Liri Dewglow of Quillwood's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Liri stepped past the painted toadstools and onto the dead path. The ground was wrong under her boots — gray, cracked, the moss flaked away like old skin. No roots breathed here. The forest had pulled back from this strip of earth as if afraid to touch it. At the path's center sat a mossy stump, hollowed into a portal, its carved runes glowing a sick green. The bark-reader had set it there. A marker. A door. The figure did not move. Liri raised the staff. "Step into the light." The hood fell back. The face beneath was not her student's. It was older, sharper, and Liri knew it the way you know a scar you have stopped looking at. A name rose in her throat from a life she had buried before Quillwood ever called her. She did not say it. She only said, "You should be dead." "You left me for dead," the figure answered. "There is a difference." The voice carried the same short-soft shape of her own name. "The bark-reader spoke easily once I named the village we both came from. She did not know you had one." Liri's hands stayed steady on the staff, but something inside her went loose and cold. No one in Quillwood knew. Not Winter, who had taught her the root-words. Not Durgan, who had stood at her gate and traded silence for silence. Not even Mervin, who pried at every locked thing he passed. She had given the forest a clean version of herself, and this person on the dead path had just torn it open. She drove the staff down. The portal's runes flared, then guttered. "You came for the heart tree." "I came for what you owe," the figure said, and stepped backward through the stump. The green light folded shut behind them. The dead path was empty. Liri stood alone with the knowledge that her past had found a door into Quillwood — and that she, not the bark-reader, was the breach.