Page 50 of The Bear Between Us

The altar stone with its crack down the center, the moss-covered ring of ancient stones, the enormous roots that have grown through everything over centuries. The carved symbols on the altar stone are dim now, the ritual's heat long gone, and the hollow has the quality of somewhere significant that has returned to being simply old.

Elowen stands at the edge of the stone ring and closes her eyes.

I watch her read the ley line, the mark on her wrist brightening slightly as she engages with the power.

"It's there," she says. "Brennan was right, it's structural. Built into the line itself like a knot." She opens her eyes. "It's not complicated. He built it to be robust rather than sophisticated, something that would survive anything that happened at the surface level." She looks at the altar stone. "But I'm not at the surface level anymore."

She steps into the stone ring.

What she does next takes about twenty minutes and is almost entirely invisible from the outside. She stands at the altar stone with both hands resting on its surface and her eyes open and the mark blazing steadily up her arm and the only external evidence that anything is happening is the ley line's behavior under our feet, which shifts from the wrong quality Maris flagged in this morning's readings toward something cleaner by increments too gradual to track moment to moment but visible over the full span of the twenty minutes.

Torin stands at the hollow's edge and watches the perimeter.

Maris watches the ley line readings on the monitoring equipment she brought, calling out the figures every few minutes in a low voice. The numbers trend in one direction, steadily, without reversal.

I watch Elowen.

She doesn't look like someone struggling. She looks like someone working, the distinction I've learned to read over five weeks of watching her work, and the work is thorough and unhurried and completely hers.

At the twenty-two minute mark she lifts both hands from the altar stone and steps back.

"It's gone," she says. Not triumphant. Just factual, the way she delivers information she's confirmed and doesn't need to dramatize. "The knot is dissolved. The ley line is clean."

Maris checks her readings. Checks them again. "Confirmed," she says. "The baseline is clean. Cleaner than any reading I've taken since I arrived."

Elowen looks at the altar stone for a moment, the cracked surface and the dim carvings and the roots grown through everything, and whatever she's thinking as she looks at it she keeps to herself. Then she turns from the shrine and walks toward the hollow's edge where I'm standing.

She stops beside me and we both look at the hollow for a moment.

"That's the last of it," she says.

"Yes."

She looks at the mark on her wrist, fully back to its settled baseline, the luminescence quiet and steady. "He spent eleven years building toward something that took me twenty minutes to dismantle," she says. Not with satisfaction exactly. Something more like perspective.

"He didn't account for you," I say.

"No," she says. "He accounted for a vessel. That's a different thing."

We leave the shrine hollow and walk back through the forest toward the territory boundary, and the forest around us is ordinary and old and completely still, and the ley line under the path runs clean all the way home.

39

ELOWEN

The boundary work takes forty minutes.

Last week it took three hours. The week before that, at the shrine with everything still raw and new, it took most of a day. The power is learning the territory the way I learned it as a child, by repetition and attention and the slow accumulation of familiarity, and what required conscious effort seven days ago is beginning to require something closer to intention. Not effortless. But mine in the way that practiced things become mine, integrated rather than applied.

I finish the northern section and walk the eastern creek line and by the time I reach the southern boundary the morning is fully light and the forest around me is doing what it does now, which is acknowledge my presence without demanding anything from it. A working relationship. My grandmother would have had something to say about that and I find I can think about her now without the weight of betrayal sitting on top of everything else. She made the choices she made. I made mine. Both of us were trying to survive something larger than ourselves with the tools available.

I'm at peace with her. It took five weeks and a god's worth of power and a grandmother's roadmap to get here, but I'm at peace with her.

Rourke is waiting at the territory's eastern boundary when I come back through, which means Kaedric told him when I'd be finishing, which means they've been coordinating my schedule without telling me, which I'll address later with the specific tone I reserve for things that are mildly irritating but not actually worth a significant argument.

He's leaning against his truck, notebook in hand and looks at me when I come through the tree line.

"Ms. Briar," he says.