Elder Bran’s longhouse smelled of peat smoke and chalk dust. The children sat in a low semicircle on the floor, legs crossed, knuckles pale where they squeezed their knees. Elder Bran stood before them, staff planted like a spear in the dirt, his one eye glittering with the sort of righteous fury that made the rafters seem to lean in and listen.

“Today,” he said, voice dry as old wood, “we speak of a new danger.” His gaze slowed and lingered, just a fraction too long, on Draven and Kaelen seated at the edge of the ring. “Shapeshifters.”

A hush folded over the children. Even the breath in the longhouse seemed to wait.

“They once walked among us freely,” Bran continued, pacing like a predator, “wearing the faces of our friends, our loved ones. They smile like us. They eat like us. They nurse like us. They take, they replace, they poison.” He let the words hang, and they tasted of iron in the air.

Draven felt the elder’s stare settle on him like cold ash. He straightened involuntarily, palms damp on his knees.

Bran’s voice hardened. “What would you do if you thought you had found a shapeshifter among you?” he asked the circle.

Murmurs rose. One child suggested leading it back into the forest. Another, more timid, proposed locking it in a cellar. The ideas were small and frightened. Only one child’s voice pushed like a knife through the hush — a high, cruel voice that carried: “Kill it.”

It was Corin, Joahn’s boy — the same Joahn who’d gone missing in the trees months before. His face was tight with something that passed for grief and thirst for vengeance; there was a cruel light in his eyes. “We kill them,” he said plainly.

Bran’s one good eye gleamed. He clapped once. “Yes. We kill them.” He began to walk the space between the children, talking, circling like he was tracing blood on the floor. “But they do not die as we do.”

The children leaned in. Even Kaelen, small and bony, forgot to pull his knees closer to his chest.

“Our ancestors were wise,” Bran said, stopping now directly before the two brothers. He tilted his head, the barest smile carving his face. “They would gather stones from the Letic River. They carved protection runes into those stones.” On a blackboard behind him he pointed to crude symbols — spirals and crossed lines — and the children’s eyes followed with the obedient awe of the fearful.

“When a shapeshifter was caught,” Bran said, slow and careful, “the elders would place the stones on its hands. If the runes did not protect their flesh from the heat, then—” He did not finish the sentence aloud. The implication curled through the room like smoke: then the hearth would finish what the runes began.

His gaze flicked to the boys. Not for a breath less than a heartbeat. “It is everyone’s duty to watch,” he finished. “To protect the valley.”

Draven stared at his own hands for a long time after the lesson. The words burrowed in him — duty, watch, protect. A hard, rightness pushed against something darker in his chest: guilt, and the trembling responsibility of a boy who’d already been forced to act like a man. He felt Kaelen’s small hand close over his under the bench — a soft, quick pressure meant to steady, meant to say: I’m here. Don’t fall apart.

It did not steady him. The elder’s look had split something open.

—--
Outside, the younger children clustered near the treeline, baskets of pale flowers at their knees, voices bright and nervous as they replayed the lesson like a story meant to scare them straight.

Draven lingered with the older boys, feigning distance while keeping an ear on the small cluster at the edge. Corin — Joahn’s son — was there too, a swaggering presence, and he was saying the very thing Bran had praised.

“I’d kill any fae that came into the valley,” Corin boomed, voice too loud for the day. “Doesn’t matter what it looks like. I’d kill it even if it was a baby.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the longhouse, though everyone knew who he meant. When he spoke the word “baby” he did it like a curse.

His gaze slid and landed on Kaelen. Corin let it rest there, unblinking, a deliberate, pointed thing. “Especially if it looked like that,” he said, smirking.

The words dropped into Kaelen like stones. His face flushed, then paled. He pushed from his seat. “What do you mean by that?” he demanded, voice small and brittle.

Corin didn’t flinch. He stepped closer, and the other boys closed in, circling like hyenas. “Test it,” Corin said casually. “Test the little monster and the woman that bore it. If they’re fae — well, we know what to do.”

“Test them how?” another boy chimed in, eager for cruelty.

“Make it show its true face,” Corin said. “Make it touch the stones. If it doesn't burn, it’s just ugly. If it does — then throw it in the hearth.” He looked around for applause and got nods instead, the slow, terrible spreading of a mob’s certainty.

Anger rose in Kaelen like a pressure. He’d taken the hits from Harlan already; his skin had learned how not to show the small pink crescents where the fingers had struck. Corin’s voice was the brittle snapping of a splinter in a raw place. He shoved forward before he’d thought — a sudden, clumsy lunge that put him across Corin’s chest. Surprise flashed in Corin’s face before fists began to fly.

The world narrowed. There was only the thud of small fists and the sharp slap of skin on skin. Kaelen’s hands were a different thing now; years of having to endure had hardened him. He landed blows that made Corin’s smirk split, landed enough that the other boys cried out and surged in to separate them.

Someone grabbed Kaelen’s arm and hauled him away, fingers like iron; someone else yanked Corin back with equal force. The circle broke; breath fogged in startled clouds.

Draven moved in a heartbeat, not to drag Kaelen off but to bark at him — to put the thunder of authority between his brother and further trouble. “What did I tell you?” he hissed, voice hard as flint. “Stop. Now.”

Kaelen’s chest heaved, lungs burning from the sudden sprint of violence and adrenaline. He’s staggered, blood hot in his mouth from a bitten lip, eyes wild. When Draven spoke it was less a scolding than a plea—fear braided with anger.

“You could get us all killed,” Draven snapped. “You could make them really talk. You could make them want to hurt us.”

Kaelen glared, but the glare had edges only the two of them recognized: hurt, defiance, survival. “Why should I stand and take words that say she’s a monster?” he hissed back. “Why should I take that for you or anyone?” His voice shook. “You stand there like you hate her and then you stop me? Which is it, Draven?”

Draven’s face tightened. For a long beat, he had no answer. Around them the children muttered, the older ones shifting their weight, the lesson swirling in the air like a threat. The elder’s words — stones, runes, hearth — had hollowed out something that let the boys’ rawest fears pour through.

A woman appeared at the longhouse door, calling for quiet. The boys were shoved back into places, scuffed and wary, each licking wounds both smelled and sterile. Corin spat an ugly word, chest heaving, before stalking off with a swagger that felt like cowardice pretending to be victory.

Draven stared after him. He thought of the way Bran had looked at them. He thought of his hands, of the thing he’d held when the boys had sat alone and drunk in their own fear. He thought of Kaelen’s fists, and of the baby in their house who reached for him with steady hands.

He squeezed Kaelen’s fingers briefly beneath the table where no one could see, a small, private squeeze that said: we’re still together. We’ll keep our mouths shut. We’ll keep the watch. We’ll not be the ones who burn.

But inside, something had cracked wider than it had before. Outside the longhouse, kids recited elders’ lessons like catechism, the valley’s whispers folding into each other until certainty — dreadful, murderous certainty — felt like the only kind of truth left.