Page 11 of The Arrow and the Alder

S eph 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 with tapered ears.

No. Her grandfather was inarguably mortal , and yet the dream persisted like a stain, forcing her to face a truth she could not comprehend—a truth she did not want to 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 awareness was yanked 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.

Since the last, it’d been two .

It’d been so long Seph even wondered if she’d lost this particular side of her ability.

Apparently not.

She slid her hand just below her shift, where she’d suspended Rys’s enchanted ring from a leather cord around her neck.

The stranger’s words from the night before were still too near, and they’d kept her up late into the night, haunting her with their simplicity. Seph had always known losing Rys was a possibility—maybe even an inevitability, if she were being honest. For what could mortals do against the ravenous depraved? But hearing Rys’s fate spoken thus, after two years of nothing, was too…simple. As if his rich, colorful life could be extinguished by the three little unfeeling words uttered by a complete stranger: Rys is dead .

This ring belonged on his finger. Their papa had given it to him, given to him by his father—Grandpa Jake—as an heirloom of protection against kith enchantments. Though at the time, the kith hadn’t been able to enter their lands, so the ring had been passed down more out of sentimentality than practicality. Rys had originally worn it on his thumb, but as he’d grown, his thumb had become too wide for it, so he’d been forced to switch hands. Then fingers.

It’d been on his middle finger when he’d left for the war. The cool moonstone had brushed Seph’s cheek when he’d said goodbye. In that moment, Seph had known that she might never again see him or her papa or Levi, yet hope had whispered: not them. Anyone but them.

Hope, that abominable thing. Always clinging to dead things.

You are the strong one .

Linnea’s words haunted her now. Seph didn’t want to be the strong one, but she feared that if she let go, she would fall apart and never be able to put herself back together again.

She squeezed the little band of moonstone—something solid, something sure—and closed her eyes, but her dream flashed behind her eyelids again.

It was a simple thing for Seph to interpret others’ dreams, but it had always been difficult interpreting her own. This was where Nani came in, but she wasn’t here anymore. Seph rubbed her temples, determined to figure it out on her own.

Anything to distract herself from the overwhelming pain of Rys’s loss.

The coat Lord Massie had sought was obviously tied to the curse, and though Seph didn’t understand how, the timing of it, in conjunction with Milly’s vision, convinced Seph on this point. The parts Seph could not piece together were what Grandpa Jake and Nani had to do with any of it, or why he’d had kith ears in her dream, or why he and Nani had been burying the coat in the backyard, where the woodpile now…

Back.

Pile.

Seph turned her head in the direction of the backyard. Was that what her grandfather had been trying to tell her? To search beneath the woodpile? Was he aware that they’d given Lord Massie the coat? If so, why would he ask Seph to go to the woodpile?

Unless…

Unless Nani had seen this day in one of her visions, and they’d constructed another coat. A fake.

Give my regards to your grandfather .

Lord Massie’s words still haunted Seph. The twisted smirk upon his face as he’d spoken them, and the cruel gleam in his eyes. As if he’d known Seph’s grandfather. Not known of , but really and truly known him.

Linnea coughed beside her and rolled onto her other side, dragging Seph from her spiraling thoughts.

No . This was ridiculous. Seph was exhausted and now creating stories where there were none just so that she didn’t have to dwell on Rys. Resolved, she lay back down, rolled onto her side, and tucked her hand beneath her pillow, willing herself to go back to sleep.

Two breaths later, Seph was throwing back her covers and climbing off of her pallet. She tugged on her boots, snatched her coat off the hook, and slipped it on over her nightdress before tiptoeing around Linnea to climb gingerly down the ladder in the dark. With every step, her mind whispered her foolery, but her heart would not quit. And Seph could not rest until she was certain.

Grabbing a lantern, she made her way out back. A cold and bitter wind snatched her warmth immediately, but the fire of curiosity burned within, chasing away night’s chill. Seph grabbed the shovel from the old stable and strode toward the woodpile.

There .

She set the lantern down, stabbed the shovel into the damp earth, moved a few logs out of the way, and started digging. With every heave, reason told her to go back to bed, that emotion was getting the best of her, but it felt good to move, to sweat. To work out the tangle of feelings that knotted inside of her soul.

Seph dug deeper and deeper, fueling her fury into every scoop of earth, into every stomp of her boot on the lip of her shovel. In her mind, she saw the kith high lord holding up her grandfather’s coat while the baron stood gloating. She envisioned a depraved clawing through Rys’s skin, and then hot tears mixed with her sweat and fury. Dig after dig, clump after clump. She’d already dug much deeper than the vision had shown her, and at last she growled in anger and frustration, threw down the shovel, and collapsed to her knees.

“I can’t do this anymore…” Seph whispered to no one as the tears streamed freely down her face. Saints, she was so tired—tired of fighting. Tired of hoping.

Tired of her own futility.

Seph dropped her head into her mud-sodden hands. “I’m sorry, Rys…I wish it’d been me instead of you…you were always the strongest of us all, and now…now you’re gone…” Her voice broke, her throat closed around her words, and her shoulders shook with long suppressed sorrows.

And once that well was depleted, once every tear had dried and she was left with nothing but the present, her circumstances chased after her like an avalanche. What was she supposed to do now? She’d offended a kith high lord . No one could save her from the baron’s wrath, and if it weren’t for Nora, Seph would leave. She’d run far away from this place—maybe even to the warfront, where she could search for Levi and Papa and fill the position Rys had left behind. To make sure the depraved and their leader and this Prince Alder suffered as much as possible before the curse came for them all.

Three months. What could possibly be done in three months?

Seph rubbed her aching eyes, and she was just pushing herself to stand when she noticed an edge of frayed leather amidst the mound of dirt she’d unearthed.

Seph stopped breathing.

Could it be…?

Heart pounding, she reached forward, pulled the bundle from the pile, and unfolded the wrapping with trembling hands.

To find the coat within.

A flash.

Seph saw light, blinding white, and it engulfed her body with heat.

She dropped the wrapping, and for a moment, she simply stared, dumbstruck and terrified. It resembled the coat Lord Massie had taken. Yes, it was very clear that someone had gone to great lengths to replicate the original, but had the coats been side by side, anyone would have known the lie from the truth, because the truth was alive . Seph could not explain it any other way. This coat had a pulse. Power radiated from its iridescent mahogany fibers, from the embroidered kith symbols that moved , whispering softly as they slid over and around the coat like rivers of liquid gold.

Enchantments.

The language of eloit —the thread that tied the kith to the vast well of Demas’s power.

The symbols twinkled and blazed, as if they’d been woven from starlight. What were her grandparents doing with such an object, and why had her grandfather wanted her to take it?

“Well, well, well, what have we here?”

Seph jumped back as the baron and two of his guards stepped into view.