I noticed them two days ago." She paused. "I have seen it somewhere before that too. I cannot place where."

Something shifted in his expression, a man receiving news he had hoped for and dreaded in equal measure.

"It is a pack marker," he said. "An old one. Used to mark the boundary of protected territory."

Vee looked at him steadily. "Whose pack?"

He met her gaze. "Mine," he said.

The word sat in the room between them. Outside, the first pale suggestion of dawn was beginning to separate the sky from the mountain line.

"You placed markers on the tree line outside my shop," she said.

"No," Kael said. "I did not place them. They were already there."

She looked at him. "That makes it worse, not better."

"I know," he said, his voice carrying the tone of a man working out in real time how much to say.

Vee studied the side of his face. He was looking at the notebook with an attention that went beyond simply recognising the symbol, the way someone looked at something they had not seen in a long time and had not realised how much they missed until it was in front of them.

"Someone put those marks there to protect this property," he said at last. "To warn others away. They would have been placed by someone with authority." He paused. "Someone who knew you would end up in this town and wanted to make sure you had enough time."

"Enough time for what?" Vee asked.

He looked at her directly. "For me to find you," he said quietly. "Before they did."

Vee sat with that for a moment. The scar on her wrist had gone warm and still, not urgent but present, like something listening.

"Who is they?" she asked.

He moved to the window and looked out at the pale morning settling over the main road. His back was to her but she could see the slight tension in his shoulders that had not been there a moment ago.

"People who have been looking for you since the same night I started looking," he said. "With considerably worse intentions."

Outside, the main road was beginning to stir. The baker across the street was opening his shutters. The ordinary sounds of Ashveil waking up, entirely indifferent to the conversation happening in the herbalist's workroom.

Vee looked at the back of Kael's head and thought about the two men who had come into town the previous day asking questions. She had not mentioned them yet. She had been waiting to see what he would say first.

"Two men came into town yesterday," she said. "Asking about a woman matching my description."

Kael turned from the window. His expression was controlled and completely unreadable, which told her more than any expression would have.

"What did they look like?" he asked, his voice even.

She described them precisely. He listened without interrupting. When she finished he moved to the worktable, leaned both hands on its edge and looked at her with the direct, undecorated focus she was beginning to recognise as his version of urgency.

"We have less time than I thought," he said.

Vee looked at him steadily. Something in her chest was very quiet and very certain.

"Then you should stop giving me partial truths," she said. "We will both get further with the full ones."

He looked at her for a long moment. And then, for the first time since she had found him at the edge of the forest, something in Kael's face settled into a different kind of stillness. Not the stillness of a man keeping things back. The stillness of a man deciding, finally, to begin.