Aldric Thornmoor's Arc

Chapter 10 of 16

They ran two streets before Wanda pulled him into a doorway. Aldric's side was wet through his cloak. The councilor's shouting still carried behind them, but a new sound was rising above it. Voices. Not guards. Criers. Wanda tilted her head. "Listen." A man on the corner was already calling it out. Traitor. Thornmoor. The one who threw fire at the gate house. A price on his head by morning. Another voice picked it up a street over. The councilor had not waited for dawn. He had put his story into the district's mouth before Aldric could put his own there. Aldric wrote on his stub. THEY WILL HEAR HIM FIRST. Wanda read it and spat. "Then we get above them," she said. "Higher than the criers." She pointed down the lane. A black obelisk rose at the center of the small square, taller than the roofs, its runes glowing pink and blue against the stone. Aldric had walked past it a hundred times as a herald. Its base was the old proclamation stand. Every crier in the district would circle back to it before sunrise to take their line for the day. He nodded. He still had the other half of the page against his ribs. They moved through the back lanes. A crier passed the alley mouth, shouting Aldric's name and a lie about a burned child. Wanda's charred hand tightened around Aldric's wrist and did not let go. At the square, two criers were already at the obelisk, waiting for the councilor's man. A dark bush grew beside the base, its leaves so black they seemed to swallow the lamplight, faint dust drifting through the branches. Aldric knew that bush. Heralds fed proclamations to its roots when a reading was finished. What went in was remembered by the stone. What the stone sang, the district repeated. He did not have his voice. He had a page in the councilor's own hand. Wanda stepped into the square first. Fire bloomed low around her feet, not to burn, only to be seen. The two criers turned. She held their eyes. Aldric climbed the obelisk's base behind them. He unfolded the other half of the proclamation. He pressed it flat against the onyx, over the lowest rune, and drove his thumb into the wound at his side until blood ran down onto the page and into the stone. The obelisk took it. The runes flared. The page went to ash. A sound came out of the stone that was not his voice but carried his words, low and clear across the rooftops, naming the councilor, naming the thumb in the wax, naming the curse on the compact. The criers on the far streets went quiet. Windows opened. By the time the guards reached the square, the district had already heard it. The councilor's name was in every mouth. Aldric's was no longer the traitor's. He slid down from the base. Wanda caught him. Above them, something small and winged lifted off the obelisk's tip and turned east toward the council hall, a red iris fixed on him, orange light dripping from its edge. The councilor had lost the street. Someone higher had just marked Aldric for the hall.