CHAPTER 1
IT WAS A WRONG-LOOKING creeper.
The leaves were the colour of a bruise gone septic (mottled violet-black, slick with a sheen that caught the weak dawn light and threw it back wrong). They lay flat against a stem thick as a man's forearm, ridged with tiny, backward-facing barbs that pointed like the teeth of some patient predator. That stem had coiled itself around the pale trunk of a ghost-pine in three deliberate turns, biting so deep that clear resin wept from the wounds in slow, trembling drops. Along the creeper's length, at irregular intervals, jutted black seed-cases the size of a child's clenched fist. Each bore a single curved thorn that flexed when the wind touched it, tasting the air.
Kael of Briarholt smelled it before he saw it.
Sweet rot (cloying, intimate, the scent of meat left three days in high summer). It slid into his lungs and lodged there, familiar in the worst possible way.
He stopped dead on the narrow deer trail, one boot balanced on a root slick with moss. The high Veilwood Marches were still half-asleep; mist drifted between the iron-oaks in slow, pale ribbons that swallowed sound and gave it back distorted. Somewhere far off a raven croaked once, a broken-throated laugh, then fell silent. Kael closed his eyes for one slow heartbeat, willing the grief-fog that had lived behind them these three weeks to stay thick a little longer.
When he opened them again the creeper was still there, patient and obscene.
He had seen its like only once before.
Three weeks ago. Sealed inside the cobalt jar on his father's desk.
Kael crouched, careful not to let his shadow fall across the vine. The nearest seed-case swivelled a fraction, thorn questing toward the warmth of his skin. He knew the old herbals by heart (Corvin had drilled them into him since boyhood), but nothing in those pages had prepared him for the way the thorn moved, slow and deliberate, as though it recognised him.
The ghost-pine's trunk was ringed with the creeper's coils all the way to the first fork, twenty feet up. Resin had hardened in long amber tears that caught the light and turned it sickly. Kael rose slowly and stepped back, scanning the undergrowth. No other vine. No crushed grass, no broken twigs (nothing to show how the cutting had been planted here, miles inside the Veilwood Marches, far from any road or footpath). The forest floor was undisturbed except for the single place where the creeper had taken root, as though the earth itself had opened its mouth and accepted the seed without protest.
Everything else looked ordinary.
The iron-oaks had begun their yearly bleeding; crimson splashed across their crowns like fresh wounds against the pale sky. Lower down, the duskwoods still wore their dark green coats, stubborn as old soldiers refusing to salute the coming winter. A red squirrel scolded from a low branch, tail flicking, then darted away as if it too had smelled what grew on the ghost-pine. Mist curled around the trunks in slow spirals, thinning here and there to reveal patches of moss luminous with dew. Somewhere water dripped steadily (one drop every three heartbeats), the only sound besides his own breathing.
Kael's breath came slow and deliberate. He had walked these forests since he could toddle on unsteady legs. Master Corvin (half hermit, half hedge-sorcerer, all sharp tongue and sharper eyes) had dragged him along on herb-gathering treks from the time he was six, naming every leaf, every root, every berry that could heal a fever or stop a heart with a smile. Corvin never spoke to him as a child; he spoke as if Kael already knew the answers and simply needed reminding.
This creeper, though, Corvin had shown him only once, and not in the living woods. A single pressed sprig between pages of a forbidden book whose leather cover had been stitched with silver wire. The edges of the page had been blackened as though the plant had tried to burn its way free.
Kael's father, Dren, had kept a cutting of the same creeper sealed in a jar of cobalt glass (the jar Kael himself had thrown on a wheel the summer he turned nine, lopsided and proud, the first thing he had ever made that his father had kept). Dren had been a wayfarer all his life, chasing rumours of star-bones and storm-caged opals across the borderlands. Rich folk in the river cities paid small fortunes for whatever oddity he dragged home: a vial of water that screamed when poured, a mirror that showed tomorrow's weather, a single feather that weighed more than a horse. Dren loved the chase more than the coin; he would hand over a dragon-bone flute one day and be gone the next, grinning like a boy let out of school, boots already dusty with the next road.
Kael's older brother, Torren, had inherited none of that fire. Torren measured worth in ledgers and marble halls and the quiet approval of men who wore silk. Five years ago, when Kael came of age, he had built himself a small cabin on the forest's edge (one room, a stone hearth, a single window that looked west toward the Pale Rift) and rarely looked back. He still visited Dren often; Torren almost never did.
Whenever Dren left on a long journey he would leave a note in the cobalt jar: a scrap of news, a rough sketch of some impossible creature sighted near the Rift, a warning about prices rising in the south or bandits on the old trade road. Three weeks ago Torren had arrived at Kael's door after dusk, flanked by two town guards, eyes red and voice flat.
"Father is dead. Murdered in his study. There's… there's no reason for you to see it."
Kael had gone anyway.
They would not let him view the body (something about the face, they said, something about respect), but he saw the blood: thick rust-brown lakes across the oak floorboards, handprints smeared high on the walls as if someone had tried to claw their way up through the ceiling itself. The metallic stink had been overwhelming, mixed with something sweeter (sweet-rot creeper, he knew now). The house servants had whispered when they thought he could not hear: talk of rift-echoes wearing men's faces, of a killer who left no footprints, of things that should have stayed on the far side of the Pale.
And on the desk, sealed tight inside the cobalt jar, lay that single sprig of the creeper, leaves still bruised violet-black, thorn curved like a question no one wanted to answer.
Kael stood now in the chill morning air and felt the forest watching him. The seed-case nearest his boot flexed again, slow and deliberate. A bead of resin trembled on the ghost-pine's bark, fell, and struck the leaf-litter with a sound too loud for the silence.
He drew his plain iron knife (fire-blackened along the spine, the way Corvin insisted all honest steel should be) and cut a wide circle around the creeper. When he was ten paces clear he wiped the blade on his trousers, though it had touched nothing.
The smell followed him all the same.
He walked on, deeper into the Veilwood Marches, boots silent on the moss. Mist curled around his legs like a living thing. Behind him, far back in the hollow, the second sweet-rot creeper shivered as though something large had brushed past it. A single seed-case detached, rolled once, and lay still, thorn pointed west.
Toward Briarholt.
Toward him.