The next few entries were more of the same. Druidic corruption. Soil taint. The green sickness. All of it pointed to druids as the cause, none of it offered any way to prove otherwise.
"This is useless." Chloe pushed the book away. "It's just centuries of people blaming druids for things they couldn't explain."
"Maybe not entirely useless." Moira had been reading her own book, and now she turned it to face Chloe. "Look at this."
The page showed a diagram of a well, surrounded by concentric circles. Annotations in cramped handwriting filled the margins.
"What am I looking at?"
"A containment breach." Moira traced the circles with her finger. "This is from a case in Scotland, about two hundred years ago. A well that had been sealed started leaking. Not water. Magic. Old magic, bound into the earth by someone who wanted it hidden."
"What happened?"
"The land around it started dying. Crops first, then trees, then the animals that grazed there." Moira met her eyes. "Sound familiar?"
"Does it say what caused the breach?"
"Someone opened the seal. Deliberately." Moira's voice dropped. "The text says it was a local farmer who thought there was treasure hidden in the well. He broke the binding without understanding what he was releasing."
Chloe thought of the old well Corin had mentioned. Abandoned. Sealed. Sitting right in the path of the spreading sickness.
"What stopped it?"
"They found the source and resealed it. But it took months, and the land never fully recovered." Moira closed the book. "Chloe, if something like this is happening here..."
"Then it's not about druids at all."
"No. It's about whatever's in that well."
Chloe sat back, her mind racing. The whispers at the café, the implications in these old texts, the way people had been looking at her since the plants started dying. All of it pointed at her blood, her heritage, her inability to explain herself.
But Corin had been right. The problem had started before she'd ever touched his orchard. Before she'd worked with Freya's herbs. Before any of it.
Someone had opened something that should have stayed closed and she was going to find out who.
"Can I borrow this?" She tapped the book with the well diagram.
"Take it." Moira was already gathering the others. "And Chloe? Be careful. If someone did this deliberately, they might not want you digging into it."
"I know."
She tucked the book into her bag and moved toward the door. The afternoon light was fading outside the Book Nook's windows, turning the sky the color of bruises.
Knowledge was armor. But sometimes, armor wasn't enough.
10
CORIN
The moon hung low over the orchard, three-quarters full and bright enough to cast shadows through the falling snow.
Corin stood at the very edge of his property, stripped down to nothing, flakes settling on his bare shoulders and melting against his skin. He'd been fighting the urge to shift for days. His bear had been restless since the first hive weakened, pacing beneath his skin with an urgency that wouldn't quiet.
Tonight, he stopped fighting.
The shift came like breathing. Bones cracked and reformed. Muscles stretched and thickened. Fur erupted across his skin in a wave of dark brown, and his vision sharpened until the night became something close to day.
When it was done, he stood on four massive paws, seven hundred pounds of grizzly bear with senses no human body could match.
