Turn 5 of 8

Ask Bett Harrow about promises and the Underwood — she may know the shape of this

You tell Aldous to stay put, and he nods with the gratitude of a man who has been told to stop moving for the first time in weeks. You pull your coat from the hook by the door, check that the lamp is low enough to be safe, and step out into the wet night. The rain has thinned to a mist that sits on your skin rather than falling through it, and the street is empty in the way Little Halloway is always empty after dark — not abandoned, just quiet, every door shut and every window a warm yellow square. The inn is four buildings down on the left, and you can see light in the downstairs window before you reach it.

The common room is empty save for Bett Harrow, who is wiping down the bar with the methodical patience of a woman who has cleaned the same surface ten thousand times and finds it soothing. She is sixty-six, square-built, with hands that look like they were carved from oak and a memory that makes the parish records look unreliable by comparison. She does not look up when you enter, but her cloth pauses for half a second, and that is Bett's version of raised eyebrows.

"He's at my shop," you say. You don't need to explain who. Bett sent him to you, which means she has already decided how much of this is your problem, and the fact that you are here means she was right to. She resumes wiping, and you sit on the nearest stool and wait, because Bett Harrow does not answer questions faster for being rushed.

"Aldous Vane," she says, after a silence long enough to fold the cloth twice. "His grandmother was a Morley. The Morleys logged the eastern edge of the Underwood three generations back, until they stopped. They stopped because the wood takes promises personally." She sets the cloth down and looks at you directly, and her eyes are the steady brown of someone who has lived beside something she does not fully understand and has made her peace with that.

"He came through here a week ago, half-dead with exhaustion, and asked me where to find someone who knew the old remedies. I told him the apothecary, because your great-grandmother wrote things down that the rest of us only kept in our heads. But I'll tell you what I told him — the Underwood doesn't deal in objects. You can walk in and walk out with a stone in your pocket and nothing follows. But if you make a promise in there, or break one, or take one that wasn't offered to you, the wood remembers. It sends something to walk behind you until the promise is fulfilled or returned."

You ask her what she knows about the thing that follows — what it is, what it wants. Bett shakes her head slowly.

"It's not a creature, not the way you'd think. It's the shape the debt makes when it walks. It doesn't want anything. It's just doing what it has to do, same as a river runs downhill. The question isn't what it wants. The question is what he owes." She picks up the cloth again, turns it over, and adds, almost to herself, "And that's the part he has to say out loud. Nobody can say it for him. Your great-grandmother knew that, too."

You stand, and Bett catches your wrist — not hard, but with the practiced grip of someone who wants you to hear the next part clearly.

"There's a girl who has been leaving things at the treeline," she says. "Your apprentice. Small jars, bits of bread, that sort of thing. She hasn't told you, and I'm telling you now because if you're going to mix something for the Underwood, you need to know who in this town is already on speaking terms with it." She lets go.

"Go back to your shop. Get him to name what he took. And when you do — listen to the exact words he uses, because the Underwood will."