"If you meant to take him," she said into the dark, "you would have. So tell me why you're still sitting in my beans."
Kael's answer came from closer than she expected. He had not moved to the door. He had stayed where she left him, a shadow among shadows.
"Because the decision is not finished," he said. "And because I have nowhere else that would not make this worse."
"Worse for whom?"
"For him. For you. For the thing that is already hunting the child who can wake the Bond."
Mara's fingers dug into the shutter. "Explain. Simply. As if I were holding a pitchfork."
A pause. Then, with the careful patience of someone who had practiced this speech in empty clearings for years:
"There is an old curse on my kind—or what is left of my kind. We were keepers once. Guardians of the seams between your fields and the older wild. Men made bargains with us for safe roads and mild winters. Then men grew afraid of what they could not own, and a mage-king in the east bound us into shapes that remembered hunger more easily than speech. He thought if we looked like monsters, we would be easier to kill. He was partly right."
Kael's voice roughened. "The Binding frays when a child of unmarked blood chooses us freely—not as a pet, not as a weapon, but as kin. The prophecy is older than the curse. It says the light will answer only once in a generation, and only if the child is not forced. I have walked from the Ash Ranges to the salt marshes looking for that moment. I have been driven from villages with fire and song. I have watched mothers scream and fathers raise axes. I learned to wait at fences. I learned to ask."
"And if Elias had pulled away?" Mara asked.
"Then I would have left," Kael said. "And the curse would have kept its teeth for another span of years. And the thing that feeds on the Binding—the Hollow King who wears the mage-king's leftover power—would have kept growing. He does not want the curse broken. He wants the last of us hunted into myth, and then he wants your kind to forget we ever held the seams. When the seams tear, your winters will not be mild. Your roads will not be safe. Your children will learn new names for hunger."
Mara closed her eyes. The cottage smelled of peat and onions and the faint sweetness of Elias's skin. Outside, a beast who spoke like a scholar and looked like a nightmare waited in her garden as if manners could make him smaller.