"Children often aren't," Kael answered. "Fear is taught. Sometimes well. Sometimes too well."
"Will the Hollow King come here?"
Kael's ears—flat against his skull, not quite bovine, not quite human—angled back. "He will send a seeker first. Something that looks almost like a person. It will ask questions. It will offer help. If it finds the Bond's scent, it will call the rest."
"And the Bond is what Elias made when he touched you."
"Started," Kael corrected. "A Bond is a rope with three strands: choice, truth, and time. Choice has been made. Truth must be spoken—my name in the old tongue, his name freely given, yours as witness. Time must be survived. Thirteen days from the first light, if the three strands hold, the Binding on my line weakens enough for others to wake. If the strands break—if he is taken, if I am killed, if you revoke the witness in fear—the light dies, and the Hollow King learns exactly where to put his boot."
Mara sat in the grass. Elias grabbed her finger. "Thirteen days."
"Thirteen."
"And what do I get for being the witness in your prophecy?" Her voice was dry. "Besides nightmares and a houseguest who can't fit through my door."
Kael was quiet for a long time. "You get a world where the seams hold. You get winters that do not eat your neighbors. You get a son who will grow up knowing that monsters can choose, and that choice can be holy. That is not nothing. It is also not enough. So I offer what I can that is mine: protection. Teaching, when he is older, if you allow it. And when the Binding breaks, a debt paid in whatever coin you name that does not cost another child's blood."
Mara looked at her son. Elias had found his toes. The world, for him, was still mostly toes and milk and the interesting shape of a horned giant.
"We'll take the thirteen days," she said. "Day by day. And you will teach me how to spot a seeker."
Between the first light and the seeker's arrival fell the second day of waiting, when Mara's fear tried to reinvent itself as anger.