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“Town business.” Which is true, and the first outright lie I’ve told her since middle school.

Roslyn had put it more plainly, in the office, with her reading glasses dangling around her neck. “We keep the record. It’s been a Thorndale for a hundred and ninety years, and my days of sitting on the frozen ground all night are behind me.” Then she shoved a leather-bound book into my hands, the pages thick and yellow. Nine entries, all in different handwriting.

The grove is a forty-minute walk from the last road, and we’re a silent procession as we make our way along the wide trail.

The clearing is smaller than I expected. Maybe thirty feet across, ringed with black spruce that lean inward at the top. The night sky a ragged circle above us. In the middle is a stone, waist-high and flat, with a worn surface. Big enough for a person to sit on. Snow is banked up against the sides, and Pete scrapes it away with a shovel. Nick helps him clear it.

Hazel meets me at the perimeter. She’s in a wine-colored parka over something long and dark, and she’s as pleasant as she was across the inquiries desk in October, so I know I’m about to be told a rule.

“You understand what you are here to do?”

“Roslyn said⁠—”

“I know what Roslyn said.” She steps aside and shows me where to stand. “Write it down properly. Your handwriting is the only thing about this evening that concerns me.”

They start as soon as twilight shifts into full dark and form up without anyone saying so. Lloyd, Pete, Hazel, Sigrid, and Nick are evenly spaced around the stone with their backs to the trees.

Roslyn’s spot is mine now, just outside the ring where I can see everything and touch nothing.

Anna kneels on the flat stone in a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up and no coat. Hazel sets a clay bowl on the stone, wide and shallow, the glaze the color of whiskey. Thumbprints of its maker are still on the rim, and I wonder who made it and how long ago.

Lloyd goes first, for the village council, with a thin cut across his thumb, squeezing a bead of blood into the bowl.

Pete after him, for the settler families, wincing hard when he pricks his finger. He’s done this before and still looks like he hates it.

Hazel pierces the pad of her index finger for the coven. Sigrid slices her wrist for the Lund without any expression at all, and doesn’t once look at the knife.

Then Nick.

He takes the knife and opens up his forearm, and a good deal more blood goes into that bowl than came from anyone else. The cut closes over while he’s still standing there, his focus firmly on Anna.

Hazel adds dirt from around the base of the stone, water from a mason jar she carried in, and powder and dried leaves from a leather pouch. She stirs it with a bleached white bone.

The knife is older than the bowl. Hammered iron, handle carved from the horn of some animal and wrapped in cord and hide.

Anna unbuttons her shirt to the sternum. Hazel dips the blade into the bowl and presses the sharp edge to her skin, right over her heart, cutting deeply. Anna’s jaw clenches, but she makes no sound at all. Lines of blood roll down her chest, soaking the fabric. I want to look away. But I keep watching, and I keep writing, because that’s the job I said yes to.

Hazel draws a deep-blue lapis stone the size of a peach from her robes. She presses it to Anna’s chest, over the wound, and holds it there.

“The oath,” Hazel says.

“I, a carrier of the dark, bind myself to the light, to the boundary of our lands, in service and protection of those who put down roots before us, the coven, and the clans who call it home. Never to cross beyond, never to leave our people vulnerable, until the end of my days.”

Anna’s hand covers Hazel’s, holding the stone in place. Hazel returns to the circle. Everybody sits down in the snow, and we wait for the sun.

Sunrise in the third week of December comes a minute or two before eleven. By nine p.m., I can’t feel my feet. By midnight, I’ve started printing one letter at a time, because my hand won’t write in cursive anymore.

Around three in the morning, Nick crouches beside me and puts his coat over my legs.

“You’ve been here before,” I say.

“Four years ago.” He glances at Anna, who hasn’t moved a muscle since pledging her freedom to this town.

“Yours?”

He nods. “Three days after I took my Blood Rites. Three days of being a vampire. It’s supposed to be a week at minimum. We didn’t have a week. It was August. We didn’t have much night either.”

I think about his scar. I’ve traced my fingertips over the puckered edges in the dark and never asked because he flinches, every single time.