Aldric Thornmoor's Arc

Chapter 1 of 16

Aldric Thornmoor stood at the foot of the church he could no longer enter. The council had stripped his herald's voice a year ago and set him outside these doors for holding a door he should have barred. Inside, someone else was reading the winter proclamations in a voice that cracked on the vowels. Aldric's mouth watered at the sound. He knew the words. He had once been the man who spoke them across three provinces without a single stumble. He turned his back on the doors before anyone inside could see him listening. His cloak dragged on the stones. At his collar hung a coin hammered flat into a broach, the old Thornmoor crest still legible under his thumb. He rubbed it the way other men worried a tooth. The path led into the trees behind the churchyard. He walked until he found the tree he was looking for. Its bark was carved with a sigil he had cut into the wood as a boy learning protection work. His first. The lines had grown crooked as the trunk widened, but the mark still held. He set his palm flat against it and tried to say the opening line of the winter proclamation under his breath. His voice came out as a dry click. He tried again. The second word tore. He closed his mouth. If he could not speak a single line to a tree, he could not stand before the high council and force them to hear him. Without his voice he had no way back. He would die outside these doors. "You'll ruin it faster that way." He turned. A woman stood on the path in a dress of pale pink and yellow. Barefoot. Her hair fell in black ringlets. Her hands were burned black to the wrists. She was not lost. She was watching him the way a butcher watches a hanging cut. "Who are you," he said. The words scraped. "Why are you watching me." She pointed up. Aldric looked. On the branch above his head sat a pink rabbit the size of a dog. It smiled down at him with a mouth full of thin, crowded teeth. Blue light dripped from mushrooms clustered in the fork of the trunk, and the drops sizzled where they hit the leaves. "It's been drinking your old sigil for a week," the woman said. "That's why your throat won't open. Your voice is inside it." Aldric stared at the thing on the branch. Grief and anger climbed his chest at the same rate. "Cut it down and take it back," she said. "Or don't. I need a herald who can still shout. You need a throat. Decide now." Aldric drew the small knife at his belt. He set the blade against the sigil in the bark and cut. The rabbit screamed with his voice.