Read Chapter 7: Father's Lie

The rain came in from the west, a grey curtain dragging across the glen, and with it came a car Callum didn't recognize. He watched it from the kitchen window, a slick black hire car crawling up the track, its wheels spinning briefly in the mud before finding purchase.

He hadn't told anyone he was here. Not his colleagues at the ranger station, not the few friends he had in Inverness. Just Morag and Ishbel, and neither drove a car like that.

The engine cut. The driver's door opened.

A woman stepped out. She was older than him by a decade or more, with sharp cheekbones and the same dark MacRae hair threaded with grey. She wore a waxed jacket that had cost more than his monthly wage and carried herself like someone used to getting answers.

Callum met her at the door. She looked at him the way you'd look at a photograph that had faded.

"You're Callum." Not a question.

"And you are?"

"Eleanor." She said it like it should mean something. When his face stayed blank, she sighed. "Your father's sister. I've been trying to reach you for three days. You don't answer your phone."

His phone was in the truck, dead, and he hadn't charged it since the night with the stones. "I've been busy."

"I know. I've been watching the news. Poachers, missing deer, the works." She stepped past him into the house without an invitation, her eyes moving over the dim interior. "This place looks the same. Smells the same. Like rot and old dust."

"Can I get you something? Tea?"

She turned to face him. "I'm not here for tea, Callum. I'm here because you opened the cellar."

The words landed like a stone in still water. His hand went instinctively to the dirk at his belt, hidden under his jumper.

"How do you know about that?"

Eleanor sat down heavily in his grandmother's chair—the one no one sat in, the one that still held the shape of her. "Because I was the one who sealed it. Twenty years ago, after your father disappeared. I was the last Keeper before him, and I walked away. I'm the one who broke the line."

Callum's mind raced. His grandmother had been the Keeper, he'd assumed, or his grandfather before her. The journal named a succession of MacRaes stretching back centuries. His father had died when Callum was six—a climbing accident in the Cuillin, his mother had said. A fall. No body recovered.

"What do you mean, 'disappeared'?"

Eleanor studied him. "What did your mother tell you?"

"That he fell. Climbing. The estate couldn't recover his body."

"Convenient." She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "Your father didn't fall. He walked into the forest one night in September and never walked out. But not like his father before him—no, Alistair went in on purpose. He'd spent three years trying to find a way to break the pact, and he thought he'd found it. He thought the answer was in the stones."

Callum's blood went cold. He knew about the stones now. Four of ten mapped, the rest hidden. Ishbel's warning echoed in his skull—keepers who try to break the pact lose all their memories.

"Did it work?" His voice came out rough.

Eleanor laughed, and it wasn't a pleasant sound. "You think I'd be here if it had? He was found—or the traces of him were. His jacket, his boots, arranged at the foot of the standing stone in the eastern grove. Neat as a laid-out corpse. His dirk was gone. The forest took everything else. He was forty-one years old, and he left behind a son who couldn't remember what his own father's face looked like by the time he was nine."

The words hit harder than they should have. Callum had always assumed his memory of his father was thin because he'd been six when the man died. Grief, his mother said. Trauma. But now, standing in this house with an aunt he'd never known he had, he understood the truth. The forest had taken his father's memory. And then it had taken its own son's memory of the man.

"What did he find?" Callum asked. "Before he went in. Did he leave anything?"

"He left notes." Eleanor reached into her coat and pulled out a folded manila envelope, yellowed at the edges. "I've had these for twenty years. I never read them—I was too afraid. But you've opened the cellar, and you're in this up to your neck, and you have the right to know what he was chasing."

She held it out. Callum didn't take it.

"Why would you warn me? You're the one who sealed the cellar. You walked away."

"I walked away because I was a coward." Her face twisted. "I was twenty-four, and I'd just watched my own mother feed her most precious memory to that thing in the earth. I'd seen what the line did to people. I couldn't carry it. So I buried the door, and I let your grandmother take the pact—reluctantly, at the end of her life—and I told myself that if Alistair could find a way out, I'd go back."

"Did you believe he would?"

"I hoped." She looked at the envelope in her hand. "He was the cleverest of us all. The only one who thought he could out-think a curse." A beat. "He was wrong."

Callum took the envelope. It was heavier than it looked, as if the paper itself had absorbed something from the forest. He didn't open it. Not yet. He needed to be sitting down, alone, with a bottle of whisky and a clear head.

"You should leave," Eleanor said suddenly, standing. "Tonight. Get in your truck, drive to Inverness, don't look back. Let the forest have this house and everything in it. Let the line die with you."

"I can't."

"You can. You're not bound until you make the offering. You've opened the door, but you haven't fed it. Walk away now, and it will find another way."

"The memory loss has already started."

Eleanor went very still. "How bad?"

"Faces. People I went to school with. Teachers. The names of streets I grew up on. I drove through my own hometown last month and had to use the sat-nav to find the bakery." He swallowed. "And I can't remember what my father looked like. I thought that was normal."

Something flickered in Eleanor's eyes. Fear, or sorrow—or the recognition of a familiar pattern. "It's feeding on you because you've been near the stones. The boundary stones wake the connection. Every step you take in that forest, every breath you draw near the grove, it drinks you down a little more."

"Then I need to find a way to break it. Fast."

Eleanor shook her head. "There is no breaking it, Callum. Only surviving it, or feeding it what it wants. Your grandfather chose his own path, and it took him. Your father chose his, and it took him. I chose to run, and it made me a ghost in my own family—unseen, unheard, unable to help anyone I loved."

She picked up her bag from the floor. "I came here to warn you because I owe your father that much. Alistair loved you more than anything—more than the land, more than the pact, more than his own life. He'd hate seeing you go the same way."

"Then help me." Callum stepped toward her. "You know things. The cellar, the stones—there has to be something. A loophole. The journal says one of the keepers broke a piece of the pact. Just once. Just enough to escape for a few years."

Eleanor's face shuttered. "That keeper paid for it with more than memories. She lost her name. Her face. Everything that made her *her*. And when the forest found her again, in her seventies, it didn't ask—it *took*."

She reached the door and paused. "If you stay, Callum, you will end up like your father. A pile of clothes at the base of a stone, and a son who can't remember you." She looked at him, and for a moment he saw something like grief in her eyes. "And there's something else. Something I've never told anyone."

"What?"

"When Alistair disappeared, I went to the grove. I searched for three days. Found nothing but the clothes, the boots. But on the third night, I heard him." Her voice cracked. "He was under the earth, Callum. Under the roots, calling my name. Begging me to dig."

The rain hammered against the windows. Callum stood frozen.

Eleanor's face twisted. "I dug until my fingers bled, and I found a hollow—a space like a grave, the roots woven into a cage. It was empty. But it had been occupied. And there was writing on the inside of the roots, scratched in the wood."

"What did it say?"

Eleanor looked at him, and her voice was flat and terrible.

"It said: *The son must finish what the father began.*" She turned and walked out into the rain, leaving Callum standing in the doorway with the envelope heavy in his hand, her words settling into him like stones into water.

He didn't open the envelope.

He stood there for a long time, listening to the wind, feeling the forest breathing on the edge of his awareness. And for the first time, he understood that his father wasn't dead. Not truly. He was still out there, trapped under the roots of the ancient trees, waiting for his son to finish what he'd started.