Read Chapter 23: The Village Under Siege

The first one came in the post office. Old Mrs. MacLeod, who had sorted letters for forty years, looked up from the counter and stared at the parcel in her hands as if she’d never seen one before. Then she turned to the queue and asked, very politely, “Who are you all?”

It took the better part of an hour for the village to calm her down, to coax her into a chair in the back room with a cup of tea and a blanket. By then, the boy who delivered the morning papers had wandered into the butcher’s and stood weeping against the cold cabinet, unable to say his own name.

Callum heard about it from the butcher’s wife, who grabbed his arm as he walked past the shop on his way to fetch Ishbel’s medication. “It’s spreading,” she said, her fingers white against his sleeve. “It’s in the air. You can feel it—can’t you feel it?”

He could. He tasted it at the back of his throat, something metal and green, like copper left to rot in peat. The forest was exhaling. Every birch and oak and twisted rowan for miles around seemed to be breathing out a fog that carried not spores or pollen but something thinner. Something that slipped in through the nostrils and behind the eyes and unhooked the little threads that held a person to their name.

By noon, three more villagers had been found wandering. Two of them couldn’t remember how to get home. One—a young man Callum had gone to school with—kept asking where his mother was, though she had died when he was eight and he had wept at her grave every year since. His memory had gone back to the last morning he’d seen her face, and there it stopped, looping like a needle stuck in a groove.

Callum did what he could. He helped shepherd the lost back to their houses. He phoned the regional hospital and got told, in that maddeningly calm NHS way, that a psychiatric consultation had been scheduled for next week. Next week. He stood in the middle of the high street and watched the village shrink away from its own reflection. Shutters were being drawn. Doors were being locked. The pub—open since noon, as ever—was empty for the first time in living memory.

And then the accusations began.

It was Mhairi Fraser who started it, which was almost funny because Mhairi Fraser had once chased Callum’s father out of her garden with a rake for trampling her dahlias. But grief and fear made strange bedfellows. She stood on the steps of the village hall, her hair wild, her eyes bright as an animal’s, and she pointed a shaking finger at him.

“You!” she cried. “Your family. Your blood. We all know what you are. We all know what your father did. And now it’s come back. It’s come back because of you.”

A crowd had gathered. They didn’t mob him. They didn’t shout. Worse—they simply stood and watched with hollow, hungry eyes, waiting for him to deny it. Callum opened his mouth to explain, to tell them about the Ur, about the memory orbs, about the curse that was not his choosing but his inheritance. And then he looked at their faces and saw what Ishbel had meant about panic. If he told them the truth—that they were being picked clean by an ancient thing with roots in the earth and a hunger older than the hills—they would burn the forest down. They would come with petrol and shotguns and torches, and the Ur would eat them all in a single hot gulp.

So he bore it.

“It’s not me,” he said, and even to his own ears it sounded thin. “It’s not my doing. There’s something—there are events happening, things I can’t fully explain. But I’m trying to fix it.”

“Fix it?” Angus MacBride, the blacksmith, stepped forward. His face was red and swollen, his fists clenched. “Your father was meant to fix it. He killed himself to fix it, didn’t he? And we all told ourselves it was an accident. We all told ourselves nothing was wrong. But you knew. You must have known.”

Callum’s chest seized. The private grief of his family, the secret shame of a man who had chosen the dirk over his own son—now laid bare in the middle of the street by a blacksmith with a grudge. He had no proof. He had only a story that sounded like the ravings of a madman. And the memory of his father’s face was already blurring at the edges, already being replaced by the faces of these people who looked at him as if he were the disease.

“My father,” Callum said carefully, each syllable costing him, “did what he did to protect you. To protect all of us. And I am trying to finish what he started.”

“Protect us?” Mhairi Fraser screamed. “You call this protection? Our children are forgetting their own names! My grandson didn’t know me this morning. He looked at me and asked where his granny was. I AM HIS GRANNY.”

She was crying. Callum had never seen her cry. The crowd’s anger fissured—some of them reaching for her, some turning their hollow gazes back to Callum. He felt the weight of the dirk at his hip, hidden beneath his jacket. He thought of the orbs stuffed into his pack back at the house. His mother’s face—gone. His first dog—barely a shadow now. How much longer until his own name slipped away from him? Until he stood in the street asking strangers where his mother had gone?

He wanted to tell them. He wanted to open the jacket and show them the dirk, make them understand the weight of a vow carved in blood and worn for centuries by people who had no choice. But Morag had told him what happened to witnesses who knew too much. And the witness stones—the ones missing, the ones ground to dust by jealous hands—were proof enough that some secrets could not be shared. The truth would not save these people. It would only give them a target, and the target would not be the forest.

It would be him.

“Two days,” Callum said. His voice was quiet, but it cut through the noise. “Give me two days. I will sort this. I swear it on my father’s grave.”

“Your father’s grave is empty,” Angus said flatly. “We all know it. He never went in the ground. He went into the trees.”

The silence that followed was worse than shouting. Callum looked from face to face and saw not anger now but fear—a fear so deep it curdled into certainty. They knew. Perhaps they had always known, in that quiet, unspoken way of small villages where everyone’s business was everyone’s business. They had buried his father in their minds and turned away, because acknowledging the truth would mean acknowledging the forest, and nobody in Glenmora had ever had the stomach for that.

Callum did the only thing he could. He turned and walked away from the village square, and no one stopped him. He felt their stares on his back like the hot breath of the Ur itself, and he did not look around until he had reached the edge of the trees.

Ishbel was waiting for him there, pale and shaken, her arm still bound in a sling from the cave. She must have heard the shouting. She must have seen the shutters coming down.

“They know something,” she said quietly. “They may not know the whole truth, but they know enough.”

“They know nothing,” Callum said, and it came out bitter as bark. “They know less than I did a week ago. And I know nothing. I don’t even know my own mother’s face anymore.”

Ishbel was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out one of the orbs they had saved—the one that pulsed with a dim, sickly light. It had been his father’s, they thought. The last memory Alistair MacRae had held before the dirk found his heart.

“We have one shot,” she said. “This orb. It has what your father knew. What he saw before he died. If we can break it open properly, we might learn what he did to hurt the Ur—and what he failed to do.”

Callum looked at the orb. Then he looked back at the village, at the dark windows and the drawn curtains, at the thin spiral of smoke rising from the chimney of the MacRae family home where Morag would be sitting alone.

“If we fail,” he said, “they’ll hang me from the oak tree by the kirk.”

“If we fail,” Ishbel said, “they’ll hang the whole village first.”

She pressed the orb into his hand. It was cold. It was warm. It pulsed like a heart, and deep within its glassy surface, Callum saw a shape he almost recognized. A figure with his father’s shoulders, standing at the edge of the trees, holding something that gleamed in the moonlight.

The orb filled his mind with one clear image before Ishbel snatched it away. In it, his father stood face to face with the Ur—not at the forest’s edge, but deep in the caverns beneath. And in his father’s hand was not the dirk at all, but the tenth witness stone.