The Will and the Wilds(6)

“Does he want the stone?” I ask, crouching by his side. “He seemed to want the stone.”

My father shakes his head, but in disagreement or confusion, I can’t tell.

I grasp his hand. Recently cleaned, even the nails scrubbed. I mull over my words and tamp down the anxiety in my chest. “I can get rid of it.” The stone is a treasure and a shield, but it is not worth the danger of safeguarding.

“No.”

“There are other means of—”

He turns his hand about and ensnares my fingers. His eyes lock on to mine. “You have lived longer than she did now.” He means my mother. “Because of that stone. And I lost . . .” His eyes glaze. “What did I lose, Elefie?”

“Enna, Papa.”

He lets go of my hand and breathes deeply through his nose. “Enna. I sacrificed . . . so you wouldn’t . . .”

Standing, I rest a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. I understand.” The talisman is a rare one, stolen from the very realm it’s designed to protect against. There are many types of Telling charms, but none so accurate as this one. I palm the stone’s coldness, wondering why a mysting would batter itself against my wards to obtain it, when in all my twenty years, it has attracted little attention from my neighbors, and none from the other realm. Surely the gobler was after something else entirely, and the stone had merely caught its eye.

My gaze drifts up from the stone to the silver bracelet encircling my wrist. The circle. Sketches copied from my grandmother’s journal spin through my mind.

A summoning . . .

“There are other mystings, Papa,” I say, tasting each word before letting it pass my lips. I step around the chair to face him. “Intelligent mystings, less . . . harmful ones, who might prey on a beast like the gobler. Force it and any others to leave.”

His expression closes. “They’re all demons. Evil.”

“But they can be bargained with.” My own grandmother once hired a rooter—a docile, forest-dwelling mysting—to grow the great tree wall that surrounds her house to this day. As good a protection from predators as any, although I do not know what it asked of my grandmother in exchange, just that they made a bargain. No mysting knows the word charity.

Not all human dealings with mystings have been entirely hostile. I suspect it was a mysting who warned the king twenty years ago about a possible war between realms, and a mysting who first spoke to my father of the Telling Stone around my wrist. But for every mysting who’s willing to cooperate, there are five others who will eat the flesh off your bones, if you but give them the chance.

It would be safer, perhaps, to hire a swordsman, someone with more wit about him than my father. But this is Fendell. There are no sell-swords here, and there’s no time to request one to come from afar, even if we had the money.

A sore lump that bears my mother’s name rises in my throat, but I swallow it down. I will not become like her. Nor will I let my father meet her fate. We will not sit in this house and wait for another gobler to attack us.

“We will leave, then.”

My father looks up at me. “Leave? Is it market day?”

The conversation is slipping from him. “Papa, there is a gobler on its way. If you will not let me give up the Telling Stone or hire a creature to protect us, then we must leave.”

My father’s hands grip the armrests of his chair. “Elefie’s grave . . .”

His eyes are moist, so I back down in silence, excusing myself to my room. My mother’s grave is not the only one out there. My father’s parents are also buried on our land. My father will not leave them unless absolutely necessary. One reason of many why even the closest college, in Caisgard, is beyond my reach. My father is not so addled as to be unable to care for himself, but I would not leave him. Not for anything.

And so I need to find another way.

Thumbing through my notes, I find what I need. I linger on the page depicting a summoning ring, first drawn in charcoal to copy my grandmother’s hand, and later outlined in ink. An eight-pointed star made of two overlapping squares, each point touching an encompassing circle. A summoning circle can be made with a number of things, but some substances provide stronger magic than others. Blood, for instance, is a strong summoner. Especially human blood.

Cringing, I close the book. It rests in my lap for a long time, my fingers drumming against its worn cover. Long enough for the shadows to shift in my room. I think, ponder, until I’ve no thoughts but one.

The Telling Stone has grown nearly as cold as it was last evening. The gobler is coming.

In the kitchen, I grab a basket, putting into it a cask three-quarters full of oil, flint and steel, my silver dagger, and all the coin I can find. In my father’s room, I retrieve my mother’s gold-link necklace and two of Papa’s war medals. My mother’s wedding ring stays in its safe place in the top drawer of my father’s old dresser. Papa may not notice these other valuables missing, but he would notice the ring’s absence.

Putting a towel over the items, I make a plate of bread and cheese for my father and hand it to him. “Here you are. I’ll go collect the milk from the Lovesses.”

He cocks a brow at me. “The milk . . . ? Our collection day is tomorrow, is it not?”

I’m surprised he remembers. It seems almost cruel to take the small victory from him, but I say, “No, no, it’s today. You just asked me to fetch it.” Guilt worms between my breasts, but my resolve to live, and keep my father alive, is stronger.