The second night after leaving the temple village, Shree Yan woke to find his own hand had gone cold again, though nothing stood over him this time. He lay still, listening.
Nothing.
Then, faint, from somewhere beyond the treeline:
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
He was on his feet before the third tap finished, blade in hand, though the sound didn't repeat. Wu Yan stirred at the disturbance, one hand already reaching for his sword before his eyes had fully opened.
"What is it?"
"Something walked past the perimeter and stopped." Shree Yan kept his voice low. "Or wanted us to think it did."
They found nothing when they searched, no tracks, no disturbed ground, only a single crow feather caught in the low brush at the exact spot the sound seemed to have come from. Fen Lu turned it over in the lamplight the next morning without comment, though her silence said enough.
"Osen's testing whether we're still tracking his movements," she said eventually, "or he's simply reminding us that he can find our camp whenever he chooses to."
"Both, probably," Numanfung said, saddling her horse with more force than the task required.
They reached the fifth village by midafternoon, and this one carried none of the eerie stillness of the fourth. Ordinary noise greeted them from a quarter mile out, a blacksmith's hammer striking iron in steady rhythm, children shouting somewhere near a stream, a dog barking at their approach and getting nowhere with it. Shree Yan felt something in his chest ease slightly at the sound of a place that hadn't yet been touched.
Clang.
Clang.
Clang.
The hammer never broke rhythm as they rode in, and the blacksmith, a broad woman with soot-streaked forearms, glanced up only long enough to confirm they weren't trouble before returning to her work.
"You'll want the elder's house," she said, tilting her head toward a modest building near the village center. "If you're here about the dreams."
Shree Yan stopped his horse. "What dreams."
"Half the children under ten started having the same one, three nights back," the woman said, setting down her hammer at last. "Woke up crying, all of them, saying a woman was calling them by a name that wasn't theirs."
Numanfung's breath caught, audible even over the settling quiet of the forge.
They found the village elder waiting on his porch, as though he'd been expecting them, or expecting someone, for days. He was old enough that his hands trembled faintly even at rest, though his eyes carried a sharpness that hadn't dimmed with the rest of him.
"You carry her mark," he said to Shree Yan, before any introduction had been offered. "I haven't seen that particular shade of pale in a man's skin since I was young enough to still believe the stories my own grandmother told me."
"What stories."
"Sit," the elder said. "This will take longer to tell than you'll want to stand for."
They sat. The old man was quiet a moment, gathering something that had clearly waited a long time to be spoken aloud.
"My grandmother said a woman came through this village once, generations before I was born, carrying a sickness that wasn't a sickness at all. She stayed only a season. Long enough to marry into one family, bear a single child, and vanish before anyone thought to ask her real name." He looked at Numanfung directly. "The family she married into took the name Subba, generations later, once they'd moved north and mixed with other lines."
Numanfung went very still.
"You're saying I come from here."
"I'm saying your bloodline's root runs through this village, among others," the elder said. "My grandmother believed the woman left something behind before she disappeared. Not blood. Something else. She used to say it slept beneath the old well, waiting for someone with the right blood to wake it."
Fen Lu leaned forward. "Has anyone ever looked?"
"Once," the elder said. "My own father, as a young man, foolish and curious the way young men often are. He came back from the well with his hair gone white overnight and never spoke of what he saw down there again. He made me swear never to send anyone else looking."
"We need to look," Shree Yan said.
"I assumed you would." The old man's voice carried no argument in it, only weary resignation. "I only ask that you understand I warned you properly first. My father's silence was the only mercy that well ever showed anyone."
The well sat at the village's northern edge, ringed with stones worn smooth by generations of rope and bucket, though nobody had drawn water from it in living memory. Shree Yan approached its edge and looked down into darkness that swallowed the afternoon light within a few feet of the surface.
Drip.
Drip.
The sound rose up from somewhere far below, water striking stone at intervals too regular to be natural.
"I'll go down," he said.
"Not alone," Numanfung said, already tying a rope to the nearest post.
"If your grandmother's ancestor buried something specifically tied to your bloodline, you may be the only one who can safely retrieve it."
"Then we go together," she said, in the tone that had stopped working as an argument for her days ago, and Shree Yan, recognizing the futility of contesting it, simply nodded and began securing his own rope alongside hers.
The descent took longer than either of them expected, the well's shaft narrowing gradually until Shree Yan's shoulders brushed stone on both sides. The drip continued below them the entire way down, steady and patient, growing louder as they neared the bottom.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
His feet finally touched solid ground, and his borrowed night sight sharpened the darkness into shapes he could navigate by. A small chamber opened at the well's base, considerably larger than the shaft itself had suggested, its walls carved with script he recognized immediately, the same angular Astral Concordance letters from the valley and the academy stone, though older here, worn nearly smooth by time.
At the chamber's center sat a single stone box, unmarked except for one detail: a handprint pressed into its lid, small enough to belong to a woman, the fingers splayed as though she'd pushed it closed herself in the last moments before leaving it behind forever.
Numanfung landed beside him a moment later, her breath catching at the sight of it.
"That's the handprint from my dream," she said quietly. "The one where she's crying. I always assumed it was symbolic. I never imagined it was literal."
Shree Yan knelt before the box, studying the seal without touching it yet.
"If your ancestor sealed this personally," he said, "then opening it may require more than curiosity. The elder's father went mad simply looking. We should assume worse waits for whoever actually breaks the seal."
"Then we open it carefully," Numanfung said, "or not at all, and I'd rather know than spend the rest of my life wondering what my own blood left buried down here."
Shree Yan considered the risk a final time, weighed it against everything this journey had already cost, and found, in the end, that he agreed with her completely.
"Together, then," he said.
They placed their hands on either side of the small stone handprint, and pressed.
Crack.
The seal split down its center, and a low, resonant hum filled the chamber, rising steadily until it settled into something that sounded, unmistakably, like a single held note of a woman's voice, singing a lullaby neither of them had ever heard before yet somehow, impossibly, already knew.