The little house trembles - not from storm or earthshake, but the horrible empty silence. Hiraeth presses his back tight to the wall, listening. The fight seems to be over, but he cannot tell how it ended. There is no wind this morning - if they left the door open, how would he even know if they left?

He is still wedged between his bed and the empty shelves, filled with echoes of helpless rage. Or - not so helpless? What if one of them did something - bad? No, surely not - they've fought a hundred thousand times before. It's always worked out before. It is only his own wickedness. Only the consequence of too many fanciful stories. Too many nightmares he can never quite remember in the morning.

Everything that can be packed, everything they can send ahead to Castletown is already gone. They are supposed to leave after breakfast, his stepmother driving the two-wheeled gig, he and the twins in the rented ox-cart with the last few chests. His father is supposed to ride beside them, armed with crossbow and sword, scouting road and field - but Link is still blind drunk, hours after dawn.

Hiraeth turns the dusty golden puzzle box in his hands. The men who brought the cart up carried also rumors of bandits and ghosts and wild creatures, and everyone knows the Zora have raised the toll on their smooth sculpted roads in the aftermath of the heavy winter rains.

Hiraeth is more afraid of breaking the puzzle box than these nebulous dangers. He's never been allowed more than half a day's walk from the village before, but he's read every book his teacher smuggled for him, and spent countless hours absorbing the maps of Hyrule and her neighbors. He could draw any of them from memory, could recite piles of trivial facts about almost any civilized country in the world if he wanted to.

But he cannot remember which order the trigger points should go in, and the hidden springs creak and grind with age. He cannot remember which parts are made to twist, and in which direction.

How could he fail to measure the years slipping by? Days and months and seasons, birthdays and festivals. He is taller and his voice still startles him sometimes when his own words rumble off his tongue like a grindstone laughing. He can remember watching his sisters grow, his stepmother wax round with child.

His father never changes.

How could he not notice?

His stepmother used to say how lucky she was to have a pretty husband. That his scars lent him dignity, made him even more interesting and handsome. Even when she was angry, she used to say he should take better care of himself to preserve that very beauty.

Now she is bitter, and certain he will be unfaithful when they move to the city, as if he has not spent half their marriage working in one city or another. Now she yells at him for coming out unscathed on the other side of a night of hard drinking. Now she accuses him of hiding his own witchblood from her, and demands to know what else he hides. She demands he explain why after so many years he uproots the family and drags them away from a good life in their village.

His father denies none of it, only shouts that she knows nothing about anything, that she is become a nibbling, venomous shrew, that his past is not her concern, that she has no right to question his decisions.

Hiraeth cradles the fragile little puzzle box in his clumsy hands. He wonders how his sisters manage to sleep through their parents' arguments, or if they only make pretend to hear nothing. If they too are listening to the silence, trying not to imagine what they will find if they go downstairs before they are summoned.

The golden summer morning at last overthrows off the blue cast of dawn. It glares at him through the naked window, catching on the ridges and grooves of the gilt puzzle box. The longer he stares at the dense ornamental carvings, the more he begins to find the suggestions of words in the pattern.

Hiraeth frowns at the box, licking his thumb and rubbing grime away from one corner. He remembers the seals of the three golden goddesses flank the corners, but he curses himself for never examining the borders linking them to the six-petal flower in the center of each face. He pretends he is trying to make sense of a messy student's lesson, muttering the possible letters in sequence until he pieces together a word.

Then another.

Let this my desire bear the might of the oldest gods - no work of man nor magic may break it.

Hiraeth finds the same inscription encircling each of the eight corners. But - what desire is the archaic inscription meant to guard?

And why did his father give him a puzzle engraved with superstitious nonsense?