Alaric the Crimson's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Alaric burned the map before the second bell. He watched the parchment curl on the workshop hearth until only the ink of the forge's location survived as ash. Three days ago he had a plan to walk openly to the mountain smithy and begin the sunfire blade. This morning a runner from the Order arrived with a name pinned to a folded note: Rita's scouts. They knew. He stood in the mystic workshop and made himself think it through. The blade was the only weapon the coming darkness feared, and only the Crimson Knight could draw it from the fire. If he rode for the forge now, Rita's riders would meet him on the road and end the work before the first hammer fell. If he waited, she gained days to gather worse than scouts. His mentor found him at the rack of ordinary blades near the window. She did not knock. Elysia Brightwarden moved through the workshop the way she moved through every room she entered, as if she had built it. She set two fingers on the spiral rack and the blades caught the lantern light and threw it back in blue. "You mean to go," she said. "I mean to not go," Alaric said. "Openly." He told her the plan while he spoke it into shape. He would send his four knights out at dawn on the roads Rita expected him to take. Kael south. Throne west along the ridges. Seraphine on the open highway with his crimson cloak on her shoulders. Lyra to the river crossings. Each would move loud. Each would draw eyes. He would ride alone, at night, on a borrowed mount, by the shepherd trails no scout watched. Elysia listened. When he finished she lifted one of the shimmering blades from the rack and laid it across the public anvil at the center of the room. "Ordinary steel," she said. "Carry this. If they stop you, you are a smith, not a knight." "And the cloak?" "Leave it on Seraphine. Leave the sword-name here. Leave the statue in the square to speak for you while you're gone." He nodded once. He gathered a plain sheath, a hammer, a leather apron. Before the third bell he was in the yard, pulling the cinch tight on a bone-thin horse that steamed in the cold. Not his war-mount. Nothing of his. He rode out under the low gate while his knights rode out under the high one, banners bright, horns sounding, drawing every watcher toward the wrong horizons. By midnight he was past the last village his name was known in. The shepherd trail climbed. Behind him, faint on the eastern flat, he saw what should not have been there: a single point of red fire moving fast across open ground. Not a scout's torch. Too steady. Too quick. Something with hooves of flame had found his trail anyway.