Read Chapter 10: Ewan's Trail

The morning mist clung to the glen like a slow exhalation, and Callum's boots were soaked through before he'd gone a hundred yards from the bothy. He'd left before first light, the image of Ewan's root-marked legs still burned into his mind, the memory of his whispered words—*the Ur told him I made a promise*—scratching at the back of his skull like a trapped thing.

He found the first boot at the base of the crag.

It was Ewan's, unmistakably—a battered leather thing with a reinforced toe and a buckle that had been re-stitched twice. Callum had seen him wear them through three winters. It sat upright on a flat stone as if placed there deliberately, laces neatly tied, the sole facing the cliff that rose forty feet above the tree line.

No scuff marks on the rock. No sign of a fall.

Callum crouched beside it, unhooked his pack, and pulled out the folded scrap of oilcloth that had been jammed inside the boot's opening. The paper inside was damp but legible, written in Ewan's cramped, left-handed scrawl.

*Callum—I found it. The old woman was right about the stones. There's a way through that doesn't cost what you think. She said the Ur collects the memories, but it can't hold what was never offered freely. If you bind the debt to the land itself, let the stones remember instead of you—*

The handwriting broke off mid-sentence, then resumed in a shakier hand.

*Need to test it. The grove beyond the second waterfall. If I don't come back, the answer's there. Don't let Eleanor burn the map. She knows more than she says, and it's not all lies, but it's not all truth either.*

*E.*

Callum read it twice. The third time, he read it aloud, the words sour on his tongue.

"Bind the debt to the land," he muttered. "Let the stones remember."

He thought of his father's notes, of the careful warning that the Ur was never generous, only patient. He thought of the stag they'd found, its throat opened without a single sign of struggle. He thought of Morag Gunn's blind eyes and her quiet certainty that three keepers had already been unmade.

And he thought of Ewan—steady, simple Ewan, who couldn't lie worth a damn and couldn't read a map upside down, who would walk into a trap with both eyes open if he thought it might help.

Callum tucked the note into his inside jacket pocket instead of his pack.

It wasn't a decision he could explain. He only knew that something in him balked at showing it to Ishbel, or to Eleanor, or to anyone who might take it at face value. It read too clean. It answered too neatly. And Ewan, for all his virtues, had never once been the kind of man who solved ancient curses in a single night.

He pulled the boot free from its perch and tossed it into the underbrush. Let the forest claim it. Let anyone looking for Ewan's trail find nothing but a dead end.

"Sorry, Ewan," he said, and didn't know if he meant it.

---

The walk back to the village was longer than it should have been.

Callum knew the route—he'd walked it a hundred times, hazy summer evenings and hard winter mornings alike. But twice he found himself pausing at forks he didn't recognize. A stand of birches he'd never noticed before leaned over the path, their pale trunks bent in a way that made his stomach turn. The stream he crossed was running lower than it had been two days ago, the stones exposed like ribs.

He stopped at the third fork, where an old gate had once marked the boundary between Common Land and the forest proper. The gate was still there. The fence posts flanking it were new—or rather, they were the same posts he remembered, but he couldn't recall when he'd last seen them.

His dog's name had returned to him that morning.

Finn.

It had arrived unbidden, the way those fragments did—a flash of wet fur and a wagging tail, a boy's voice calling across a field—and Callum had grabbed it, held it, turned it over like a coin in his palm. Black-and-white border collie. A white star on the chest. He'd loved that dog with the whole fierce heart of a seven-year-old.

Now, at the gate, he realized he couldn't remember what Finn had felt like to touch.

He could picture him. He could picture the star on his chest. But the sensation of burying his fingers in that rough fur was gone, smooth as a stone worn by water, leaving only the shape of the memory without its weight.

Callum gripped the gatepost and breathed through it.

When he looked up, Eleanor was standing at the end of the path.

She wore her usual grey coat, her silver hair pulled back, and she held a walking stick that Callum didn't recognise. She didn't move as he approached.

"You're out early," she said.

"Ewan's still missing."

"I heard." Her eyes tracked him with that unsettling precision she had, the way she seemed to see more than she was shown. "You didn't find anything."

It wasn't a question. Callum's jaw tightened.

"The trail goes cold past the crag. He could have gone anywhere."

"Or been taken anywhere." Eleanor's voice carried no inflection. "The forest has been hungry since you stopped remembering properly. It finds new sources."

Callum wanted to ask her how she knew—how she could stand there in her clean coat and her composed silence and speak about the forest's hunger as if she were discussing the weather. He wanted to ask her about his father, about what she'd hidden and when she'd hidden it, about whether she'd known what she was sending him toward when she'd urged him to take up the ranger post in this godforsaken glen.

Instead, he said, "Morag said there's a breaking point coming. When the Ur's weak enough to refuse."

Eleanor's face flickered—barely, a twitch at the corner of her mouth—and for a moment Callum thought he saw something like recognition there. Then it was gone.

"Morag Gunn has been dead for the better part of a century and hasn't let it slow her down," Eleanor said. "You'd do well to remember that she's not always telling you things for your benefit."

"Then tell me what I need to know."

"I don't know what you need to know." She stepped past him, and her walking stick sank deep into the mud with each stride. "I only know that whatever Ewan found, it wasn't a way out. There is no way out of the pact. There is only the keeping, or the taking."

Callum watched her go. The note in his pocket felt like a stone against his ribs.

He should have asked her about the second waterfall.

He should have asked her what she knew about binding a debt to the stones.

But something in him—the same thing that had made him hide the note from Ishbel, that had made him toss Ewan's boot into the scrub—kept his mouth shut. He'd spent his whole life being led. First by his father's absence, then by the family name, then by Eleanor's whispered suggestions and Ishbel's careful maps and Morag's riddles. Everyone had a thread and they all wanted to pull him along it.

Ewan's note was the first thing that felt like his own.

Even if it was a trap. Even if the Ur had written it through Ewan's hand, a lure baited with hope.

Callum reached into his pocket and touched the folded page.

For a second—just a second—he felt the ghost of a dog's tongue against his fingers, rough and warm and familiar.

Then it was gone, and he couldn't remember the name that had come with it.

He started walking toward the forest.