Protect the Keepers.
I shivered, the voice simultaneously a breeze through the canopy and a breath on the back of my neck.
Briar shook himself like he’d walked through a cobweb. “Yeah. I never quite got used to that.”
Rowan had gone still. “It’s willing to talk, if you’re willing to hear it.”
I exchanged a look with Kessian. Adrenaline wearing off, I scrambled for what questions to ask. “Can you tell us what the wraith is?”
You. Not you. Like you, but other.
That made no sense to me at all. It only opened more questions. Kessian looked equally frustrated.
“What do you mean, it’s me but not me?”
A part of you. A piece, severed. The soul of its wild magic twinned to your own witch’s heart.
“And what does it want?”
To go home.
“But … I thought Shearwater was its home.”
It is … a tree without roots. A house unoccupied. A place people come and go but never stay.
“Are you talking about the wraith or Shearwater or me?”
Yes.
I scrubbed a hand roughly through my hair, as if I might tear it out. Kessian leaned into me in a subtle show of comfort.
Briar said, “I know. The riddles don’t help matters.”
“If it’s any comfort, this is the forest being quite direct, like,” Rowan said.
“But I was back in Shearwater, and the wraith was there. If it means for all of us to be reunited, to go home, we already have been, and it still tried to drag Kessian off to …”
I trailed off. The breeze through the trees whispered eagerly like I’d said the right thing.
I didn’t want to believe the implication, but the look shared between Rowan and Briar confirmed they were thinking the same. The strid … It wanted us to go back to the strid.
The Keeper will find safe passage. Your dreams are the compass. Time is the road you must travel.
I shivered. Dreams? Like Kessian’s memory I’d found myself in? Time, like its visions of the past and future?
“What does that mean? How?” Kessian demanded.
But the forest no longer seemed to listen, its words rushing together, whistling intensely through the trees.
In times of old, its waters ran through the veins of all who drank from its well, and they were it, and it was them, and they were Shearwater. But now it is a poisoned well. The blood of its heart leaks far from its shore, so now the water is not blood, but tears. It cries, “Come home,” but no one hears it, and the poison makes it bitter and sour. It ensnares the blood to sleep forever in the depths, but you—you escaped. You, a grave awaiting burial, and your Keeper the spade.
“The Keeper? Who is the Keeper?” I asked.
“The one with whom you share dreams.”
The voice rattled my teeth in my skull, made my bones ache, but that last phrase drove a splinter of fear through my heart.
Kessian said, “Does that mean …? AmIthe Keeper? Am I a danger to him and not the other way around?”
