Page 23 of The Arrow and the Alder

“Take it. It is yours.” He held the cloth and ring toward Josephine.

Her throat moved as she swallowed, and she approached on sluggish legs, as if she could keep Rys alive a bit longer. She didn’t look at Alder; her eyes fixed on the little circle of tarnished hope resting on his palm. When she reached him, she hesitated. Her hand hovered over his, shaking as the tears streamed down her face. Then she took the ring and squeezed it in her fist, closing her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,Rys,” she said like a prayer.

Alder was sorry too. It never should have been Rys. It should have beenhim.

“Was it quick?” Josephine whispered.

It took Alder a moment to register the question. “Yes,” he answered, softer this time.

Josephine squeezed the little ring as if she might squeeze Rys back into existence. As if she might impart a last message to him through the medium of that enchanted moonstone:I will not forget your sacrifice, for as long as I live, so help me Ava in heaven.

Alder needed to go. Now. Before he lost Massie.

Before he lost himself.

He strode briskly for the door.

“You’re leaving?” Josephine choked.

He stopped and turned just enough to see her at the edge of his periphery. “I have fulfilled my debt to your brother.”

“Your…debt?”

“He saved my life. In return, I have saved his memory. There is nothing more required of me.”

She stared at him.

Alder knew he was being short, but he had to leave. He opened the door.

“My brother is dead!” she yelled at him, letting loose the storm that Alder had seen raging inside of her. “For two years, we’ve heard nothing from him, and now you’re leaving? Already? You could at least tell us how it happened…how he was separated from Levi and my papa, how you know him or why you kept running away from me—anything at all,please.”

Alder stopped with his back to her, and breathed in deep. They deserved more, but he could not give it. “I can’t give you the information you want, and nothing I say will bring him back.” He looked back, glancing to the mother, who cried into her skirts, and then his gaze skimmed the walls and the rafters until his attention settled back upon Josephine. “Goodnight,” he said, before he slipped out into the night. And as the cold enveloped him, all Alder could think about was how he’d once thought he’d had everything in the world, but he’d never known family or love like that.

Seph bolted upright upon her pallet of straw. The loft was pitch-black, and though she couldn’t see Linnea, she could hear her sister breathing, but it wasn’t Linnea who’d woken Seph.

It was the dreams.

Of a man and a woman—a younger Nani, with hair like sunlight and eyes like a summer sky, and Seph had watched from afar as her grandmother’s slender arms wrapped around a man with familiar black hair and amber eyes.

A man withtaperedears.

No. Her grandfather was inarguablymortal, and yet the dream persisted like a stain, forcing her to face a truth she could not comprehend—a truth she did notwantto comprehend. But as she’d watched, Grandpa Jake’s tapered ears rounded into mortal ones, and then he was digging with a shovel, deeper and deeper into the soft earth. Seph was shocked to find that she knew the landscape, though there was no fence around the perimeter, and the majestic pines that marked the edge of their lawn were nothing more than flimsy new saplings. Still her grandfather dug, and when he finished, he held out his hands.

A young Nani placed a bundle within. At first, Seph thought it an infant, but when her grandfather took the bundle and peeled back the leather wrapping, Seph saw that it was no infant.

It was the coat.

Just an edge was visible, but she knew it immediately, and in her dream, she felt a visceral pull upon her soul, as though the coat were physically drawing her forward. Her awarenesswasyanked forward until it hovered directly over the coat as her young grandfather placed it inside of the hole he’d dug. He shoveled piles of earth overtop of the bundle, and Seph’s awareness fell in after it.

To light.

Blinding white light that engulfed her like flame. It burned away all of the mist, through hordes of screeching depraved…

And that was the moment Seph woke.

Seph dragged her hands over her face and inhaled deeply. These were not normal dreams. These left a tingling in her chest and an urgency in her soul, because these sorts of dreams were prophetic. It was the other side of the coin of Ava’s gifting: Seph could interpret others’ dreams, but she also occasionally experienced her own. They always came without warning, and sometimes an entire year would pass without one.

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