Chapter 8 Corin
CORIN
It had been Corin's idea to make it daily.
He'd called her the morning after their first session in the orchard, the words tumbling out before he could second-guess them.
Waiting for the thaw to check the well could take weeks.
In the meantime, things were getting worse.
It made sense to compare notes every day, track the progression, see if they could find a pattern.
That was the reasoning he'd given her. It wasn't entirely a lie.
Now, three days into their arrangement, Chloe stood beside him at the apiaries with her notebook in hand and a furrow between her brows that had become familiar.
She'd started keeping detailed records. Soil samples, plant observations, weather conditions.
She was thorough in a way that reminded him of himself.
"This one's worse than yesterday," she said, peering into the hive he'd just opened.
Corin looked. She was right. The bees were more scattered than before, some crawling aimlessly on the inner cover, others clustered in strange formations that had absolutely nothing to do with protecting the queen. He'd never seen behavior like this in healthy colonies.
"That's the second one this week."
Chloe's expression tightened. She stepped back, hugging her notebook to her chest. "Corin, I need to tell you something."
He replaced the cover and straightened, giving her his full attention. "Alright."
"My starts at Freya's are getting worse too. The ones I planted last month are almost dead now." She wouldn't meet his eyes. "And the comfrey I transplanted near the east fence is completely gone."
"I know. You mentioned it."
"I know, but..." She trailed off, then seemed to force herself to continue. "People are talking. They think my blood is doing this. That whatever I am is poisoning the land."
Corin went still. "Your blood."
"I have druidic ancestry. At least, that's what my sister says.
I don't fully understand it myself." Her laugh was thin, humorless.
"I can feel things in the soil that other people can't. Sense when plants are stressed or thriving.
But I can't control it, and I can't explain it, and people find that suspicious. "
"So they blame you when things go wrong."
"It's not the first time." She finally looked at him, and something defensive flickered in those green eyes. "I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm just telling you because you deserve to know. If working with me is making things worse..."
"It's not."
"You don't know that."
"Yeah, I do."
She blinked. "How?"
Corin didn't have a good answer. He just knew, the same way he knew when a hive was healthy or when rain was coming. His bear knew. Something in his gut recognized the wrongness in the land and recognized, just as clearly, that Chloe wasn't the source.
He couldn't explain that without sounding crazy.
"The first hive started struggling before you ever came to help," he said instead. "Before I even saw you at Freya's that morning. I noticed it during the cold snap, four days before you and I talked."
"That doesn't prove anything. I've been in Hollow Oak for a year. Maybe it's cumulative."
"Chloe." He waited until she met his gaze. "It's not you."
"How can you be so sure?"
Because the land doesn't react to you like it reacts to whatever's poisoning it. Because when you're here, everything feels calmer, not worse.
He didn't say any of that.
"I've been tending this land my whole life," he said. "Four generations of Vanes have worked this soil. I know what natural problems look like, and I know what this is. It's not natural. And it's not you."
She stared at him, something unreadable moving behind her eyes.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"I'm choosing to believe you." A small, wry smile. "For now."
He nodded, satisfied. Then he turned back to the hives, scanning the rows, thinking.
"Come with me."
He led her past the apiaries toward the north edge of the orchard, where the land sloped gently downward toward the tree line. The snow had melted here faster than elsewhere, leaving patches of bare earth interspersed with muddy slush.
"What are we looking at?" Chloe asked.
"Water runoff." He crouched, studying the faint channels carved into the soil. "When the snow melts, it flows downhill. Picks up whatever's in the ground and carries it."
She crouched beside him, following his gaze. "You think something's contaminating the runoff?"
"Maybe." He traced one of the channels with his finger, following its path toward the trees. "These all flow in the same direction. Toward the old well I mentioned."
"Or away from it."
He looked at her sharply.
"If the contamination is coming from the well," she said slowly, "the water wouldn't carry it downhill. It would spread outward from the source. Like ripples."
She was right. He'd been thinking about it backwards.
Corin stood, scanning the landscape with new eyes. The worst damage was near the north fence, closest to the tree line. The beds near the barn, further from that direction, were almost normal. And the well sat somewhere in between, abandoned and sealed and supposedly harmless.
"Something's leaching from that well," he said. "Or through it. Spreading outward into the groundwater."
"Something old?"
He remembered what Elias had said about patterns. About things that fed on dreams, on land, on whatever they could find.
"Yeah." His jaw tightened. "Something old."
Chloe was calm for a moment, processing. Then she straightened, brushing dirt from her knees. "We need to check it. The well."
"Ground's still too frozen to dig."
"Then we wait for the thaw and we check it the second we can." Her voice had gone firm, determined. "If something's poisoning your land and Freya's plants and who knows what else, we need to find the source."
We. She kept saying that. Like they were a team, partners in this strange investigation.
His bear rumbled approval.
Corin filed the information away, added it to the growing list of things he was trying not to think too hard about. The sour soil. The confused bees. The old well that might be leaching something toxic into the groundwater of Hollow Oak.
And Chloe Faelan, with her druidic blood and her careful hands and her absolute certainty that she was to blame for problems that had started long before she ever touched the earth.
She wasn't the poison. He knew that as surely as he knew his own name. But something was. And it was getting worse.
"Thursday still looks like our best bet," he said. "Weather's supposed to warm up. We'll check the well then."
Chloe nodded. "I'll be here."
They walked back toward the barn, boots squelching in the mud. Corin's thoughts churned, turning over possibilities, discarding theories, coming back again and again to the same conclusion.
Someone, not something, had touched the land.