Chapter 23. Blood on the Birchwood

Before dawn’s pale light had fully broken, the birches were already bowing eastward, their slender white trunks bending like sentinels slipping through prayer. In most of Rootwild, birch was a rarity—outnumbered by the soaring pines and burly elms—but here, on this fringe where frost lingered long and the soil stayed cool beneath a gray spring sky, they clustered in tight ranks. Their limbs were thin as bone, their branches stark against the half-light, offering no shelter, no lies—only watchful silence.

Aeryn stood at the lip of the hollow, her leather boots sinking a half-inch into spongy leaf rot. The damp air swirled with the scent of moss and old bark, of wet cloth left to molder, and of something darker—memory, perhaps, or the echo of footsteps long vanished. She did not look at the broken trees or shifting shadows; she studied the trail itself. She imagined the cart’s passage: where its wheels would gouge deepest into soft earth, where the sloping grade would tug at its