Aldric Thornwood's Arc

Chapter 9 of 10

Dark came slow, then all at once. The stranger doused the lamp and lifted the flap. "Now," he said. Aldric followed him out into the cold. They moved along a low ridge, boots quiet in fresh snow. The stranger led him down toward a shape pressed against the rock — another shelter, smaller, half-buried. But the cloth door hung open. Lamplight spilled out where no lamp should still be burning. The stranger stopped hard. Aldric stopped behind him. Someone was already inside. Aldric stepped past the guide. Outside the shelter sat a ring of blackened stones, ash still warm, a kettle tipped on its side. Whoever waited had been here for hours, maybe days. He pushed the flap aside. A figure knelt by a cot, pressing cloth to a thin shoulder under the blanket. The figure turned. Not a guard. Not his mother. A face he had last seen in a cellar room, lit by purple light from a karaoke box — and yet not that face at all. Two of them. The guide had brought him to a sibling already being tended by someone who had known the way long before either of them. Aldric closed the flap behind him. The sibling on the cot opened their eyes. "You came," they said. He had found them. He was not the first. The one by the cot reached into a canvas bag and drew out a tangle of colored wires, frayed ends bright in the lamplight. Aldric knew the bundle. It had run the back of the karaoke box years ago, in the cellar where a child too small to be on any list had hidden behind the speakers. "I kept these," the kneeling one said. "I kept everything of theirs." The guide stepped in behind Aldric and stopped. His face had gone still. He had not known there was another keeper. Aldric looked from the wires to the sibling on the cot, pale and breathing shallow. The path he had walked alone for years now had two other people standing on it, and one of them had been here first. He knelt by the cot and took the thin hand. The search was over. Whatever came next was not the same search at all. The sibling's grip was light, but it held. Aldric leaned close. "Who else knows you're here?" he asked. The sibling's eyes drifted to the keeper by the cot, then back. "She does," they whispered. "She sent the wires ahead. She said you would come last." Aldric felt the cold settle deeper than the wind. His mother had not lost the trail when the screen broke. She had only stopped needing it. Someone in this tent had been her hand all along. He did not yet know which one. He pulled the blanket higher over his sibling and stayed kneeling, because leaving now meant leaving them again, and he would not do that twice.