Chapter 21: The Land Answers

The light came up out of the stone.

It was silver and slow, and it spread across the flat rock and over the grass.

Rowena did not take her hands off Lachlan's shoulder.

Her palms were wet with his blood, and her whole body was shaking.

"Stay," she said again. "Please."

The light crept up his chest.

It rose through the wound in his shoulder in a thin glittering thread.

The silver was coming out of him.

She watched it lift from the torn flesh in tiny beads, and hang in the air, and drift away across the clearing.

The black lines running under his skin faded. The torn edges of the wound drew together.

Lachlan drew a long, ragged breath.

His eyes opened, amber and clear.

"I can feel it," he said hoarsely. "The ground. It's holding me up."

"Don't talk."

"It knows you."

All around the stone the monkshood began to bloom.

It had been bare stalks since the frost.

Now purple buds split and opened in a ring, hundreds of them.

The wind turned.

It blew down from the ridge through every tree on the mountain, and the branches bowed toward the stone.

Rowena heard it as a sound in her bones.

Hartnell, it said. Hartnell. Hartnell.

Orson's wolves felt it too.

The man with the rifle stood frozen.

His gun sagged in his hands.

The wolf beside him let his weapon slide out of his fingers and fall.

"What is this?" Orson snapped. "What are you doing? Shoot her!"

Nobody moved.

A second gun hit the grass. A third.

One by one, the thirty hunting wolves put their weapons down, and then they went down on their knees in the frozen turf.

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