Chapter 6 - THE BLACK OBJECTElias collapsed beside the fireplace just after midnight.
The storm had returned, shaking the cabin with such force that the shutters seemed ready to tear free.
Clara found him gripping the side of his head, his face tight with pain. A dark line of old resin was visible deep inside his right ear.
Silas’s warning echoed in both their minds.
Never let anyone remove it.
But Silas was dead, armed men were searching the farm, and the journal had named a hidden key.
Clara heated water, cleaned the smallest tweezers in the flame, and knelt beside him with the oil lamp.
“I will stop if you tell me,” she said.
Elias seized her wrist when the metal neared his ear.
“It has been there since I was little,” he said slowly.
He rarely used his voice. The words were rough because he could not hear their shape.
Clara covered his hand with hers.
“Then perhaps you have been carrying someone else’s secret long enough.”
He released her.
The black object came free in fragments, a shell of hardened resin and wool wrapped around something metallic.
Elias gasped and pulled away.
Clara unfolded the material and found a copper pin edged with pale silver. The pine-and-star symbol gleamed at its center.
“This object could not have entered by itself,” she whispered.
The pin slipped from the tweezers.
It struck the floor.
Elias turned toward the sound.
“I heard it.”
At first, Clara thought he had read her reaction. Then she tapped the poker lightly against the hearth behind him.
He turned again.
The sound was faint and distorted, more vibration than tone, but it was real.
Elias began to tremble.
Clara expected joy. Instead, grief crossed his face. If the blockage had stolen even part of his hearing, then Silas—the man he loved as a father—had known.
“Why would he do this to me?” Elias asked.
Clara did not have an answer.
She examined the copper pin more closely. Along one edge were tiny notches, like the teeth of a key.
The pale border was not silver but bone, carved so thinly that lamplight passed through it.
On the back, beneath the pine symbol, were two initials:
E.M.
Elias Mercer.
May you like
Before they could speak, a boot struck the cabin door.
Alden Voss had arrived.
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