The meeting broke up after that, not with any grand declarations but with the simple shifting of bodies back into motion. Marla stood, Pebble perched on her hip, and stalked out into the clearing to begin barking new orders as if nothing unusual had happened. That was her way of fighting fear: by giving it no room to grow roots.

  Rogan left to find Inna, his expression thoughtful in a way James hadn’t seen before. Bren lingered only long enough to clap James on the shoulder, then followed, heading for his weapons to check them over.

  James stayed seated for a moment longer, the longhouse feeling strangely empty now. Lumen drifted around him in a slow, tired orbit, light soft and dim. The familiar did not speak, but its presence was a small comfort.

  He got to his feet with a groan and stepped outside.

  The clearing looked almost normal at first glance. Smoke curled up from the central hearth in a lazy spiral. Children darted between legs. The aether fawns grazed near their fence, their snowy bodies and glowing horns little patches of impossible light. The Heartroot towered over everything, leaves gleaming with a soft, golden-red glow. Mana butterflies flickered around its branches like living confetti.

  Only the tightness around mouths and the way people’s eyes kept flicking to the treeline betrayed the undercurrent of unease.

  James didn’t try to erase it. He just did what he always did now. He started working.

  He called Havlik over as the man finished stacking a bundle of firewood. Havlik was broad-shouldered, with a kind face and the permanent air of someone expecting to be given a task. Right now, that face was pinched with the same fear that haunted the others.

  “Havlik,” James said. “Got a moment?”

  “Of course, Chieftain,” Havlik answered. His voice wobbled just a little. “Is something wrong?”

  “Besides the obvious?” James tried for gentle humor and almost managed it. “I’m sending you with Rogan tomorrow. Down to the tunnels. I want you to get stronger.”

  Havlik’s eyes widened. “Me? I… I’m not a warrior. Not yet.”

  “You might be,” James said. “Or you might not. That’s what we’re going to find out.” He took a breath. “I’d like to bless you. Now, if that’s alright.”

  Havlik looked like a man standing in front of a roaring river, about to step in without knowing how to swim. Fear warred with something else in his eyes. Hope, maybe. Or desperation. Eventually, he squared his shoulders and nodded.

  “If you think I can help,” he said, “then I’ll try.”

  “That’s all I ask,” James replied.

  He raised his hand, feeling the now-familiar tug of the blessing ability stirring. It brushed against his mana reserves, careful, not nearly as greedy as Hero’s Benediction had been. A warmth welled up in his chest and flowed down his arm, into his palm.

  “By whatever power thinks it was a good idea to drop me here,” he muttered under his breath, “let this actually work.” Then, more formally, he touched Havlik’s shoulder. “I bless you, Havlik. May your path open.”

  Mana flared, gentle but undeniable. Havlik jerked, eyes going wide and glassy for a heartbeat as invisible notifications flooded his vision. James pulled his hand back, resisting the urge to pry.

  “Well?” he asked, after a moment.

  Havlik blinked rapidly, swallowing. “I… got something,” he said slowly. “But I need to… read it. Figure it out.”

  “Do that,” James said. “Talk to Rogan later. He’ll help you find where you fit in the training. Tomorrow you go with him. Today you rest and get your head around whatever popped up.”

  Havlik nodded, still shell-shocked, and wandered away, nearly walking into a firewood pile before correcting. James watched him go with a mix of curiosity and satisfaction. Time would tell what path had opened, but at least one had.

  He didn’t have much longer to muse. Bren was already waiting at the edge of the clearing, knives at his belt, shoulder freshly healed. Rogan joined them with his usual quiet presence. As they started toward the treeline, the soft chime of the bell-flowers followed them like a hopeful chorus.

  They passed the pasture fence, where the aether fawns lifted their delicate heads to watch them, eyes glowing softly. Finni was in the middle of them, a white shape among white shapes, guiding them with gentle gestures. His red hair stirred though there was barely any wind, and his new green eyes glinted with an odd light.

  He turned as they passed, forehead creasing.

  “You are leaving,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Just a little walk,” James answered. “Tracking whoever decided to use Bren for target practice.”

  Finni’s expression tightened, then smoothed out again, his face settling into that calm, slightly distant serenity that had become more common since his last blessing. He looked at Bren’s shoulder, eyes lingering on the faint pink skin where the wound had been.

  “I will come,” he said.

  Rogan frowned. “This is not a stroll with fawns,” he said. “It could be dangerous.”

  Finni met his gaze without flinching. “The forest wishes me to go,” he replied. “It hums with it. There is a note in the roots, a pull in the leaves. I hear it when I breathe. It wants me there.”

  James and Bren exchanged a look. There had been a time when James would have written a sentence like that off as poetic nonsense. Now he had a mana tree in his front yard and a blessing ability that turned ordinary villagers into glowing heroes when he was desperate enough.

  “If the forest wants him, we should probably listen,” James said. “Besides, if we say no, he’ll follow anyway, and I’d rather keep him where I can see him.”

  Rogan grunted, conceding the point with poor grace. “Stay behind me,” he said to Finni. “If something attacks, you drop and let us handle it.”

  Finni nodded with that same eerie, composed obedience. “I will stand where the forest wills me to stand,” he said. “But I will not be foolish.”

  James chose to take that as agreement.

  They stepped beneath the trees.

  The forest swallowed them quickly. The sounds of the clearing faded, replaced by the rustle of leaves and the occasional distant call of something unseen. Shafts of moonlight slanted through the canopy, dust motes and mana motes dancing together. The butterflies that loved the Heartroot did not follow, but here and there James saw faint glimmers of aether fireflies hovering near mossy trunks, as if the tree’s influence had begun to spread.

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  “Show us the way,” James said quietly.

  Bren nodded and led the way, feet finding the same careful path he had walked earlier that day. James followed a few paces behind, hand resting lightly on the hilt of a mana-knife he had formed and kept ready to refresh. Rogan’s heavy tread was surprisingly quiet behind him, the big man having learned to move softly long ago. Finni brought up the rear, footsteps almost soundless on the loam.

  It did not take long to reach the spot where Bren had been shot.

  “Here,” the hunter said, stopping near a thick-bellied tree with a familiar scar. The bark was gouged deeply where the arrow had slammed into it, and the ground nearby showed the faint scuff where Bren had dropped to roll.

  James walked slowly around the area, letting Mana Resonance stretch outward. The forest was a low, steady hum in that sense, roots and streams and tiny beasts all singing their quiet songs. Fainter, but still present, he felt the echo of sharp, focused intent that had lingered when they first arrived. Someone had stood here, drawn a bow, and decided a stranger’s life was worth an arrow.

  He crouched near a cluster of ferns and brushed them aside.

  “Hidden vantage point,” he murmured. The small rise gave a clear line of sight to the spot where Bren had stood, but was screened by branches from any casual glance.

  Rogan crouched as well, fingers tracing the ground. “Bootprints,” he said. “Light. Not like my feet. Quick.”

  Bren moved to another side of the rise. “There,” he said, pointing. A frayed strip of something dangled from a low shrub. James plucked it free. It was a strip of woven fiber, too smooth to be simple vine, too rough to be fine cloth. Rope, maybe, or harness material.

  Near the base of another tree, a pale shape caught Finni’s eye. He knelt and picked up a feather. It was a twin to those on the arrow’s fletching, long and grey with an odd sheen.

  “Whatever shot at me had good gear,” Bren said grimly. “Bow, ropes, proper boots. Not some half-starved wanderer with a stick.”

  James found a second arrow half-buried in a tree trunk a little further on, its shaft snapped from where Bren had broken it off. He ran his fingers along the smooth wood, the well-cut stone, and felt his unease deepen.

  They followed the trail as far as they could.

  For a while, it was simple. Even a skilled stalker could not walk through a forest without leaving some trace. A bent twig here, a scuffed patch of dirt there, a faint impression where a heel had pressed just a little too hard. Bren pointed each out with quiet efficiency, and James’s Mana Resonance picked up the lingering echo of foreign mana, a thin line threading through the ambient hum.

  Then, as if a knife had cut the world in two, it stopped.

  They stood in a small hollow between three thick trees, the ground covered in a carpet of fallen leaves. Here, the tracks simply vanished. No snapped twigs, no disturbed earth. Bren circled the area three times, then four, increasingly frustrated. Rogan tested the trunks themselves, then looked up into the branches, searching for any sign of a rope or perch. There was nothing.

  “It’s like they just flew away,” Bren muttered finally. “No trail. No scent. Nothing.”

  “That is not how walking works,” Rogan said.

  James closed his eyes and extended his mana sense as far as he could. For a moment he thought he caught a thread, faint and strange, drifting upward rather than forward, but it slipped away like mist between his fingers.

  He was about to swear when Finni shifted, expression distant.

  “The forest says,” Finni began, then hesitated, as if listening to someone only he could hear. His brows pulled together in a slight frown. “It says… it was not human.”

  James opened his eyes. “What?”

  Finni’s gaze was unfocused, fixed somewhere over James’s shoulder. “The one who walked here. The one who watched and shot and left. The forest knows their steps. It tastes their passing. It says they are not of the People.” He tilted his head, listening. “It says it likes them.”

  “That’s… comforting,” Bren said dryly. “The forest likes whoever tried to pierce me like a roasting hare.”

  Finni’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “The forest does not think as you do, Bren. It likes storms and fires and the sharp teeth of wolves. It loves what moves, what changes.”

  “Still not comforting,” James muttered.

  Rogan grunted. “Not human,” he said slowly. “Beast?”

  Finni shook his head. “No. The weight of them is… different. Branch and bow, leaf and step. Old paths. Not beast.”

  James felt a strange little chill run up his spine. His mind tried to supply a word, a shape, something from the fantasy books he used to read curled up on the couch with coffee. He pushed it down. This was not a game, and guessing based on old stories was a good way to die confused.

  “What matters,” he said instead, “is that someone, something, out there is watching us, and the forest doesn’t think they’re a bad idea. Which means they might not be enemies. Yet. Or they might be very efficient enemies.” He sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Either way, we don’t know enough to act. Not yet.”

  Bren scowled at the empty woods, as if sheer glowering might make the hidden watcher reveal themselves. “Feels wrong to just go back,” he said. “But I can’t track what isn’t there.”

  “I know.” James patted his shoulder gently. “You did good. You’re alive. That matters. We’ll treat this as a warning, not a death sentence. For now we harden the village and we get stronger. Whoever or whatever they are, we won’t be this easy to test next time.”

  Rogan nodded once, acceptance in every line of his big frame. “We train,” he said. “We build. Then if they come, they find teeth instead of soft bellies.”

  Finni looked down at his bare hands, flexing his fingers. “The forest will whisper if they draw near again,” he said quietly. “It is curious. It will not keep such things to itself.”

  James met his eyes and, for a moment, saw none of the boyish uncertainty that had clung to Finni when they first met. There was something older there now, something deep and green and faintly unsettling. He wondered, not for the first time, exactly what price the forest would ask for lending its voice.

  “Then tell me if you hear so much as a leaf sneeze in the wrong tone,” he said. “Please.”

  Finni’s mouth curved, this time definitely a smile. “I will,” he promised.

  They turned back toward the clearing. The walk back was quiet, each of them wrapped in their own thoughts. The forest seemed no more threatening than usual; a bird called overhead, a distant rustle signaled some small creature’s passage. The ordinary sounds clashed against the memory of stone and blood and golden light underground, of arrows and invisible stalkers above.

  By the time the bell-flowers chimed again and the Heartroot’s shadow fell over them, James felt the weight of the day settling over his shoulders like a too-heavy cloak.

  The villagers looked up as they emerged. Faces searched theirs for signs of disaster or relief. James let them see neither panic nor complacency. He let them see determination instead.

  “We didn’t find who did it,” he called out, not bothering to soften the truth. Murmurs rippled through the clearing. “But we found their traces. Someone with better tools and better training than us is close enough to shoot at our people. So here’s what we’re going to do.”

  He glanced at Marla. She stepped forward at once, Pebble now perched on her brother’s hip somewhere in the crowd, having been transferred like a particularly beloved, squirming bundle.

  “From tonight,” James said, raising his voice so even the children at the pasture fence could hear, “we’re on watches. No one goes outside the clearing alone after dark. If you need wood or water, you take someone with you. Rogan will explain who stands when. If you see anything strange, you tell someone. You do not shrug and walk away. We will build more. We will train more. And in the morning, Rogan will take some of you to the tunnels, and you will beat monsters into experience until they wish they had stayed in their holes.”

  There was a strained little chuckle at that, quickly smothered. It was enough.

  He let his gaze sweep over them, taking in every face, every worried eye and furrowed brow. “We are not going to curl up and hope this goes away,” he said. “We’ve worked too hard to build this place. We have a longhouse that keeps us warm, gardens that feed us, a tree that gives us dreams instead of nightmares, and now we have metal.” He jerked his thumb toward the little pile of ore they had brought back. “We’re going to use all of it. We’re going to take this hit, and we’re going to turn it into something that makes us stronger.”

  Marla’s chin lifted, something like pride flaring behind her eyes. Rogan’s shoulders straightened. Bren’s mouth quirked. Even some of the children stood a little taller, even if they didn’t quite understand why.

  James let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He felt Lumen drift a little closer, the familiar’s dim light warming just enough to tickle his cheek.

  Time was not on their side. Somewhere beyond the trees, something unseen had marked them. But here, for this moment, they were alive, together, and moving.

  That would have to be enough, until it wasn’t.

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