Seventy-two hours. The number hung in Alex's mind like a tolling bell. The fragile truce Kiera had brokered was less a peace and more a mutual holding of breath. The Covenant wasn't hunting, but their invisible net—drones, satellite thermal, listening posts—would be tighter than ever, monitoring for any breach. They were waiting. Confident.
Alex and Jenkins retreated not to the cottage or the forge, but to a place even more hidden: a fire lookout tower decommissioned in the 1960s, perched on a bald peak overlooking the northern Blackwood. Its wooden frame was rotten, its windows gone, but the 360-degree view was commanding. It was Jenkins's "high nest," stocked with supplies, binoculars, and a powerful telescope.
For the first twenty-four hours, they watched. The forest was preternaturally still. No anomalous heat blooms on the horizon scanner Jenkins had rigged (a jury-rigged mess of civilian tech and intuition). No howls. It was as if the hollow had been a release valve, and now the pressure was gone, leaving an eerie vacuum.
"She's hiding," Jenkins said on the second morning, sipping bitter coffee from a tin cup. "Or she's been claimed."
"Claimed?" Alex asked, scanning the endless green sea with binoculars.
"The forest doesn't just host the curse. It… absorbs the lost ones. The fully feral Moon-Touched, the ones who can't remember their names… they sometimes just stop being individuals. They become part of the background noise. A will-o'-the-wisp of rage and pain that flits through the trees. If Lily's gone that far…" He didn't finish.
They needed a guide. Someone who knew the forest not as a warden or a hunter, but as something else entirely. Alex thought of the note from the archive, the one signed 'R.' He thought of the list of herbs Lily was studying. He thought of Kiera's mother, who had "sought answers in places even I feared to go."
"There has to be someone else," Alex said, lowering the binoculars. "Not a Blackwood, not on the Committee. Someone on the edges. An herbalist. A… witch."
Jenkins was silent for a long time, staring into his coffee. "There's stories," he finally conceded, his voice grudging. "Older than the Blackwoods in Millfield. The first peoples who lived here spoke of a 'Leaf-Speaker.' A woman who treated with the forest spirit, not as a master or a servant, but as a neighbor. When the settlers came, the stories changed. Became about a hag in the woods, a corrupter, a lure for lost children. The usual fear."
"But you believe she's real."
"I believe my sister believed," Jenkins said softly. "Elara's notes… they weren't just about plants. They were about conversations. She wrote about meeting an 'Elder in the green.' I thought it was poetic nonsense. Now… I don't know. If such a person exists, and if Lily was following Elara's research, she might have sought her out. Not as a victim, but as a student. Or a patient."
It was the thinnest of leads, a thread of folklore. But it was all they had.
They spent the day piecing together fragments. Jenkins retrieved his sister's moldering field journals from a locked trunk in his workshop. The pages were filled with precise botanical sketches and dense, lyrical text. One recurring, cryptic phrase appeared: "To find the Heart's-Moss, seek the Stone that Weeps, then follow the laughter of the hidden stream where the kingfisher is silent."
"Heart's-Moss?" Alex asked.
"Not in any botany text I've ever seen," Jenkins said. "But look." He pointed to a sketch of a plant with tiny, heart-shaped, silver-flecked leaves. The notation read: "Antidote? Or symbiote? E. claims it 'calms the second heart.'"
The second heart. The curse.
"The Stone that Weeps could be a marker near a spring," Alex mused. "The 'laughter of the hidden stream'… a tributary you can hear but not see. Where the kingfisher is silent… a place too still for a bird that needs moving water to hunt."
It was a riddle. A treasure map for the desperate.
They cross-referenced the 1847 map with modern hydrographic surveys. There was a cluster of undocumented springs and seepages in a remote western valley of the Blackwood Tract, a place marked with the vague warning: "Unstable ground – sulfur vents." It was far from the Weeping Hollow, far from any known Ward post, deep in territory even Jenkins had seldom explored.
"If you wanted to hide from everyone—Blackwoods, Covenant, town—that's where you'd go," Jenkins said, tracing the valley on the map. "Or where something that didn't want to be found would live."
They moved out at dusk of the second day. The journey was a slow, brutal descent into a part of the forest that felt primordial. The trees were giants, their trunks furred with thick moss. The air grew warm and humid again, laced with the tang of minerals and decay. True to the map, the ground became spongy, treacherous, pockmarked with small, bubbling mud pots and vents emitting wisps of warm, rotten-egg-scented steam. The "hidden stream" was indeed a sound—a cheerful, distant babble that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, trickling through underground channels.
They found the "Stone that Weeps" as full dark fell. It was a massive, lichen-covered slab of granite leaning against a hillside. Water seeped continuously from a fracture near its top, tracing a dark, damp stain down its face like eternal tears. At its base, in a small patch of earth kept perpetually moist, grew a cluster of the delicate, heart-shaped, silver-flecked moss from Elara's journal.
Heart's-Moss.
Jenkins knelt, touching it reverently. "She was here. Elara."
"And Lily," Alex said, pointing. A few feet away, a patch of the moss had been recently harvested, the cuts clean, made by a small trowel or knife. A human hand.
They followed the "laughter," the sound leading them down into the heart of the sulfur valley. The kingfisher was indeed silent. The only sounds were the gurgle of water, the hiss of steam, and their own cautious steps. The mist here was warm, clinging.
And then they saw the light.
Not the cold, electric blue of Covenant tech, but the warm, flickering orange of firelight. It spilled from the mouth of a cave, half-concealed by a curtain of hanging roots and thick ferns. The air around it smelled different—clean herbs, drying flowers, woodsmoke.
They approached silently. There was no door, but the entrance was woven with bundles of dried plants, bones, and feathers—a warning or a welcome, Alex couldn't tell.
"Hello?" Alex called softly, his voice swallowed by the mist.
For a long moment, there was nothing. Then, a figure appeared in the cave mouth, silhouetted by the fire.
She was not a hag. She was ancient, yes—her face a roadmap of deep lines, her hair a wild cloud of white—but her eyes, reflecting the firelight, were sharp, clear, and held an unnerving depth. She wore simple, homespun clothes stained with plant dyes. In one hand, she held a wooden staff topped with a intricate knot of woven willow and crow feathers.
"Thomas Jenkins," she said, her voice like the rustle of dry leaves. "You look like your sister. In the eyes. The sad, seeking eyes." Her gaze shifted to Alex. "And you bring a new seeker. One who smells of fear and city steel. And of the Beast's breath."
She knew them. She'd been expecting them, or someone like them.
"We're looking for Lily Greene," Alex said, finding his voice.
The woman—the Leaf-Speaker, Alex could think of her as nothing else—studied him. "The flower-child. Yes. She found her way here, following the old paths. Following Elara's ghost."
"Is she alive?" Jenkins's question was a raw scrape of hope.
"Alive? Yes. Well?" The Leaf-Speaker's mouth twisted. "The forest has touched her deeply. The moon's poison is in her blood. But her heart… her heart is strong. It fights. She tends my moss garden. She remembers the names of things. For now."
Relief, so potent it was dizzying, washed over Alex. "Can we see her?"
The Leaf-Speaker's gaze turned inward, listening to something they couldn't hear. "The forest is uneasy. The iron teeth are silent, but they still bite at the edges. The old blood is afraid, bargaining with the grey men. You bring their attention here."
"We don't mean to," Alex said. "We just want to help her."
"Help," the old woman repeated, as if tasting a strange word. "Help is a knot. It binds as much as it frees." She stepped back, gesturing with her staff. "Come. See. But be quiet. The change is upon her with the rising moon."
They entered the cave. It was larger than it looked, a natural chamber warmed by a central fire pit. The walls were lined with shelves carved from the rock, holding clay pots, bundled herbs, and strange, beautiful objects—polished stones, bird skulls, intricate weavings. In a corner, on a bed of fragrant ferns and wool blankets, lay Lily.
Or what was left of her.
She was asleep, or in a trance. The physical changes were less severe than in the hollow—the fur patchier, the distortions subtler, as if the wild energy was being focused inward. She looked both terribly ill and peacefully resting. One human hand lay outside the blankets, and curled loosely in its fingers was a sprig of Heart's-Moss.
"The moss eases the war inside," the Leaf-Speaker whispered. "It does not cure. It… negotiates. It helps her remember herself when the moon calls. But the call grows stronger. The wards that once muffled it are broken. The grey men's machines have torn the quiet."
"The Covenant," Alex said.
"A name for a hungry ghost," she spat. "They see life as a clock to take apart. They will unmake the balance. And the forest… the forest will answer."
"What will it do?" Jenkins asked, his voice full of dread.
The old woman looked at the sleeping Lily, then into the fire. "When a wolf is cornered, it attacks. When a forest is cornered… it remembers it is older than wolves, older than men. It has defenses none of your maps have recorded." She fixed Alex with her deep eyes. "You have three days, the trembling girl bought you. But you fight the wrong war. You chase a symptom. The disease is the silence, the fear, the greed. To save the flower-child, to save the trembling girl, you must heal the rift. You must make the forest, the old blood, and the frightened town see they are all part of the same wounded body."
It was an impossible task. A spiritual diagnosis for a crisis of claws and contracts.
"How?" Alex asked, despair creeping in.
The Leaf-Speaker reached out and touched the silver-flecked moss in Lily's hand. "You start by listening. Not with machines. Not with fear. You go to the place where the first promise was made. You go to the Whispering Stone Circle on the night the truce ends. And you bear witness to what the forest says when its last patience snaps."
She was sending them to the epicenter. On the deadline.
"And Lily?" Jenkins asked.
"She stays with me. She is safe here, for now. Safer than with you, who are hunted. Go. Prepare. The final moon is rising."
They were dismissed. As they left the cave, the warm, herbal air behind them, Alex looked back. The firelight framed the old woman and the sleeping, changed girl. A witch and a werewolf, tending a garden of heart-shaped moss in a hidden valley. It was a picture of a different world, a fragile, alternative peace.
Outside, in the cold mist, Jenkins let out a long, shaky breath. "We found her."
"Now we have to save her," Alex said, the weight of the Leaf-Speaker's words settling on him. "And to do that, we have to stop a war nobody else even understands they're fighting."
The hands of the clock were moving. The next stop was the heart of the darkness itself: the Whispering Stone Circle. Seventy-two hours were almost up.