Alyla Franco's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Alyla left the castle before noon with the pale stone knotted in cloth at her belt and twelve treated arrows in her quiver. She rode the two-tone mare the stewards had saddled for her, a warm brown horse with darker legs and a darker mane. The road east was empty. That itself was wrong. By the second hour she smelled the rot before she saw it. The blight had crossed the road. Where the wheel ruts should have been, the ground sagged into a black trough. It ran from the ditch on her left to the field on her right, wider than a barn door. The far side of it held the small farmhouse and, past that, the red barn with hay heaped at its foot. She could see both plain in the afternoon light. She could not reach them. She dismounted and led the mare closer. The horse balked ten paces out and would come no farther. Alyla went on alone. At the edge she crouched. The dark was not shadow. It was absence. A pebble she dropped into it made no sound. She pulled a stick from the ditch and pushed it in. The wood softened, then hollowed, then fell away into nothing. She drew her hand back before the cold could climb her wrist. She unwrapped the stone. It sat warm in her palm, no bigger than a plum. She thought of the twelve arrows and did the count. Twelve to kill the beast. None to spare for the road. She put the stone against the edge of the trough anyway, just at the lip. The blight pulled back from the stone the width of a finger. No more. She pressed harder. The stone grew hot in her hand. The dark thinned in a small pale ring and held there. A ring was not a bridge. She stood and looked across. A tabby cat sat on the farmhouse porch, licking one paw slow, unbothered, on the side of the world she could not reach. Beyond the barn, in the pen, a black-and-white horse paced the fence and would not settle. Something in the barn had it spooked. Something the cat, small and low, did not fear yet. Alyla wrapped the stone. She stepped back from the trough. The road east was closed to her. The beast was on the far side with a house and a barn and animals it had not finished with. She swung up onto the mare and turned north along the ditch. Somewhere the trough had to end, or thin, or bend around a rise. She would ride until she found the seam. She had lost the straight road. She had not lost the beast. Behind her, the ring of clean ground at the lip of the dark stayed pale, and did not spread.