Read Chapter 3: The Keeper's Dagger

The morning light through the kitchen windows did nothing to warm the stone of the farmhouse. Callum had slept badly, if at all, the whispers from the wind still circling in his skull like flies around a carcass. He poured cold water from the tap over his face and stared at himself in the small mirror above the sink. Same face. Same grey eyes. Same faint scar through his left eyebrow from a childhood fall he could no longer fully picture.

But the man looking back felt different. He felt *watched*.

He dressed in yesterday's clothes—there was no point unpacking until he knew what he was dealing with—and moved through the ground floor with a deliberate, methodical pace. Living room. Parlour. A small study coated in dust so thick it seemed less like neglect and more like intention. As if the room had been sealed off for a reason.

The desk sat beneath a tall window that looked out over the front garden and, beyond it, the treeline of the grove. Callum paused. The forest was dark even at this hour, its canopy swallowing the morning's modest light. He thought he saw movement between the trunks—a flicker of something not quite animal—but when he blinked, it was gone.

He turned back to the desk. Locked, of course. He tried the drawer handles anyway, and found the top one loose. Inside, beneath a stack of yellowed correspondence and a tarnished brass compass, his fingers closed around something cold and heavy.

He pulled it out.

The dirk was old. Very old, judging by the pitted iron of the blade and the worn leather wrap on the grip. But it was the carvings that caught his attention. Along the fuller of the blade, etched in a pattern so fine it might have been missed by anyone not looking closely, were interlocking spirals—Celtic knotwork, but drawn in a style he'd never seen. The loops didn't close. They *chased* each other, endlessly turning, each one bleeding into the next without resolution.

And at the base of the blade, just above the guard, a single symbol. A circle split by a vertical line. Callum understood, without being able to say how, that this was the mark of the grove.

He was still holding it, turning it over in his hands, when a knock rattled the front door.

He slipped the dirk into his jacket pocket without thinking, its weight settling against his ribs.

The woman on the doorstep was perhaps seventy, with sharp grey hair pulled back in a practical bun and a waterproof coat that had clearly seen several decades of Highland weather. She wore reading glasses on a chain around her neck and regarded him with the calm, appraising look of someone who had already decided what she thought of him.

"You'll be Callum," she said. It was not a question.

"And you are?"

"Morag Sinclair. I was your grandmother's friend. Her oldest friend, if you want to be precise about these things, which I generally do." She stepped past him into the hall without waiting for an invitation. "You'll be wanting tea, and I'll be wanting to sit down before my hips give out entirely."

Callum closed the door, bemused, and followed her into the kitchen. She took a seat at the table without ceremony and looked around the room with something close to grief.

"I came as soon as I heard," she said. "I knew Agnes would go quickly when she went. She always said the Grove wouldn't keep her waiting past her time."

"The Grove." Callum set the kettle on the stove. "That's what the journal called it."

Morag's eyes snapped to him. "She left you the journal?"

"And a house. And a forest I apparently have to guard until I die." He kept his tone light, but Morag didn't smile.

"Did she leave you anything else?"

Callum hesitated. The dirk was warm against his hip, as if it had absorbed his body heat. He considered lying, then decided it was pointless. This woman knew more than he did, and he was done guessing in the dark.

"A knife," he said. "An old hunting dirk. With carvings on it."

Morag closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them, there was something like relief in their depths. "Good. I was afraid you wouldn't find it. I was afraid she'd taken it with her."

"You knew about it?"

"I knew about almost everything. I'm the one who catalogued what your grandfather left behind, back when he—" She stopped, pressing her lips together.

"When he what? Walked into the forest and never came out?"

"Disappeared," Morag corrected. "That's what the police called it, and that's what we let them call it. But no. He didn't disappear. He went in deliberately, carrying his own dirk, and he didn't come back because the Grove accepted his offering."

"What offering?"

Morag looked at him for a long moment. Outside, the wind had picked up, rattling the kitchen window in its frame. A branch scraped against the glass like a hand asking to be let in.

"Your grandfather was a good keeper," she said quietly. "Maybe the best the MacRaes ever had. He was devoted to the pact. He believed in it entirely, the way some men believe in God. But when your mother was born, he started asking questions. About the cost. About what the Grove was really taking, year after year, and whether the family had been cheated."

"Cheated how?"

"The dirk—" Morag nodded toward Callum's pocket. "That's not a weapon. It's a key. The pact isn't signed in ink. It's renewed in blood, once every generation, by the current keeper. They make a cut on their own hand and let the blood fall on the roots of the largest tree in the Grove. The tree drinks, and the pact continues. The forest remains asleep. The entity remains bound."

"And the cost?"

Morag's face grew careful. Flat. The way a historian's face goes when they're about to tell you something they've told a hundred times and never once wanted to.

"Each keeper has something taken. The one thing they value most. Not their life, not their health—the Grove is careful not to kill its shepherds. But a memory. A precious one. The kind that defines who you are."

The kettle began to whistle. Callum didn't move to it.

"That's why I don't remember my childhood properly," he said slowly. "The gaps. The missing years. My mother used to say I had an active imagination, that I was confusing dreams with reality. But I knew—I always knew there were things I should remember and couldn't. Places I'd been, people I'd loved, a little girl with red hair who—"

He stopped. The image was there, then gone, dissolving like frost on glass. A red-haired girl. A hand in his. Laughter by a stream. And nothing else.

"My grandmother took my memories," he said. "She did this to me."

Morag stood. "You need to understand something, Callum. Agnes didn't do it to hurt you. She did it because she loved you. She saw what the keeper's life did to your grandfather, what it did to your own father—how he couldn't live with the cost of it and drank himself into an early grave. She thought if she took your memories of the Grove, the bond would fade, and you could have a normal life."

"It didn't work."

"No. It never does. The bond is in the blood, not the memory. All she did was delay the inevitable and spend her own life paying for it."

"Delaying it how?"

Morag looked at him, and for the first time, her composure cracked. Behind her glasses, her eyes were wet.

"Agnes didn't die of heart failure, Callum. The Grove doesn't allow keepers to retire. It doesn't allow them to pass the role to someone unwilling. She'd been keeping the pact alive in your name for years, paying the cost herself, so that you wouldn't have to. The diary you found, the one she left for you—she wrote it in the last months, when the price had become too much. When it started taking things she couldn't spare."

"What did she lose?"

Morag picked up her coat, pulling it tight around herself as if the temperature in the room had dropped.

"The Grove doesn't take only memories, lad. It takes whatever is most precious. For your grandmother, in the end, that was the knowledge of who she was. She spent her final weeks in a haze, unable to recognize her own reflection, and she was peaceful anyway. Because she'd done what she set out to do. She'd bought you time."

She moved toward the front door, and Callum followed, his hand brushing the dirk through the fabric of his jacket.

"You have the key," Morag said, pausing at the threshold. "But a key only opens a door. It doesn't tell you whether to walk through. The pact is weak now. If you don't renew it before the next full moon, the Grove will wake. The entity will rise. And whatever it does then won't discriminate between MacRaes and innocents."

"Full moon," Callum repeated. "That's six days away."

"Six days." Morag stepped out into the grey light. "I'll come back with what I have on the family history. There might be a way out. A loophole. Your grandfather believed there was one, and he died searching for it."

She walked down the path to an old Land Rover, and Callum watched her go. When she reached the vehicle, she turned back.

"Callum. Be careful with that blade. The Grove can feel it. It's been waiting a long time to have the MacRae keeper come home."

She drove away, leaving him alone on the doorstep, the weight of the dirk pressing against his side like an accusation.

Six days. He had six days to find a way out of a pact his family had honoured for generations.

He turned and walked back inside. In the kitchen, he pulled the dirk from his jacket and laid it on the table. The carvings caught the light, spirals chasing their own tails without ever closing.

He would need to read the journal carefully. Every page. Every word. If his grandfather had found a clue, a hint, a way to break the cycle, it would be in there.

And if not, he would have to make a choice. Keep his memories, and let the Grove wake. Or sacrifice the one thing that made him himself, and remain the keeper forever.

Through the window, he saw the treeline shift. Just slightly. As if the forest had leaned closer to watch him decide.