Marked by the shadows

Epilogue

Three weeks after the glade, a letter arrived at Maren's shop.

It had no postmark. No return address. The envelope was old, the paper thick and slightly yellowed at the edges, the kind of quality that had not been manufactured for at least fifty years. Maren's name was written on the front in handwriting that was not familiar to her, and that was the thing that made her set down her tea and sit very still for a moment before opening it.

In forty years of living in Ravenshollow, Maren knew every hand that had ever written to her.

She did not know this one.

Inside was a single sheet, folded once. Six lines. No signature.

She read it twice, then set it flat on the table under the lamp and looked at it for a long time without moving. The objects in the glass cases around her sat in their careful arrangements. The maps on the walls held their overlapping territories. Everything in the shop was exactly as it had always been, and yet the quality of the air had shifted in a way she recognised from long experience as the feeling of something arriving that had been in transit for a very long time.

She reached for her coat.

It was early, barely past six, the streets of Ravenshollow still quiet and the fog sitting low against the cobblestones. She walked quickly, the letter folded in her pocket, her lamp unnecessary in the pale morning light. She had not sent word ahead. There was no time for that and besides, Lena would be awake. She always was at this hour.

She was right. Lena answered the door before the second knock, already dressed, a cup of tea in her hand and the particular alertness in her eyes of someone whose instincts had been finely tuned by six weeks of Ravenshollow.

She took one look at Maren's face and stepped back to let her in.

Kael was at the kitchen table. He looked up when Maren entered and the quality of his stillness changed immediately, the way it always did when something required his full attention.

Maren set the letter on the table between them and sat down.

"This came this morning," she said. "I do not know who sent it. I do not recognise the hand. I have been in this town for forty years and I have correspondence from everyone who has ever mattered here and I have never seen this writing before."

Lena sat down. She looked at the letter but did not reach for it yet, reading the situation the way she had learned to read things, taking the measure of it before committing. "What does it say?"

Maren looked at her steadily.

"It says that the original bond did not have two keepers," she said. "It says it had four. And it says that the other two are already here."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Kael's eyes met Lena's across the table.

Outside, the fog pressed against the windows, and somewhere beneath the town, in the deep old ground, the thing that had woken in the glade three weeks ago turned its attention toward the small lit kitchen on the edge of Lark Street and waited to see what they would do next.

To be continued in Book 2: What the Ground Keeps