Grievance
Elder Cove lies in a fold of the old mountains, under a peak that breathes a blue smoke down the hollows at dusk. The people who were here before the settlers knew to keep off it. The settlers cleared and planted right up under it, and raised their children in its shadow, and have been paying for it ever since - a child a year, taken from beyond the low fences when the smoke comes down, in a voice each mother knows.
But the taking is not the horror. The horror is what comes after: the way the loss smooths over, the way a name goes soft in the mouth, until a mother cannot say who it was she lost - only that she wakes at a certain hour and reaches across the bed for someone gone.
Elizabeth Stephens is the one soul in the cove who will not let the taken be forgotten. She is about to learn what remembering costs.
Some doors, once opened, do not close.
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