“He was five years old,” the baker stood, his large hands resting gently on the dog’s two still heads. He didn’t look at me with anger, which would have been bearable. He looked at me with exhaustion. “He used to chase the frost-voles out of the grain stores. Best mouser we ever had. Never let a single sack spoil.”
“He liked the crusts,” the wife said, touching the dog’s ear. “Whatever we burned that morning, he’d wait by the oven door for it. Even when the flour got scarce last winter... he always waited.”
“I’m sorry,” I choked out.
The baker looked up, his eyes rimmed with red. “We saved for months to pay for this visit, Miss Emberlin. We thought... well. We remembered how the valley used to be. When the beasts just got old, instead of turning into monsters.” He shook his head, looking past me, out the window where the sky was bruising purple. “Before the Stormgardes forgot us.”
He gathered the dog’s body into his arms, hefting the weight with a grunt. “There’s no fixing it now, is there? Not for any of us.”
Back in the supply room, I braced myself against the soapstone sink, scrubbing at my hands until the skin was raw andred, but the tremors wouldn’t stop. The water in the basin sloshed over the rim, splashing my boots.
“Stop it,” a voice hissed.
The door slammed shut, slicing off the sounds of the weeping baker in the front room. Briony stood there with high color in her cheeks and not much patience.
“I have to get clean,” I said, reaching for the scrubbing brush again. “I have to—“
Briony crossed the small room in two strides. She grabbed my wrists, her grip surprisingly hard, and yanked my hands out of the water.
“Look at them, Lysa!” she said. “Look at what you’re doing!”
I tried to pull away, but my strength had drained out of me with the dog’s life. I was a husk, trembling in her grip. My hands were a ruin, frostbite burns from the Quieting sat stark white against the scrub-marks. My fingernails were blue, the beds contrasting sickeningly with the dried blood I hadn’t managed to wash from my cuticles.
“You’re killing yourself, Lysa! Look at you!” Tears spilled onto her cheeks, but she didn’t let go. “Whatever is happening to these animals, whatever this sickness is... it is too much. It is not worth your life. You have to stop.”
“I can’t,” I said, the words brittle. “If I stop, the village—“
“To hell with the village!” Briony shoved my hands back toward my chest. “I don’t care about the infirmary! I care aboutyou! You disappear when you use the gift, Lysa, you turn into a ghost right in front of me.”
The door creaked open again. My father stood on the threshold, his shoulders slumped. He looked between us: Briony fierce and weeping, me shaking and bloodstained.
“She’s right, Lysa,” he said. “We cannot ask this of you anymore. Not at this cost.”
“It’s not about the cost, the river is turning into sludge. The foxes are seizing in the mud. That dog out there died because the magic inside him curdled.”
I leaned back against the sink, gripping the edge to keep upright. “Tell me. Everything you didn’t say when the letter arrived. Why does it matter?”
My father rubbed a hand over his face. “Lysa—“
“Why is the manor so important for Abberwyn?” I demanded. “People say the Stormgardes abandoned us, but the moment that house started dying, the town started rotting. It’s not a coincidence.”
Father sighed. He stepped into the room, closing the door behind him.
“It’s the Hush Magic,” he said. “We think of it as simple—heating rugs, cooling tea, finding books. Domestic comforts. But magic requires a filter. It requires a structure to ground it, or it becomes wild and toxic.”
He gestured vaguely toward the ceiling, toward the mountain peaks hidden by the rain. “The Stormgarde ley-line isn’t only a source of power, Lysa. It’s a heart. The manor was built to pump the magic through the valley, to refine it, to strip away the volatility before it reaches the town. The Stormgardes...they are the keepers of the filter. Not many people know this though. I, myself just found a few pages in one of your mother’s books.”
I stared at him, the cold in my bones forgotten for a heartbeat. “So when the manor crumbles...”
“The filter breaks,” Briony said, horror dawning in her green eyes.
“Raw, unrefined magic bleeds into the soil,” Father confirmed. “It twists the creatures first. Then the water. Then us. If Fenrik dies, and that manor falls... Abberwyn won’t just be poor. It will be uninhabitable.”
I looked down at my ruined hands. The poisoning was happening to the entire valley. And Kelda, she wasn’t just killing a man. She was damming the river at its source.
“I need to see that book, Father.”
“I’ll find the text,” Father said, though his gaze drifted toward the front room, where the silence was heavier than the sobbing had been. “But Lysa... knowing the mechanics of the dam doesn’t help when the water is already drowning you.”
