Petunia yelped, her hands jerking back slightly as she stared at the book, her heart pounding in the stillness of the night. "It—it talked!" she stammered, her voice high-pitched, her gaze darting between the book and the stag, her sunglasses slipping down her nose. "You didn't say it would talk like that! What—what does it mean, a sloth?"
The Elder Stag inclined its head, its form shimmering with a soft radiance, its antlers casting faint flecks of light across the clearing like stars fallen to earth. "The relic has spoken, young one," it intoned, its voice a resonant melody, rich with the wisdom of ages, a final note of guidance before its departure. "The Vyrthangrim is yours to bear, a companion in the trials ahead. It shall guide you, as shall I, when the paths of fate converge once more." With that, the stag's form began to fade, its light dissolving into the air like a constellation returning to the heavens, leaving Petunia alone in the clearing with the talking book, the darkness of the late night pressing in around her, the stars above her only witnesses.
Petunia scrambled to her feet, brushing frost and dead leaves from her skirt with short, furious strokes, as if tidiness could undo the last hour of her life. Her mother's sunglasses had slid halfway down her nose in the scramble; she shoved them back up with one finger. She'd taken them on purpose, before she'd even left the house—some half-formed twelve-year-old logic that if she was going to go creeping about at night after a book that spoke to her in the library, she'd rather look like an odd girl in dark glasses than a girl with wild, darting eyes that couldn't stop staring at things that weren't there. She didn't know if it would actually work. She just knew she'd rather not find out the hard way what people did to girls who stared at nothing.
"Right," she said, to no one in particular, to the book, to the trees, to whatever cosmic authority had decided a Tuesday in the woods was an acceptable time to ruin someone's entire existence. "Right. Fine. I'm going home."
"You say that," the Vyrthangrim's voice rasped in her mind, "as though the threshold will still know you when you return."
Petunia jumped half a foot, nearly dropping the book. "Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Talk. Like—like that. Suddenly. When I'm not expecting it."
"I have been addressing you since the moon was at the crest of the night, girl. You are simply slow to find your terrors."
She tucked the tome firmly under her arm, the leather cold and strange against her wrist, and started walking, her sneakers finding the packed dirt of the path more by memory than sight. The moon gave her just enough to see by—grey shapes, the black lace of branches overhead, her own breath fogging in front of her face like a small, private ghost.
"My parents are going to kill me," she said, mostly to fill the silence, because the silence had things living in it now and she'd rather listen to herself than to that. "It's got to be—I don't even know. Loads past midnight. Mum's probably already rung the police. Dad's probably already decided I've been kidnapped by gypsies or run off to join the circus."
"A misfortune, no doubt," the book grumbled, "though your small family's alarm is a trivial ripple to one who has watched the dust settle over three dynasties."
"It's not important." She hitched the book higher against her ribs. "What's important is that I am going to walk in that door and my mother is going to burst into tears, and my father is going to shout, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm meant to say, because 'sorry, I was busy getting recruited by a talking book and a ghost deer' isn't going to—"
"Guardian," the Vyrthangrim corrected, sharp as a slap. "Not a ghost. Not a deer. A Warden of the Great Wood, whose boundaries were sworn before the first stone of your small kingdom was laid. You will not speak of the ancient entities so carelessly."
"Fine. Sorry. Guardian." She rolled her eyes where the book couldn't see, which felt like a small, satisfying rebellion. "Better?"
"Marginally."
They went on like that for a while—her muttering, the book grumbling—the trees around them thinning as the path sloped down toward the lights of Cokeworth. Petunia was so busy composing and discarding excuses in her head that she nearly missed it.
Nearly.
A shape detached itself from the shadow of an old oak up ahead—tall, wrong in the way a drawing is wrong when someone's copied a person without ever having seen one. Its limbs were too long. Its skin had the dull, cracked look of old bark, and its eyes, when they caught what little moonlight there was, glowed the sick yellow of a bruise.
Petunia stopped dead. Her stomach dropped somewhere around her shoes.
Behind the dark lenses, her eyes went wide—but only she would ever know that. That, she realized with a small, cold jolt, was rather the point of the glasses. Not just to shield her own eyes from whatever unnatural light these things gave off, but so that nothing—not the thing by the tree, not some passerby who might wonder why a girl was gawping at empty air—could see exactly where she was looking, or how frightened she was to be looking there.
"There's a—" Her voice came out thin. "There's a creature over there."
The reaction in her skull was instant, and furious.
"Do NOT," the Vyrthangrim thundered, the resonance vibrating in her skull until she winced, pressing a hand to her temple as though she could physically block it out, "call it by that name. Never that word. Not aloud, nor in the quiet of your thoughts where the air might shape it. They are spirits, girl—the unseen, the bound. There is no shorter path to a quiet grave than reducing an entity of the old order to the title of a common beast in a ditch."
"It's just a word—"
"It is the only currency that does not rot," the Vyrthangrim snarled. "You have tried to pay an ancient, proud bloodline with an insult. Be grateful it ignores you. Be more grateful still that you have the grace to be paralyzed by fear rather than foolishly bold."
Petunia stood frozen, watching the tall shape drift along the treeline, unhurried, its yellow eyes never quite finding her. Her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her throat. She didn't dare turn her head—not because she thought it would help, but because the glasses gave her the illusion that as long as she didn't move, it hadn't noticed the shape of her staring.
"Hmph. Keep them on," the book added after a moment, the thought costing it a heavy, grating sigh. "Whatever these dark shells are—a small deception, but a useful shield. Half of surviving the veil is looking as though you are entirely blind to it. You have stumbled into a fragment of wisdom by accident."
"What do you mean, 'whatever they are'? They're sunglasses."
"They are dark panes of glass set before the eyes, girl, and my last keeper in Ming China if you must know, would have deemed you a witch for less. Explain the device or remain silent, but do not assume my pages read the minds of this strange century."
"They're just—sunglasses," Petunia said again, a little helplessly, because she wasn't entirely sure how to explain a thing she'd never had to explain before. "They're dark, so people can't really see your eyes properly, and the sun doesn't get in them either. Mum wears them in summer. I took hers because I didn't want anyone looking at my face too closely tonight. That's—that's all I know, really. I don't know how they work, if that's what you're asking. I'm twelve."
"Hm." The Vyrthangrim seemed to turn the information over, unimpressed but not unwilling. "A mask for the eyes, then. Crude, but not nothing. Your kind does eventually stumble into something useful, given enough centuries."
And underneath the fear—thin, but there—something else caught up with her.
She hadn't opened her mouth for any of that. Not one word of it.
"Wait." She said it slowly, like testing ice. "You're—you're talking. In my head. Right now. That's—you're actually in my head."
"Obviously."
"That's not obvious! That's—people don't just—" She lowered her voice to a fierce whisper, glancing again at the entity, which had, mercifully, begun to lope off in the other direction. "How long has that been happening?"
"Since my words first found lodging in that frantic little mind of yours. Did you believe I was crying out to the open air, for the uninitiated to hear?"
"I don't know what I believed! I've had rather a lot happen tonight!"
"Then regard it as a mercy," the Vyrthangrim rumbled softly. "If I spoke in the common tongue—aloud, plainly, for the passing wind to carry—do you have the faintest conception of what would happen to you the moment someone caught the echo?"
Petunia didn't answer, mostly because her mind had already supplied several unpleasant guesses.
"They would cry sorcery," the Vyrthangrim went on, grim and absolute, weighing its words like a judge pronouncing an old law. "Not the sanitized fables of your modern pamphlets. The ancient, blackened kind. The kind mortals settle with a high rope and a heavy torch. And they would not stop at the ledger, girl. A talking tome does not walk itself across the land. They would seek the hand that carried it. They would find you."
The blood went out of her face rather quickly.
"They'd — burn it? Burn me?"
"Mankind has committed greater atrocities for far less than a voice issuing from a closed box. Therefore, you will offer gratitude for my silence, and you will learn, swiftly, to contain these councils within the cavern of your own skull, where they belong."
She swallowed, hugging the book tighter despite herself, and picked up her pace down the path, the lights of the town finally close enough to make out individual windows. "This is — this is a lot of very specific information for something that's apparently been asleep in a library for who knows how long."
"I have endured many lifetimes to observe the methods by which mortals dismantle the things they fear. It is, lamentably, the lone consistency of your kind."
They walked in silence for a moment — an actual, out-loud silence, since apparently that was one of the few mercies she'd get tonight.
"It's really late," Petunia said finally, in a small voice, watching her own breath curl away into the dark. "My parents are going to be so cross."
"And their anger is just," the book countered, its tone hardening into a heavy, parental stone. "A child, unattended in the wilderness, long after the stars have turned, without guard or kin. In every empire I have seen fall, such wandering is deemed a deep disgrace. Where I have walked, a maid of your summers would face a bitter reckoning for such folly, and no house would call it unjust."
"Oh, brilliant," Petunia muttered. "So you're going to be cross at me too. Wonderful. Add it to the list."
"I am untouched by petty anger. I am simply weary of the absolute vanity of the young. Quicken your steps. Loitering to lament your plight will not appease your father's wrath, and I have no desire to spend my first vigil in centuries enduring the weeping of an undisciplined child."
Petunia glared down at the book, but broke into something close to a jog anyway, her house finally visible past the last stand of trees — its windows lit, every single one, which was its own kind of terrible.
"I hate you," she said, without much heat.
"You will endure," said the Vyrthangrim. "They always do."