Chapter 37
Chapter 37 — The Weight of Faces
The family walks back to the house with leather-bound shutters along the revived forest path. Meredith-Kay communicates telepathically to all three parents simultaneously, revealing that the numbers 1 through 4 correspond to the four faces of eternity, which are now under new management. Each family member holds one face, one number. Kayline is 1, the foundation. Aldren is 2, between. Mireth is 3, the arrival. Meredith-Kay is 4, marked on her back tattoo. Along the way, Harrow escorts them through his patrol range, Corvus flies overhead, and Vesper appears briefly at the edge of the forest. The baby explains that the four faces were previously held by something old that mismanaged them, and that the house, the springs, and the land itself recognized the transfer. The family arrives home to find the leather-bound shutters open, waiting.
The morning after the first night in the new place arrived not with a bang, not with a whisper, but with the particular sound of a timber wolf sneezing three times in rapid succession approximately thirty yards from where your protagonists slept on a stone floor that definitely wasn't there when they closed their eyes.
Aldren woke to the sound. Which was, frankly, an improvement over waking to a telepathic infant broadcasting directly into his prefrontal cortex, though he'd grown accustomed to that too — the way you grow accustomed to a neighbor who practices drums at odd hours, not because it stops being annoying but because your brain reclassifies it as ambient noise rather than active intrusion.
Harrow was outside the stone wall's opening, sitting on his haunches with the particular expression wolves get when they've been waiting for you to wake up and they're not especially impressed by how long it took. He'd been patrolling. That much was obvious from the damp leaves stuck to his flanks and the slightly self-satisfied set of his ears. Patrol complete. Perimeter secure. One family accounted for, four if you counted by bond-notes instead of bodies, and yes, he did, because the wolf had been plugged into whatever frequency this family operated on since before the baby was born, and his standards for accounting had become quite precise.
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