Rowan Switched's Arc

Chapter 1 of 25

Rowan stood at the cottage window with an iron nail pressed flat against their palm. The old woman who raised them had died in the spring, and on her last night she told Rowan the truth: they had been swapped in the cradle, placed among humans by folk who wanted a quiet child who never asked the right questions. Rowan had asked every question since. Tonight they wanted a name. Their real one. The one those folk had kept when they took the human baby and left Rowan in its place. For a month Rowan had been hunting. Last market day, they dropped an iron coin near a tall stranger and watched him flinch like the metal had bitten him. Rowan followed him an hour through the stalls. Since then, Rowan had asked careful questions at the well, at the mill, at the bread stall. Who else flinched at iron. Who ate no salt. Who wore their shoes wrong. The questions had traveled further than Rowan meant. The watching began three nights ago. A shape at the edge of the garden, past the flowerbed the old woman had planted. Tonight the blooms leaned the wrong way, tilting toward the dark instead of toward the house. Beyond them, the small plot of dead-heads and cracked stones the old woman kept for her lost kin sat too quiet. No wind moved the wilted heads. Something was holding its breath out there. Rowan set the hawthorn cutting from the cradle on the sill. Then the milk tooth beside it. Then a ring of iron nails around both. If the folk had left those tokens as an invitation, Rowan would answer. If they were a warning, Rowan would ignore it. They opened the door. A tall silhouette waited on the path, long-eared, wrong-shouldered, blacker than the night behind it. Small shapes crouched in the garden, six of them, thin and bright-eyed, lanterns swinging in their hands. Behind them all stood a woman crowned in black thorns, gems burning green at her throat. The moon above her was too large and too near, and the light on her face did not match the light on the grass. "You have been asking," the crowned woman said. Her voice was even. "We came to see the noise." Rowan stepped onto the stone. They held up the milk tooth in one hand and an iron nail in the other. "Then take me back," Rowan said. "Or tell me the name you took with the other child." The crowned woman smiled without warmth. She lifted one long finger and pointed past Rowan, into the cottage, at the empty chair by the hearth. "Come to the hill on the next dark moon," she said. "Bring what you were left with. We will decide what you are owed." Then the garden was empty, and Rowan was alone with fourteen nights to prepare.