Chapter 247 The Decision
Chapter 247 The Decision
POV: Rune
He came back twice more over the next three days, each time a little further in than the last.
Rune watched all of it from her window, notebook open on her knees, tracking the times he appeared and the paths he tried and the specific way he recovered each time the Wood turned on him. By the third morning she'd started to recognize the shape of his approach the way she recognized everything else in this forest, patient and methodical, closing the distance a little more each time even though the labyrinth kept resetting itself against him.
She sat with all of it on the third night, the note still tucked in its hiding spot beneath her mattress, soft now at every fold from being read so many times she'd nearly memorized the words on the page.
It was time to be honest with herself about what she actually knew.
She knew there was a phantom hunter somewhere out past the tree line, close enough now that she could track his movements from memory instead of squinting through the early light to find him. She knew Vael had protocols for exactly this situation and had never once mentioned them existed. She knew her own library stopped mattering seven years ago, and that somewhere behind all of it sat a woman with a past Rune had never once thought to ask about, a woman who checked wards with hands that moved like she was protecting something and not just containing it.
She had been pretending not to know all of this for weeks now. Longer than that, really, if she counted the years before the note ever arrived, all the small redirected questions she'd accepted without a second thought.
She wasn't going to pretend anymore. That part, at least, felt settled.
What she still hadn't decided was what came after the pretending stopped.
Rune sat on the edge of her bed, feet pulled up under her, and made herself think it through properly instead of letting the thought slide past the way she used to let everything slide past. She wasn't going to run down the stairs and tell Vael everything she'd seen. That felt too final, too much like handing over the only piece of information that was entirely hers before she'd even had the chance to understand what it meant. She also wasn't going to phase through the tower wall and go find him herself, not yet, not when she still had no idea what she'd even say if she did.
What she was going to do was watch. Carefully. The way she'd learned to watch everything in this life, because watching was the one skill fourteen years in a tower had actually given her, and she intended to use it properly for the first time.
She was going to learn everything she could about him before he arrived at her door, or before Vael found him first, whichever happened sooner. She wanted to know his patterns the way she knew the Wood's patterns. She wanted to understand him before he ever had the chance to explain himself to her, because explanations, she had learned recently and painfully, weren't always the same thing as truth.
She opened her notebook to a fresh page and wrote a single line at the top.
The Hunter.
Underneath it she started listing everything she'd observed so far. The dawn appearances. The specific configuration where he'd gotten lost the first two times before working out the pattern on the third. The way the Wood seemed to settle, just slightly, whenever he moved through it, a detail she still didn't have a good explanation for and intended to keep watching until she did.
She wrote quickly, the way she always wrote when a thought was still forming itself as it came out of her, and somewhere in the middle of it she found herself smiling, small and a little disbelieving.
I have been preparing for something my whole life without knowing what it was, she thought. I have read about forty thousand facts and lived through maybe twelve of them, and I think that number is about to change whether I'm ready for it or not.
She wrote another line, then another, filling the page the way she'd once filled entire notebooks with facts about places she'd never see and people who'd died centuries before she was born. This felt different. This was happening now, close enough to touch, close enough that her own careful observations might actually matter to someone besides herself for the first time in her life.
Sable padded over while she was writing and settled beside the notebook, reading the page with the flat, assessing expression Rune had long ago learned meant the cat had decided to involve herself in whatever was happening. She placed one paw directly on the open page, deliberate, like she was signing off on it.
"Yes," Rune said quietly, looking down at the paw and then up at the window, where the Wood sat dark and patient under the last of the evening light. "I know. I know."
She kept writing long after the light went out completely, filling page after page with everything she'd seen and everything she suspected, mapping a person the same careful way she'd spent fourteen years mapping a forest she'd never once been allowed to walk through. It was, she thought, exactly the kind of thing she'd learned to be very good at. Watching. Recording. Understanding something completely before anyone ever gave her permission to touch it.
She had a feeling that was about to change too.