The woods at dawn were a different woods than the woods at any other time, and Daniel had been walking them at dawn for a week, and the difference was the light.
The light was gray and thin and the grayness made the trees look like pencil drawings, like sketches, like rough drafts of trees that hadn’t been finished yet.
The town was a storybook.
The woods were the margins.
The margins were where he did his thinking.
He walked the tree line for an hour.
The cold was a November cold that got into the seams of the coat and stayed there, and the coat was his coat, and the seams were his seams, and the cold was a real cold, a physical cold, the kind of cold that couldn’t be cursed and could only be endured.
He counted the things he was going to lose if he closed the bargain.
The list was theoretical.
The price was unknown.
The theoretical list was longer than the known list and that was the problem.
A twig snapped somewhere to his left.
Not a deer.
Deer didn’t snap twigs and then go silent.
A person went silent after snapping a twig.
Daniel stopped walking.
“I can hear you,” he said to the trees.
Tomas stepped out from behind an oak.
He was in his late forties, broad-shouldered, the kind of man who looked like he had been born in the woods and would die in the woods.
He carried a rifle that wasn’t pointed at anything but was also not pointed at the ground.
“You’re the cannery guy,” Tomas said.
“Dan.
You’ve been walking the tree line every morning for a week.
People notice things in this town.
Especially people who spend a lot of time in the woods.” “I didn’t know I was being watched.” “Everyone’s being watched in Storybrooke.
The woods watch you.
The town watches you.
The clock tower watches you.” Tomas leaned the rifle against the tree and crossed his arms.
“I track.
It’s what I do.
I track animals, mostly.
Sometimes I track people.
You walk the same path every morning, from the laundromat to the wishing well and back.
You don’t go near the well, though.
You stop about fifty feet from it and turn around.
Every time.” The hum under Daniel’s sternum was paying very close attention to the mention of the wishing well.
Tomas had noticed the avoidance.
Tomas had tracked the pattern.
Tomas was a cursed man whose fairy-tale identity was somewhere in the forest, waiting to be remembered, and the tracking instinct was the fairy-tale instinct, and the instinct was telling him that Dan-the-cannery was worth tracking.
“I’m not comfortable near wells,” Daniel said.
“Childhood thing.” “Mm,” Tomas said.
The mm was the mm of a tracker who had heard a version of events and didn’t believe it.
“Well.
If you ever want to go near the well, let me know.
I can show you the safest approach.
There’s a path.
Most people don’t know about it.” “I’ll keep that in mind.” “You do that.” Tomas picked up his rifle and faded back into the trees the way a man who had been a woodsman for longer than the curse had been a curse faded into trees, which was to say without sound, without trace, with only the particular absence that a person leaves when they have stopped being visible and started being forest.
Daniel stood in the clearing for a long moment.
Tomas had tracked him to the wishing well.
Tomas had noticed the fifty-foot buffer.
The hum was filing Tomas under a new category — potential ally, potential threat, potential tool — and the filing was happening, and Daniel could feel it happening, and he couldn’t stop it.
He sat on a fallen trunk.
The trunk was old and mossy and the moss was a green moss, a Storybrooke green, the particular green of a forest that had been written by someone who had never seen a real forest but had read about forests in books.
He sat on the mossy trunk and thought about his mother.
He thought about his mother clearly, which was a thing he hadn’t been able to do since the song was priced.
The song was gone.
The memory of his mother’s hands at twelve was going to go too, and he didn’t know this yet, and the not-knowing was a mercy that the kit was going to withdraw at exactly the wrong moment.
He thought about his mother’s voice, the way she had said his name when he was small, the way the name had been a full sentence, a paragraph, a story about who he was and who she wanted him to be.
The name was still in his head.
The voice was still in his head.
The voice was fading at the edges, the way the cat’s face had faded, the way Brooklyn was fading, the way everything that belonged to the world before the fall was fading one detail at a time.
Brooklyn.
He tried to picture Fourth Avenue and the picture was a sketch now, a rough draft, the particular rough draft of a place that was being written over by a curse that had been writing over places for twenty-eight years.
He could still see the walk-up.
He could still see the grocery on the corner.
He could not see the grocery man’s face.
The grocery man’s face had been a specific face, a face he had seen twice a week for three years, and the face was gone now, replaced by a general grocery-man face, the generic face the curse provided for things it had decided he didn’t need to remember.
He put his hands on his knees and the knees were cold and the hands were cold and the cold was still real.
The hum under his sternum was a steady note, a waiting note, the particular note of a counterparty that knew he was about to decide and was letting him decide.
The kit was patient.
The kit had always been patient.
The kit was the most patient thing he had ever been in contract with, and he had been in contracts with insurance companies.
He decided.
He decided on the fallen trunk with the moss and the pencil-drawing trees and the gray dawn light and the cold that was real.
He decided to close the bargain.
He decided to help Mrs.
Beasley.
He decided to accept the price, whatever it was, because the alternative was letting a twenty-two-year-old boy go to a desert because Daniel Ashford wasn’t brave enough to pay a cost he couldn’t predict.
The decision was the right decision.
The decision was the worst decision he was ever going to make.
The decision was going to cost Graham the Huntsman his life, and Daniel didn’t know this yet, and the not-knowing was the last mercy the kit was going to give him.
He stood up.
The hum thrummed once.
A receipt.
The receipt was for the decision, not the bargain.
The kit was keeping accounts on his intentions now.
The kit was charging him for what he meant to do before he did it.
He walked back to town.
The cannery whistle blew at noon.
The rent was due on Friday.
The deployment was in three weeks.
The price was going to come due whenever the magic chose, and the magic was a counterparty that chose the cruelest moment it could find, and the cruelest moment was always the one you didn’t see coming.