Darcy’s eyes closed for a brief instant.
Harrowe studied her with something like awe—and something like unease. He drew a breath, slow and deliberate, as though checking himself before stepping onto uncertain ground. When he spoke again, the reverence was gone from his voice. What replaced it was harder.
“You misunderstand me.”
Elizabeth held his gaze. “I do not think so.”
“You think that because what it asks is hard, it may be set aside. It can’t!” He gestured toward the window. “The fractures—the cracks in the fields, the wells run thin, the unrest you feel—that ain’t threats meant to drive you. The land’s already answerin’. And it’s been left too long without reply.”
Elizabeth’s jaw set. “Then it may answer without us.”
Harrowe shook his head. “It won’t. It can’t. Something must stand in the breach. “Somethin’ has to bear what was once borne willin’. If not a man, then stone. Field. Tide.” His jaw tightened. “That’s the bargain.”
The words settled over Elizabeth like ash. Her gaze slid, against her will, to Darcy.
He had not moved. Not when Harrowe spoke of strain, nor when the wordbargainwas uttered as though it were an ordinary thing. He sat in his chair now, with his shoulders squared, and his hands braced against the chair arms, accepting it—accepting everything—with the same silent endurance he had shown all morning.
Something inside her snapped taut. “I will not accept abargainthat requires his ruin!”
Darcy coughed again. The sound cut sharper than any word.
Harrowe’s eyes flicked to him, then returned to her. “That’s not a choice you have.”
The inevitability of it landed heavy and suffocating, like a weight pressed suddenly to her chest. Heat surged up beneath her ribs, fierce and unmanageable—not fear, not sorrow, but a rising, desperate refusal that had nowhere to go.
“You speak,” she said, and felt her voice tremble despite herself, “as though suffering were a mechanism. As though pain were proof that the answer is correct.”
“Not proof,” Harrowe said. “Payment.”
The room seemed to contract around that word.
Elizabeth could hear Darcy breathing now—every careful, deliberate draw of air measured as though it must be rationed. The sound scratched at her nerves, dragged at something raw inside her that she had been holding together by will alone. She wanted to turn to him, to cross the room in two strides and put herself between him and this calm, scholarly certainty.
“You would have one of us answer,” she said, and the words felt thick, difficult, “for what others failed to do. You would take what remains, and call it balance.”
Darcy said nothing.
That was the worst of it.
He did not protest. He did not contradict Harrowe. He sat there as though the decision had already been made, as though his body were merely the instrument by which it would be carried out.
Harrowe did not retreat from her anger. He took it in—her clenched hands, the sharp set of her shoulders, the way her breath had gone tight and high—as though these, too, were data points, as necessary as any marginal note or brittle verse.
“Then hear it plainly,” he said.
Elizabeth lifted her chin. Her heart was hammering now, hard enough that she could feel it in her throat. Darcy’s breathing scraped on the air behind her, steady only by force, and the sound threaded itself through every word Harrowe spoke.
“There’s a place,” Harrowe continued. “Not a house. Not a church. Ground that was once marked and then forgotten. The ballads call it a meeting-ground. TheLibernames it only by description—thorn and water, stone set where no stone should be.”
Elizabeth’s mouth went dry.
“I don’t know where, but I think it’s somewhere north of here,” Harrowe said. “Near enough that the quake answered it first.”
Darcy shifted sharply. Elizabeth felt it without looking.
“There’ll come a time,” Harrowe said. “Not marked on a calendar. Marked in the land. When the ground’s already wearied, when the Lady’s near spent, and the Witness has been drawn close enough that what lies quiet can’t lie so any longer.”
Elizabeth let out a short, incredulous breath. “So, we are to go there. Together. And then what?”
