She stormed into the garden with Elias on her hip and found Kael examining a broken bean stake as if it were a problem worthy of a scholar. "Don't fix my garden," she snapped. "Don't be useful. Useful makes it harder to hate you."
Kael set the stake down gently. "Then I will be useless on purpose. Shall I sit on the flowers?"
Despite herself, a breath of laughter escaped her. It shocked her more than the light had. She pressed her lips together. "You can't joke. Monsters don't joke."
"Then I am failing at being a monster," Kael said. "I have been failing at it for a long time. It is my favorite failure."
Mara sat on the cottage step. Elias strained toward Kael; she allowed a smaller distance than yesterday, still not touching. "Tell me about the Hollow King. Not prophecy language. Plain."
Kael's gaze went distant. "He was a man first. A mage with a gift for taking living law and rewriting it. The keepers' vows were living law—promises made to the land itself. He learned to invert them. Where we said protect, he wrote own. Where we said share the seam, he wrote seal and starve. He Bound us to prove that human will could master older contracts. Kings paid him. Priests blessed him. When he finished, he found the Binding had eaten his name from the inside. Now he is what remains: a hunger wearing a crown, feeding on every unbroken chain. If the last chains break, he dies. That is why he hunts children like yours. Not for sport. For survival."
"So my son is a weapon."
"Your son is a person," Kael said sharply, the first edge she had heard in him. "The Bond does not make him a sword. It makes him a witness the land will listen to. There is a difference between being used and being heard. I will spend what is left of me ensuring he is only the second."
Mara held that distinction carefully, like a cup filled too near the brim. "If I help you," she said, "and Briarholt burns for it—"
"Then I will carry every name," Kael said. "But I do not think it will burn. The Hollow King prefers quiet thefts to loud wars. Loud wars wake too many keepers at once. He will try precision first. That is why the seeker will smile."
Precision. Smiles. Mara looked at Elias and thought of all the ordinary dangers she had already survived, and of this new one wearing a human face. "Then teach me precision back," she said. "Teach me until my fear has tools."
So he did. Through the afternoon he taught her the lag of false shadows, the shutter-flicker of stolen eyes, the way true rowan smelled when it had not been glamoured. She practiced until the sun slid and Elias needed feeding and the lesson settled into her muscles beside the older lessons of midwifery and mourning.