For a year, Willem Dehaven had begged the dead to answer him. The night they finally did, the answer came up through the floor of his sandwich shop: a pale root, patient and certain, that already knew his name. The old grove at the edge of town was more than trees. A neighbor steeped in her grandmother's lore called it by its older name and warned that the founders had bound it with a covenant. Take only what you return. Keep the rowan at every threshold. Leave the spring unsounded. For two hundred years the town kept the promise without remembering why.

Now a developer's machines were tearing the wood apart for a subdivision. The wards over every door were going soft on the same night. And men were dying at the work site in ways no coroner could explain. The developer had a cleaner story: eco-terrorists, sabotage, a grieving businessman doing his best against a fringe of zealots. It was a lie shaped exactly like the thing a frightened town could sleep on, and the town believed it, and turned on the one grieving man who kept insisting the woods were awake. Willem knew better, because the wood had his wife's voice, and a debt with his name on it that he could not remember signing. As the season wheeled toward the night the old year's door stands open, he and a handful of the disbelieved raced to remember the lost covenant and rebuild its wards, before the spring opened all the way and something older than the grove climbed up into the light. But the price of holding the dark at bay was never going to be paid in rowan or blood.

It was the one thing Willem had sworn never to give up, and the wood had been counting on that from the very first night it reached through his floor.