Late summer usually sang. Bees shouldered sunflowers. Paddles whispered where the two arms met. The outlet chattered as it hurried downhill toward Seneca.

Then the sound began to thin.

First, Awenasa felt it in her wrists, where the pulse lives. The storyteller stopped in the very middle of a tale and stared toward the south. Smoke rose there, in long, straight lines. It was too much for cooking fires. It was too neat to be safe.

That night, Awenasa went to the lily cove. Karl met her there. The moon lay on the fork of the lake like a thin, bright coin.

"What do you hear?" she asked.

Karl closed his eyes. The water carried the truth to him, and it hurt. "Boots," he said at last. "Axes. Pots breaking."

Rumors had walked the paths all spring. Soldiers marching. Longhouses burned. Orchards cut so winter would be hunger. Fields left black so people could not stay. It was a sorrow as deep as the water.

"We pack at dawn," Awenasa said. Her voice shook, but it did not break. "Grandmother's seeds. The story-sticks. The small drum. Only what we can carry. If the corn feeds crows this year, then the crows will live. We will plant again."

Karl's lantern eyes dimmed with worry. "What do I keep?" he asked.

Awenasa had already planned for this. She unwrapped a small blue bundle. Inside were a bead from the corn pestle, dried seeds of corn and beans, three apple seeds, and a bent little pin shaped like the fork of the lake.

"Keep these," she said. "And keep our songs. The ones the wind cannot hold."

Karl took the bundle in his mouth as gently as if it were a baby bird. He swam to Bluff Point, slid deep under a stone ledge, and tucked the bundle there. He laid a flat rock over it, the way a mother tucks a blanket.

"I can keep songs," he said.

By morning, people from other valleys walked the ridge path. A girl came with soot on her cheeks. An elder carried a broken piece of a boy's lacrosse stick. A mother held a baby who would not let go of a wooden spoon. Their eyes were hollow with shock.

Awenasa's grandmother pointed at the water. "The lake is a road," she said. "We will take the road fire cannot burn."

Canoes slid from the reeds. Children lifted baskets like shields. Some walked backward, as if their feet could pull their homes along behind them. The air tasted of smoke and fear.

Awenasa was the last to step into a canoe. She bent down and touched two fingers to the water and then to her forehead. "Remember," she whispered.

Karl slid under the boats. He spread his Stillwater Veil across the surface. From a distance, the lake only looked calm and plain. No one could count canoes in that soft skin of water.

At the steep outlet, the lake dropped hard toward Seneca. The water pulled like a strong hand. Karl widened a slow, safe tongue behind a rock, giving each canoe a place to breathe and choose the gentle path.

Axes cracked in the woods. Men shouted in a language Awenasa did not know. For three long breaths, even the water seemed to shake.

Karl rose just enough so his glowing wake could draw a simple, shining path.

"This way," the ripples said. "Hush. Keep going."

Awenasa gripped her paddle. She bit into the water, pulled, lifted, breathed. Bite, pull, lift, breathe. The rhythm steadied her heart.

By night, the canoes hid in a secret cove no one used in daylight. The moon looked away. Karl swam under the boats and played the sounds of home in his Murmurcraft.

"Pass me the bowl." "Mind the fire." "Who wants another ear of corn?"

They were not ghosts. They were a bridge strong enough for hearts to cross.

"Will we ever come back?" a small girl asked. She did not look at anyone when she said it.

"Yes," Awenasa said, before any elder could shape a safer answer. "If not us, then our footsteps. If not our footsteps, our children's hands. If not their hands, then our songs."

Karl pressed his fin very lightly to the underside of the water. He tucked that promise into the lake the way he had tucked the blue bundle under stone.

Days later, after more paddling and more carrying, the canoes reached another shore. It was not home, but it was water, and so it was something like mercy.

Karl could not follow farther. At the place where new water took over, he leaned into the current and let it speak to him.

They are alive, it told him. They are moving. They carry the promise.

He turned back up Keuka alone.

The orchards did not answer when he passed. Burned fields lay black and wet. The hills seemed to be holding their breath, afraid to let it go.

Winter came and laid its glass carefully. No one called from dock to dock. No pestle beat time for evening songs. Snow settled in the curves of empty canoes and made them into strange, white boats.

Karl hummed along the thin ice where deer chose poor crossing spots, easing it into safe cracks before it could break a leg. He practiced holding the saved voices.

"Pass me the bowl." "Mind the fire." "Who wants another ear of corn?"

They were small things. But in a year of burning and loss, small things felt holy.

When the last sheets of ice sighed and melted, loons tried their voices again. Karl rose at the place where the two arms meet and waited.

No reed loop touched his fin. No girl's voice called his name across the water.

He did not rush the waiting. Promises take the time they need.

At last, he wrote one glowing word in the evening water and let it drift toward the dark:

Return.

Then, for the empty hills and the listening stars, he said the old line once more:

"We keep the lake, and the lake keeps us."

The lake held the words close, like a mother holding a sleeping child.