"Follow the one that keeps him breathing," Kael said. "The rest we can argue about until the clouds burn off."
She glanced at the sky. The clouds did not look inclined to burn off. They looked permanent, a lid. And somewhere under that lid, if the beast was telling even a fraction of truth, something with a hollow crown was already turning its attention toward a pale infant in a beige blanket.
"Stay at the fence," she ordered. "If you cross it without leave, I will scream this valley awake."
"I will not cross."
She believed him. That was the most frightening part.
His name, he told her later, was Kael. Once it had been Kaelor of the High Stall, son of a line that kept the old roads between the human kingdoms and the deep woods. That was before the Binding, before the horns, before the years of walking alone with a prophecy lodged in his chest like a thorn he could neither spit out nor swallow.
But that came after the first night.
For the first hour after the light, Mara kept the pitchfork between them and backed toward the cottage step by step, Elias quiet against her, Kael's bulk following at a distance that said he understood the geometry of terror. He stopped at the edge of her kitchen garden, where the rosemary had gone woody and the beans hung limp from the cold. He sat on his haunches in the grass, taller even then than her doorframe, and waited while she barred the door from the inside and stood shaking with her back against the wood.
Elias slept again, as if miracles were ordinary as milk.
Mara lit no lamp. She sat on the floor with her son in her lap and listened to the silence outside, and to the louder silence inside her skull. She heard her late husband's voice, imagined: Get the neighbors. Get the reeve. Get fire. She heard her mother's voice, sharper: A mother does not bargain with monsters.
She heard, under both, the small sound Elias had made when the light came—contentment, curiosity, trust—and she could not make that sound mean nothing.
When dusk thickened into true night, she opened the shutter a hand's width.