Idhra left on the fourth day after the old woman's death.
She told no one. Not Hald, who had been silent since the burial and spent his days splitting wood, as if he could split his grief into logs. Not Asa, who hummed and hummed without stopping, as though the humming were a thread holding her to something. Not Fynn, who was too young to understand and too old not to feel that something was missing.
She rose before dawn, when the fire was nothing but ash and the others' breathing filled the room. She took her leather pouch and put dried meat inside, a handful of hazelnuts, and the flint the old woman had given her two winters ago. Then she stepped outside.
The fjord lay black beneath a sky that had not yet taken on any color. The air smelled of dew and earth and the end of spring. Idhra did not go toward the water. She went inland, up the slope, through the wet grass that soaked her legs to the knees.
At the crest of the hill, she stopped and looked back.
The settlement was a patch in the darkness—three huts, the smoke hole, the dark line of the fence that kept the goats in. Beyond it, the fjord; beyond that, the sea. Everything she knew. Everything she was.
She turned and walked on.
The first day was easy. She knew the land south of the fjord—not well, but well enough. Here they had gathered acorns in the fall; there stood the birch where Hald had once killed a stag. The world was familiar. Only the direction was new.
At noon she reached the stream that came down from the hills. She drank, washed her face, and ate a piece of meat. The sun stood high and warm, and for the first time since the old woman's death, Idhra felt something that was not pain. Not joy. Something lighter. The absence of walls.
That evening she slept beneath an oak, her back against the trunk, the pouch beneath her head. She made no fire. Fire could be seen, and she did not know who lived here.
On the second day, the land changed.
The hills grew flatter, the forests more open. Clearings appeared between the trees—not fields; no one had cleared this land, but open spaces, as if the land itself had decided to leave room for them. The grass was different, shorter and denser, and flowers grew among it that Idhra did not know—small blue stars that closed when touched.
She saw no people. But she saw signs: a broken branch, too smooth-edged to have been broken by the wind. A fire pit, cold but not old. Footprints in the clay beside the stream, larger than her own.
Idhra walked more carefully. She kept to the edge of the forest, where the shadows hid her, and avoided the open spaces. The old woman had never spoken of other clans, not as if they were enemies—but not as if they were friends, either. She had said: The people there call it the Stone That Drinks. So there were people there. People who knew the stone. People who had given it a name.
That evening she found a hollow between two hills, sheltered, with a trickle of water at the bottom. She made a small fire, so small it barely gave off any light, and ate the last of the hazelnuts. The sky above her was clear, and the stars stood so close together they looked like dust on dark water.
She thought of the old woman. Of her last words. Someone who does not run away.
Idhra was not running away. But she did not know where she was running, either.
On the third day, she felt the stone.
It came without warning. She was walking through a hollow, the grass reaching her hips, the sun slanting across the morning sky, when it was suddenly there—a tug. Not in her head, not in her belly. Deeper. In her bones, in her teeth, in a place that had no name.
Idhra stopped. The tug was not like the humming of the chamber. The humming had been warm, inviting, like a hand opening. This was cold. Not hostile. But hungry. Like a mouth opening.
She walked on, and the tug grew stronger. It came from the south, from the direction she was going, and it had a precise direction, as if someone were pulling a thread tied to her ribs.
At noon, she saw it.
It stood alone on a flat rise, with no trees, no bushes, nothing else near it. As though the land itself had left a space around it. It was larger than the old woman had said—three men stacked one atop another, gray and smooth, its surface shimmering in the sunlight as if it were wet.
But it was not wet. Idhra saw that as she drew closer. The surface was dry, smooth, almost warm in the light. The shimmer came from within. As if the stone itself were glowing, faintly, barely visible, but there.
She stopped twenty paces away.
The tug was so strong now that it hurt. Not much. Like a muscle that had been tense too long. It wanted her to come closer. It wanted her to lay her hand on it.
Idhra sat down in the grass.
She sat for a long time. The sun moved, the shadows turned, and the stone stood there waiting. It was patient. More patient than anything Idhra had ever felt. It had time. It had nothing but time.
The old woman had said: It takes.
The old woman's mother had laid her hand on it and left a part of herself there. Afterward, she had been different. Not sick. Not mad. But less.
Idhra looked at the stone. It looked back. Not like the attention in the chamber, which had examined her, cautious and probing. The stone looked at her like someone who knew she would come. Someone who had always known she would come.
She stood.
She did not go closer. Not yet.
Instead, she walked around it in a wide arc, keeping twenty paces away, and looked at it from every side. From the north, it was smooth. From the east, it had a groove running from top to bottom, as if someone had drawn a line with an enormous finger. From the south, it was widest, and there, at its base, something lay in the grass.
Bones.
Not many. A small skull, perhaps a dog or a fox. Longer bones beside it, thin, perhaps a deer. And among them, almost hidden in the grass, something that was not an animal bone.
A finger bone. Human. Old, yellowed, but unbroken.
Idhra knelt. She did not touch the bone. She looked at it, and the tug in her ribs grew stronger, and she understood.
The people here brought offerings to the stone. Animals. And sometimes more than animals.
She stood and went back to her place in the grass, twenty paces away, and sat down again.
The stone waited.
Idhra waited, too.
The sun sank. The shadows grew long. And Idhra sat in the grass before the Stone That Drinks, knowing that tomorrow she would lay her hand on it. Not because the stone wanted it. Not because the old woman had said so. But because the question burned inside her, and not knowing was worse than anything the stone could take from her.
She did not sleep that night. She sat and looked at the stone, and the stone looked at her, and between them lay the grass and the darkness and the question that was no longer the old woman's question, but her own.