Chapter 7 The Girl in the Fire

He told her to sit down first.

Vee pulled the second stool from beneath the worktable and sat across from him with her hands folded and her expression open, the way she sat with patients who needed to say something difficult before she could help them. She had learned early in her years as an herbalist that the way a person held themselves while listening either loosened or tightened the speaker. She made herself loose and waited.

Kael sat with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor for a moment. It was the first time she had seen him look anywhere other than directly at her or at the thing he was assessing, and the small departure from his usual steadiness told her that whatever was coming had weight even for him.

"There is a world that exists alongside this one," he began. "Older than the towns and the roads and everything built on top of it. Most people who live in places like Ashveil have no awareness of it. It runs beneath the surface of things and keeps itself that way deliberately."

"A world of wolves," Vee said.

He looked up at her. "Yes," he said. "Packs. Territory. A hierarchy that has governed the same land for centuries. Five packs in this region alone, each with their own Alpha, their own laws, their own way of doing things." He paused. "And their own Luna."

Vee held his gaze. "You told me yesterday that I was connected to a world I do not remember. You are telling me now that this is the world."

"Yes," Kael said again.

She nodded slowly, not in agreement exactly but in the manner of someone receiving information and placing it carefully rather than dropping it. "Go on," she said.

He watched her for a moment as though checking the ground before putting weight on it. Then he continued.

"The most powerful Alpha line in this region is the Draeth line. It has held the largest territory for four generations, governed the relations between all five packs, and kept a particular kind of order that the other packs depended on even when they resented it." He stopped.

"And?" Vee said.

"Seven years ago the Alpha of the Draeth line was imprisoned," Kael said. "By a council of elders who decided his power had grown too great and his independence too inconvenient. They framed it as a matter of safety, told the other packs he was losing control, that he was becoming dangerous. It was a lie built carefully enough to be believed." His voice was level throughout, carrying the flatness of someone recounting a thing they have had a long time to make peace with and have not entirely managed it.

Vee looked at him. She looked at the way he held himself when he spoke about it, the particular quality of the stillness, and something moved through her chest that was not quite recognition and not quite grief but lived in the neighborhood of both.

"You are the Alpha of the Draeth line," she said.

He did not answer immediately. He held her gaze and let the silence confirm it.

"Kaelon," she said quietly, his full name arriving in her mouth without her deciding to produce it, from somewhere she could not identify.

Something broke open in his expression so briefly she nearly missed it. He controlled it quickly but not quickly enough.

"Yes," he said.

Vee sat with that. The workroom was very still around them, the morning light now fully established, the sounds of Ashveil outside going about its business without any awareness of what was being said inside. She looked at her hands in her lap and thought about the recurring nightmare. The silver light. The voice she could never hold onto. The howl that cut off mid-cry.

"The person they imprisoned," she said carefully. "What happened to her? The Luna."

Kaelon was quiet for a moment that had a different quality than his other silences. This one was not the silence of a man choosing his words. It was the silence of a man bracing.

"She disappeared the same night," he said. "No one in the pack knew where she went. She left no explanation, no message, nothing to indicate where she had gone or whether she had gone willingly. The pack searched for months." He paused. "I searched from the moment I was free."

Vee looked up at him. "And the markers on my tree line."

"Were placed by her," Kaelon said. "Before she disappeared. She knew this town. She knew she would end up here, which means she planned her own disappearance carefully and in advance." He met Vee's eyes steadily. "She protected this property because she knew she would need it. She left herself a safe place to land."

The scar on Vee's wrist burned suddenly, sharp and insistent, a single pulse that made her breath catch. She pressed her palm over it and the burning subsided but did not disappear entirely. It sat there, low and insistent, like a word being repeated just below the threshold of hearing.

She opened her mouth to say something and the room tilted.

It was not dizziness exactly. It was more like the world briefly became a transparency laid over another image, and the image beneath it was vivid and specific and entirely foreign. A clearing lit by firelight. A circle of wolves. A young woman in a ceremonial robe with dark hair and steady hands and an expression of absolute terrified certainty on her face.

Vee's own face.

The image lasted perhaps three seconds and then the workroom was simply the workroom again, the lamp burning on the table corner, Kaelon watching her with an alertness that told her he had seen the change in her expression.

"What just happened?" he asked, his voice low and careful.

Vee pressed her fingers against her eyes for a moment. Her heart was moving faster than it should have been.

"I saw something," she said. "A clearing. A fire. A woman who looked like me standing inside a circle." She lowered her hand and looked at him. "Was that a memory?"

Kaelon looked at her with those grey eyes that were not quite steady anymore.

"Yes," he said softly. "I believe it was."