I’d hoped that my worry was unfounded. That I’d been seeing things.

“Lucinia told me what happened,” Mom said, lowering Blaise into his rickety crib, roughly crafted by Dad’s novice hands before his disappearance. As she turned, I saw the worry lines, of age beginning to show, on her face, deepened further by her own anxiety. Even more concerned was that she was scratching at the back of one of her hands—something she only did when something was troubling her terribly. “Was that boy alright? Frif?”

“The nurse said he’d been okay with some rest. Nothing serious,” I said, picking idly at the wooden table. Lucinia had been sent off to bed as well, and I hadn’t moved from my seat at the table after dinner. It was as if I were stuck in a swamp of Mom’s worry and attention. I tried to keep my breath level, breathing how she’d always taught me.

‘Level, like the undisturbed surface of a pond.’

I didn’t think Lucinia had seen enough to know that Frif had somehow gotten a shard, but the way Mom was furtively glancing around had me on edge.

She sat at the table across from me, glancing over her shoulder at Blaise’s crib. The candle on the table cast shadows over her face, making the worry lines even deeper. “Can you tell me exactly what happened, Kaelion?”

And so I did. Mom was the only one in the village who knew about the odd sensations I’d felt since I was a child—she’d been the one that taught me to keep quiet about them. As I described what I had felt, the…force turning from be back onto Frif, she was silent, but the muscles in her face tensed.

“And then I took him to the medical tent and… that’s about it,” I said, trailing off aimlessly. The words had come tumbling out of me faster than I could think, and I hadn’t even considered that I would need to stop talking at some point.

The room was silent for a long time, Mom’s gaze alternating between staring off at some distant point over my shoulder, beyond the window, and fixing on me intently.

Finally, she sighed. A heaving sigh that brought her shoulders almost up to her ears before she let out the deep breath. Then she stood, walked over to the window above the sink, and pressed a hand to the glass. Thinking about Dad.

“I knew we shouldn’t have stayed here…” she said, almost too quiet for me to hear.

I’d always suspected she knew more about this strangeness inside me than she had let on, but it never seemed a good idea to ask. As long as I did as she said, keeping it hidden away, we could carry on with our lives, undisturbed. That’s what I’d thought for so long. But now, at those words, I couldn’t help my curiosity from welling up. I stood from my chair.

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“Mom. Do you know what—“

“Not now,” she said, heaving another sigh, this one impossibly even deeper than the last. I flinched at the sharpness in her voice, whatever I was going to say forgotten. “And we thought it would be safer for you here. What fools we were.”

I stood there, dumbstruck, trying to parse her words, but nothing made any sense. Safer for me? Safer how? From what? My blood was rushing in my ears again, and I grew lightheaded. I had to stabilize myself using the table. And rising above the sea of all my other thoughts, I wondered how much she knew about me. About why I sometimes felt the things I did.

She’d said something else, I realized. But the words had made so sense. I hadn’t really heard them. “Huh?” I said.

“I said we leave tomorrow morning,” she repeated, turning to face me.

“Wha—“ I stammered. Even if I wasn’t very welcome here, Avenholme was my home. Our home. To hear we were leaving, just like that, sent me reeling. “What do you mean we’re leaving? What about Lucinia? Her friends? What about Dad—“

“Kaelion, you know as well as I that your father probably isn’t coming back.” She grazed the counter behind her with her finger as she stepped forward. “Our staying here is probably why he’s gone now in the first place,” she said. There was a sad smile, tinged with bitterness, on her face.

What was that supposed to mean? Us being in our home was why Dad was gone? “I don’t— I don’t understand,” I said, unable to form any other words, my confusion was so great. A thousand questions careened around my head, reverberating around my skull and making me feel sick. Making the floor seem to tilt, as if the world would fall out from under me at any moment. I’d been worried on my way home, but now I realized I hadn’t been worried enough.

Mom met my eyes, that contradictory expression still on her face. “I know, honey,” she said. She swept over me and drew me into a hug. “But it’ll just make it harder for you if I explain it all now,” she said. I could feel her heart beating almost as fast as my own. “I promise I’ll tell you everything, but after we leave this village, alright? Just trust me, please.”

A faint agitation had been building in my chest at the abruptness of all this, exacerbated by my desire for answers. But as Mom softly spoke, even greater than the sincerity in her voice was a tremor of fear. My own annoyance suddenly seemed very childish, and it drained from me like water from a tub. And left in the dregs was the real emotion upon which it had been building—fear, the same as Mom, even if for different reasons.

I nodded, and she squeezed me closer.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice cracking. Then, straightening, she added. “We’ll be off tomorrow just as soon as I can sell off the tonics and poultices I make from those norolillies.”

Though my legs still shook and my pulse still pounded, I nodded again, my incessant internal questions and theories unabated. But they would have to wait, I told myself. There would be time for all of that later.

As if in mocking response to this thought, I felt a prickle run over my skin, just before a distorted crash resounded from somewhere outside.