Read Chapter 15: Ishbel's Choice

The dirk was cold against Callum’s hip as he knocked on Ishbel’s door. Morning mist still clung to the village, and her cottage sat at the edge of the lane where the heather began to creep back toward the treeline. He had not slept. The journal pages from his father were folded in his jacket pocket, and Morag’s words rang in his skull like a struck bell.

Ishbel opened the door before his knuckles finished their second rap. She was already dressed, a wool shawl over her shoulders, her grey eyes sharp with something that looked like expectation.

“You’ve been to Morag,” she said. Not a question.

Callum stepped inside without being invited. The cottage smelled of peat smoke and dried herbs. A small fire crackled in the hearth, and on the table sat two cups, one already poured.

“She told you?” he asked.

“She told me you’d come.” Ishbel gestured to the chair opposite her own. “Sit. You look like a man who’s been walking through graves.”

He sat. The warmth of the fire felt distant, as if his skin had grown too thick to feel it properly. He pulled his father’s journal from his pocket and laid it on the table between them.

“You know what this is.”

Ishbel looked at the worn leather cover. Her jaw tightened. “I know what it represents.”

“Morag says your family were witnesses. That you have debts of your own.”

Ishbel was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached for the cup that had been poured for him and slid it across the table. “Drink. You’ll need your head clear for what I’m about to tell you.”

Callum didn’t touch the cup. “Tell me what you know about the curse.”

“The curse is the easy part,” Ishbel said. “It’s the witnessing that’s hard.”

She folded her hands on the table. In the firelight, her face looked older than he remembered, carved from the same grey stone as the hills around them.

“My grandmother was the last true witness for this family,” she said. “She was present at the binding. Not the original one—Alistair’s—but the reaffirmation, sixty years ago, when your grandfather took up the pact after your great-uncle died in the forest.” She paused. “You didn’t know there was a reaffirmation.”

Callum shook his head slowly.

“The pact doesn’t just pass down. It has to be accepted. A keeper can refuse it, but the refusal has a cost, and most find the cost too high. Your grandfather stood at the heart grove and accepted on his knees.” Ishbel’s voice dropped. “My grandmother stood behind him. She watched him swear. She watched the Ur take something from him—I don’t know what, he never spoke again, not a single word for the rest of his life—and she wrote it down.”

“Wrote what down?”

“What she saw. What he gave up. What the Ur took.” Ishbel rose and went to a small cabinet beside the hearth. She unlocked it with a key from a chain around her neck and removed a leather-bound book, older than his father’s journal, the pages yellowed and cracked. She set it on the table beside his father’s journal.

“Every witness family keeps a record,” she said. “We don’t guard the forest. We guard the truth of what was sworn. So that when the breaking point comes, someone will know whether the debt was paid honestly or stolen.”

Callum stared at the two books side by side. His father’s journal, filled with fearful observations and warnings. Ishbel’s grandmother’s record, older, darker, the leather almost black from handling.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked. “Eleanor warned me away from you. From Morag. She says you’re dangerous.”

Ishbel smiled, and it was not a warm smile. “Eleanor’s family were witnesses too. But their debt is different from mine. They recorded the Ur’s promises. My family recorded the keeper’s sacrifices. Eleanor doesn’t want you to know what the Ur promised—because if you knew what it offered your ancestors in exchange for their service, you might understand what it’s offered you.”

Callum felt the cold seep deeper into his bones. “The forest offered to let me go. If I let it take the village.”

“I know.”

“And if I keep the pact, I’ll forget Isobel entirely.”

“I know that too.” Ishbel’s eyes were steady. “The Ur has used that offer before. It offers freedom, or it threatens loss, and whichever choice the keeper makes, the forest wins—because either way, the keeper gives up something they cannot live without. Your grandfather chose to lose his voice. He could not speak again, but he kept his memories of his wife. He thought it a fair trade.” She paused. “He was wrong.”

Callum’s hands were trembling. He pressed them flat against the table. “How do I end it? Morag says the dirk was forged to sever the pact. That I have to drive it into the Ur’s heart at the original oath site. But she doesn’t know where that is.”

“I do.”

The words hung in the air. Callum felt his pulse skip.

“My grandmother’s records include a map,” Ishbel said. “Not a map of the land—a map of the oaths. Where Alistair swore, and where every keeper since has reaffirmed. The sites move, you understand. The forest changes. But the original oath site doesn’t. It’s where Alistair made his promise, and it’s where the Ur anchored itself to this world.”

“Where is it?”

Ishbel opened her grandmother’s record. The pages were covered in spidery handwriting, but in the back, folded into a pocket sewn into the leather, was a scrap of parchment. She unfolded it and laid it flat.

It showed the valley as it must have looked two hundred years ago—before the village, before the modern roads, before the forestry plantation. Streams ran where burns now dried in summer. A circle of stones stood at the center of a grove that Callum recognized, with a cold certainty, from his dreams.

“The second waterfall,” he said. “The grove where Ewan’s note led me. The heart grove.”

“No.” Ishbel shook her head. “The heart grove is where the Ur dwells now, but it was not where Alistair made his oath. The Ur moved its seat of power after the reaffirmation ceremonies began. It grows stronger by anchoring in new places, places where blood was shed to consecrate the pact.” She tapped the map. “The original site is here.”

Her finger rested on a point north of the village, past the loch, where the map showed nothing but unmarked hillside and a single stream marked with an old Gàidhlig name.

“What is that?” Callum asked.

“The stream’s called Allt an Uinnsinn—the Ash Burn. And the circle on its bank was built long before Alistair. He chose it because it was already a place of power.” Ishbel looked up at him. “That’s where the oath was sworn. And that’s where the breaking point will happen.”

Callum studied the map. The ink was faded, the lines uncertain, but the geography felt right. It felt like the place his body had been trying to reach when it walked him to the war memorial—not the memorial itself, but what it marked. The boundary between the village’s dead and the hill’s memory.

“Ewan found it, didn’t he?” Callum said quietly.

Ishbel’s expression flickered. “I believe so. His note mentions a path beyond the second falls, a way through the old trees. He was trying to reach the circle before the Ur took him.”

“Morag said he’s still alive. Trapped beneath the roots.”

“If the Ur has him, he’s alive in the way the forest keeps things alive.” Ishbel’s voice was careful. “He’s part of the grove now. The Ur won’t let him go easily.”

Callum reached across the table and took Ishbel’s grandmother’s record. It was heavier than it looked, as if the pages were denser than paper should be. As he lifted it, a small object fell from between the leaves and clattered onto the table.

A stone. Flat, grey, the size of his palm. Carved into its surface was a symbol he recognized from childhood—a spiral, worn almost smooth, but unmistakable.

“That’s from the circle,” Ishbel said. Her voice was strained. “My grandmother brought it back. She said it was the stone Alistair stood on when he swore.”

Callum picked up the stone. It was cold, colder than the air in the cottage. A faint vibration ran through it, like the hum of a distant machine buried deep in the earth.

“Then we go,” he said. “You and me. We find this circle. We end this.”

Ishbel was silent for a long moment. Then she reached out and placed her hand over his, the stone between their palms.

“There’s something you need to know before we go,” she said. “The witnesses don’t just record the oaths. At the breaking point, we are bound to test the keeper.”

“Test me how?”

Ishbel looked at him, and for the first time, he saw fear in her eyes. Not fear of the forest. Fear of him.

“My grandmother’s records say the witness is bound to ask the keeper a question. And the keeper must answer truthfully, or the pact cannot be severed.” Her grip tightened. “The question always concerns what the keeper would give up to be free. And the witness is cursed to know when the keeper lies.”

Callum’s mouth went dry. “What question would you ask me?”

Ishbel let go of his hand and sat back. The firelight danced across her face, and she looked like a woman standing on the edge of a cliff.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But when the time comes, I’ll know it. And I’ll have no choice but to ask it.”

The dirk at Callum’s hip pulsed once, a slow green throb that seemed to answer the hum in the stone. He tucked the stone into his pocket beside the bone fragment from Morag, and stood.

“Then we’d better hurry,” he said. “Before either of us has to answer anything.”