What the Woods Kept

My grandmother died in September and left me a house in the far north. When I got there, three men were already living in it. Viggo has been the groundskeeper for forty years and does not look a day older. Nils is the village priest, and he has been burning the parish register one page at a time. Erik's father drowned the night I was born. Each of them was marked by the forest the night my grandmother made a deal to keep her family alive. Each of them has been waiting for someone of the bloodline to come back. I came back. The forest knows it. The first snow is coming. By the time it lands, their marks will be mine, and none of them will owe anything to the trees again.