A River Enchanted

Adaira glanced across the room, her face solemn. “Two weeks ago, eight-year-old Eliza Elliott went missing on her walk home from school. We searched acres of land, from the school to her family’s croft, but we found little trace of her. Only a few places in the grass and heather, where it looked like she walked, only to vanish.” She paused, her eyes returning to his. “I’m sure you remember the ways of the isle, Jack.”
He did.
He remembered the perks as well as the dangers of straying from Cadence roads. The roads were pathways that resisted enchantments. The spirits couldn’t influence the roads, but they could toy with the grass and rocks and wind and water and trees of the isle. They could turn three hills into one, and one hill into four, but even then, there were ways of knowing the lay of the land, and which parts of it were prone to shift, and which landmarks remained fixed. Many children who didn’t know that secret map had gotten lost for hours if they wandered from the road.
“You believe the folk have tricked her?” Jack questioned.
Adaira nodded.

Jack could soon see firelight in the distance, escaping through closed shutters.
It drew him off the road, where he found the narrow path that wound to Mirin’s front yard as easily as if he had walked it yesterday, the grass whisking against his knees. The air smelled sweet from bog myrtle and sharp from smoke, which streamed from the chimney, smudging the stars.
All too soon, he reached the yard gate. Jack stepped inside it, his eyes sweeping the ground in the dim light. He could see row after row of vegetables, ripe from warm days. He remembered all the hours he had knelt in this soil as a boy, tilling and planting and harvesting. How he had complained about it, opposing everything Mirin had asked him to do.
He was stricken with nerves as he approached her door.

"He had always desired to prove himself worthy... to be wanted, to feel as if he belonged. /Music had once given that to him. A home, a purpose."

"She had never seen this expression on Adaira's face before, as if all the longings within her had gathered into one place."

"'I have been with you all this time,' she said, a soft answer that eased his rigid posture, 'The good as well as the bad. Once we were acquaintances sharing a vow. But you have become more to me than mere words spoken on a midsummer night. And I have never been one to love conditionally.'"