Read Chapter 25: Outcasts

The cold had worked its way into Callum’s bones by the time they found the hollow. It wasn’t much—a scoop of earth beneath a fallen oak, its roots lifted like a cage of frozen fingers. Ishbel collapsed against the trunk without a word, her breath coming in shallow white puffs. Blood had soaked through the makeshift bandage on her side, dark and ugly against the wool.

Callum didn’t have the strength to carry her farther. He didn’t have the strength to do much of anything except sit, and breathe, and try not to think about the faces of the villagers as they’d driven them out. Morag’s voice still rang in his skull, sharp as a blade. *His father slit his own throat.* The image wouldn’t settle. It kept shifting, like water, like the forest’s own tricks.

He pulled the orb from his pocket. It pulsed faintly, warm despite the cold—a soft amber glow that pushed back the dark just enough to see Ishbel’s pale face.

“Do it,” she said, without opening her eyes. “I’ll keep watch.”

He almost laughed. Keep watch against what? The Ur? The villagers? The memories already bleeding out of his own head? But she was trying, and that mattered more than it should have.

Callum turned the orb over in his hands. It was smooth, lighter than it looked, and he could feel the memory inside it like a heartbeat. His father’s final moments. The last thing Alistair MacRae had ever seen.

He pressed his thumbs to the surface and let it take him.

The memory opened like a wound.

Alistair stood in the dark beneath the earth, the air thick with the smell of clay and something older, something rotten. The tenth witness stone was in his hands—not the dirk. Callum saw it clearly now, the stone that no one had ever been able to find, the one that the records claimed was lost before his grandfather’s time. It was a flat disc of grey stone, unmarked, unremarkable, and his father held it like a prayer book.

The Ur was there. It didn’t have a shape so much as a pressure, a weight of attention that made the memory itself feel colder. Alistair’s voice was steady, though his hands shook.

“I’ve brought what you asked for. Now release the pact.”

A sound like roots tearing through rock. The Ur’s presence shifted, and Callum felt his father’s fear spike—a flood of it, barely contained. Alistair had been brave, but not calm. He’d been terrified.

“You bring a stone,” the Ur said. Its voice wasn’t loud. It was *inside*, like a memory of its own. “You bring a piece of the hill, and you think that buys your bloodline free?”

Alistair’s jaw tightened. “You said the stone would end it. You said it was the price.”

“The price was your line. The stone is a marker. A witness. You’ve brought me a witness to your failure.”

Alistair looked down at the stone, and Callum felt the despair rise in him—thick, suffocating. His father knew. He’d known before he came down here. The stone wasn’t the key. It was a tombstone, a record of what he was about to do.

“Then the dirk,” Alistair said. “You said the dirk could break the pact.”

“The dirk can break the pact,” the Ur agreed. And then it shifted again, and the pressure of its attention turned almost amused. “But the dirk you carry is a copy. A good one. But a copy.”

Alistair went still. Callum felt the stillness like a held breath. His father’s hand moved to his belt, where the dirk hung—the dirk that Callum had inherited, the dirk they’d been planning to use in the cave. The dirk that was supposed to be everything.

“No,” Alistair whispered.

“Your great-grandfather made it. He thought he could hide the true blade by burying it with the first keeper’s bones. He was wrong. The true blade is still there, beneath the roots, where the keeper who came before you chose to lie down and rot.”

The memory wavered. Callum felt his father’s thoughts scatter—a desperate scramble for options, for lies, for anything that might still work. But there was nothing. He’d come down here with a copy and a stone, and the Ur had let him come. It had let him believe.

“I will not give you my son,” Alistair said. His voice was quiet now. Almost calm.

“You will. Or you will give me yourself, and he will take your place, and the cycle continues. That is the pact. That is the debt. You cannot break it with painted steel and a stolen stone.”

Alistair looked at the dirk in his hands. Then he looked at the stone. And Callum understood, in the way that only a son could understand a father’s final thought, what Alistair was deciding.

He wasn’t going to break the pact.

He was going to make the Ur choose.

The memory shifted. Alistair raised the dirk—the copy, the worthless steel—and drove it into his own throat. The motion was fast, brutal, without hesitation. Blood sprayed across the witness stone, across the dark, across the Ur’s formless weight. And as his father fell, Callum saw the Ur recoil.

Not in pain. In *surprise*.

It hadn’t expected the blood. It hadn’t expected the offering to be made so completely, so willingly. The pact demanded a keeper. The pact demanded a line. But blood freely given, blood on a witness stone, was a different kind of claim.

The memory went dark.

Callum came back to himself gasping, the orb cold and dull in his hands. His father’s blood felt like it was still on his fingers, still warm, still wet. He looked down and found his hands clean, but the image burned behind his eyes.

Ishbel stirred. “What did you see?”

He told her. The words came out flat, disembodied, like he was reciting something he’d read rather than lived. The copy. The stone. The throat. The Ur’s surprise.

When he finished, Ishbel was quiet for a long moment. The wind moved through the trees above them, and Callum heard distant shouting—the villagers, still hunting. They wouldn’t find this hollow. Not yet. But they would.

“The dirk we have is useless,” she said finally.

“Yes.”

“And the real one is buried with the first keeper’s bones.”

“Under the roots. That’s what it said.”

Ishbel’s face was pale in the dim light, her wound clearly paining her. But her eyes were sharp. “Then we have to dig.”

Callum shook his head. “We don’t even know where the first keeper is buried. The roots stretch for miles. The Ur’s domain is deeper than any cave we’ve found.”

“Your father did it. He found the way down.”

“He was raised to it. He had the knowledge, the training, the—“

“He had you,” Ishbel said. “And you survived the Ur’s cave. You walked into the trophy chamber and you walked out with his memories. That’s not nothing, Callum. That’s not luck.”

Callum looked down at the dull orb in his hands. His father’s last act had been a gamble—a desperate attempt to stain the pact with his own blood, to shift the debt, to give his son something to work with. It hadn’t worked. Alistair’s death hadn’t broken the curse. It had just left Callum alone with it.

But it had left him the stone, too. The tenth witness stone. The thing the Ur had called a marker, a witness. The thing that had been in Alistair’s hands when he died.

“The stone,” Callum said slowly. “He had it with him. In the memory. He fell with it.”

Ishbel frowned. “So the stone is still down there. With his body.”

“Or near it.”

Neither of them said what they were both thinking. That going back down into the Ur’s domain, without the true dirk, without a plan, without any real hope, was a suicide mission. That they were outcasts now, fugitives, alone in a forest that belonged to something older and crueler than either of them.

But the shouting was getting closer. And the cold was getting deeper. And Callum could feel something else, too—a thinness at the edges of his memory, like cloth wearing through. He couldn’t remember his mother’s face anymore. He couldn’t remember the name of the dog he’d lost in the Ur’s cave.

He had so little left.

He tucked the dull orb back into his pocket, next to the other orbs they’d stolen. A handful of memories, stolen from a monster. Somewhere in there was the first dog’s name, the one he’d lost. Somewhere in there was his father’s voice.

“We need shelter,” Ishbel said. “We need food. We need to heal.”

“We need the true dirk,” Callum said.

“We need to survive the night first.”

She was right. She was always right, and it galled him, and it saved him.

Callum pressed his back against the oak and looked up through the tangle of roots at the grey sky. Somewhere out there, Morag was standing in the family home, the home he could no longer return to, the home she’d claimed while she denounced him to the village. The home that held the last physical traces of his father’s life.

And somewhere beneath the roots, beneath the hill, beneath the Ur’s domain, the first keeper’s bones were waiting.

The true dirk was waiting.

His father’s body was waiting.

Callum closed his eyes and let the memory of his father’s blood pulse behind his eyelids, a red heartbeat in the dark.

He would have to go back down.