7. Rowan
ROWAN
HONESTY IS THE WORST POLICY
I stand in the shadows of the old toolshed, watching the light from the lodge porch spill onto the gravel like a weak yellow bruise.
Wren Cassidy is leaning against the railing, her breath frosting in the air.
She looks small against the backdrop of the house, but the set of her shoulders is rigid, the way it always is when she’s trying to outrun a problem she can’t quite name.
She’s thinking about the word I dropped in the common room.
I can see it in the way she doesn’t move, the way her eyes are fixed on the dark line of the timber where the real world begins.
I shouldn’t have said it. The pronoun was a lapse, a crack in a mask I’ve worn for three hundred years.
Usually, my patience is indifferent to the frantic ticking of human clocks.
But the sound on that speaker had been an insult.
It was a digital caricature, a collection of frequencies that missed the resonance of the chest and the specific vibration of the throat.
It was a lie, and for a moment, I forgot I was supposed to be the biggest lie of all.
I move away from the shed, my boots making no more sound on the gravel than a falling leaf.
It’s a trick of the weight, a shift in the center of gravity that I learned before the lodge was more than a stack of raw cedar logs.
Walt passes me with his dimming flashlight, his gaze sliding right over the space I occupy.
He’s seen me before, when I’ve chosen to show myself.
But right now, I’m a detail he has conditioned himself to ignore, a part of the landscape that doesn’t require a name.
I retreat into the first line of trees, where the air is colder and tastes of damp moss and old needles.
I need to think. The hotline is a problem that is no longer behaving like a joke.
It’s a beacon, and the people it’s pulling into my territory are the kind of people who bring cameras that see in the dark and microphones that hear the heartbeat of a squirrel at fifty yards.
They are loud and invasive, and they are persistent.
But Wren Cassidy is the most persistent of them all.
I lean against a western red cedar, the bark rough and familiar against my spine.
My mind plays back the moment in the common room.
Her face. The way her eyes had widened, not with fear, but with a sharp, terrifying intelligence as if she was beginning to solve a puzzle.
A puzzle she never should have had to solve because she was supposed to know about me.
It became clear to me in the gift shop that she didn’t know about me or the arrangement I had with her family.
She should’ve known my name, but there was no recognition when I said it.
If Wren solves the puzzle, my quiet life will dissolve like the mist in a high wind. Because to her, I’m nothing but a marketing gimmick, and she’ll exploit me just to keep the rotting wood from decaying further.
The logical move is to silence the source.
Not with violence—I have no taste for that—but with the truth.
I have watched humans for a long time. I have seen them believe in gods that don’t speak, in markets that don’t exist, and in legends that are nothing more than a trick of the light on a rainy afternoon.
They’re a species that thrives on the improbable, which often makes honesty the best camouflage.
If I tell her the truth, plainly and without theater, the odds are high that she will simply refuse to see it, but I have to hope that I can be convincing enough so she’ll turn off the hotline.
I wait. I watch her go back inside, her silhouette disappearing as the heavy oak doors click shut.
I give it an hour. Time is a different currency for me, but I know the rhythms of the lodge.
Marge will be finishing the last of the dishes.
Walt will be in their small cabin, checking the weather report.
The “experts” will be in the common room, drinking cheap beer and arguing over their grainy footage and fake sounds.
Wren will be in the office, staring at the red dots on her laptop.
I emerge from the trees and walk toward the back entrance that leads through the pantry and into the small hallway behind the desk. I don’t use my concealment. I want her to see me. I want the encounter to be as mundane as a tax audit.
I find her exactly where I expected. The office is small, cramped with filing cabinets that hold the slow decay of three generations.
She’s sitting at the oak desk, her chin resting in her hand, the blue light of the screen reflecting in her eyes.
She looks exhausted. There is a smudge of ink on her thumb and a tension in her neck that makes me want to reach out and—
I stop that thought before it can finish. I am a Guardian. She is the weather. You don’t try to fix the weather.
I knock on the doorframe. It’s a light sound, but in the quiet of the lodge, it lands like a stone in a well. She jolts, her hand flying to her chest, and her chair skids back an inch on the floorboards.
“Rowan,” she says, her voice a little breathless. “You’re still here. I thought you’d... gone back out.”
“I had things to finish.” I step into the room, and the space immediately feels too small. It’s always like this with humans. Their rooms are built for their scale, not mine. I have to duck my head slightly to avoid the low-hanging lamp. “You’re still working.”
“The hotline doesn’t sleep,” she says, trying for a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She taps the laptop screen. “We just got a report of a hairy man stealing a bag of beef jerky near the North Ridge. Very high-stakes stuff.”
I look at the screen. The red dot is pulsing. It’s exactly three miles from the hive site I tended this morning. “There is no one on the North Ridge tonight. The wind is coming off the glacier. It’s too cold for casual hikers.”
Wren narrows her eyes at me. She leans back in her chair, crossing her arms. This is the moment. She’s going to ask. “Rowan, about what happened in the common room. With the recording.”
“It was a bad recording,” I say. I keep my voice flat. I don’t look at her; I look at a framed map of the territory on the wall. It’s fifty years out of date. “The vocalization was wrong.”
“You said ‘we’,” she says. She says it carefully, like she’s laying a trap. “‘That is not what we sound like.’ That’s a very specific choice of words.”
I turn my gaze back to her. She’s waiting for an excuse.
Waiting for me to say I meant the townspeople, or the conservationists, or some secret society of forest nerds.
I see the wheels turning in her head, the marketing brain trying to find a way to spin the mystery into more content. I decide to give her the truth instead.
“I am the thing your hotline is looking for,” I say.
I say it the way I would tell her the bridge on the south trail is washed out. No drama. No glowing eyes. I just stand there in my HIDE & SEEK WORLD CHAMPION shirt and state the fact of my existence.
The silence that follows is thick. I can hear the hum of the laptop fan and the distant groan of the house settling.
Wren stares at me, her mouth slightly open.
She looks at my face, then down at my boots, then back to my eyes.
I wait for the realization to hit. I wait for the fear, or the awe, or the frantic reaching for a camera.
Then, she laughs.
It’s not a small laugh. It’s a full, genuine peal of amusement that starts in her throat and shakes her shoulders. She leans forward, resting her elbows on the desk, her face glowing with a kind of delighted relief.
“Oh, that’s good,” she says, wiping a stray tear from the corner of her eye. “That is really, really good. God, Rowan, you had me there for a second. The dry delivery, the timing... you’re a natural.”
I don’t move. “I’m not joking, Wren.”
“I know, I know,” she says, waving a hand dismissively. “Stay in character. It’s better for the brand. Honestly, if Barnaby heard you say that, he’d probably faint, then try to sue you for emotional distress. It’s brilliant. ‘Local man goes full method to protect his woods’. I love it.”
I feel a strange, sharp sensation in my chest. Something close to bewilderment, mixed with a bruised sense of pride that I didn’t know I possessed. I have lived for centuries, and never in all that time have I been told I have good timing.
“I am seven feet and two inches tall,” I say, my voice dropping an octave.
“I live in a house you cannot find. I have no birth certificate. I have no family. I tend to hives that have been in this valley longer than your lodge has had a roof. I am the reason your great-great-grandmother started the arrangement.”
Wren’s smile softens, but it doesn’t disappear.
She looks at me with a warmth that is entirely wrong for the situation.
It’s affectionate. It’s the way she looks at Marge when she brings her a fresh cup of coffee.
It’s the look of someone who thinks they’ve found a secret ally in a world of nonsense.
“I get it,” she says quietly. “The commitment. You’ve been the ‘silent protector’ for so long you don’t know how to turn it off. And the shirt”—she gestures to the tacky fabric over my chest—“is a nice touch of irony. It’s a bit meta, isn’t it?”
“It is not meta,” I say. I don’t actually know what “meta” means, but I am certain it doesn’t apply to my life. “It is a shirt. I liked the slogan.”
“Of course you did,” she says. She stands up and walks around the desk.
She stops just a few feet away from me. I could reach out and touch her.
I could show her the bark-pattern of my skin, the way my eyes change when the influence drops.
I could shift right here, in this cramped office, and let the sheer scale of my true form crack the ceiling joists.