Asher Converse's Arc

Chapter 4 of 30

By dusk the grain house was no longer empty. Asher had spread the word through Tucker, and Tucker knew which ears to fill. Now three strangers sat at Asher's rough tables while Chalam stood at the head of the room, his cracked staff leaned against the wall. The tavern Asher meant to fill with laughing men held a war council instead. He had wanted custom. He got soldiers. The first man kept a knife on the table under his palm. He had a stubble beard and dark eyes that marked every door. "Kael Thorne," he said when Asher poured him a cup. "Heard a wizard needs men who fight. I fight." He drank, then set the cup down flat. "I'm hunting a relic. If your buried thing is it, I'm in." The second man leaned by the window, half in shadow, and Asher had not seen him come in. Dark blonde hair to his shoulders, a green shirt hanging off both shoulders, with the collar open. He smelled of crushed leaves. "Rowan Fisk," he said. "I find groves gone quiet. Rot out of season. Yours smells the same." He looked at Chalam's staff. "Yew and ash. Cracked. Wrong wood carries a break." Chalam's head came up. "You know staff wood." "Raised by dryads," Rowan said. "I know what a failing seal does to roots." Tucker set a bottle between them all and dropped onto a stool. "See? Told you the room fills itself." He looked pleased and made no secret of it. Asher stayed on his feet. He watched money walk out of the plan he'd built. But he heard something better in it. Men were coming to his door. Men who fought, who read the land, who carried their own reasons. If they lived, they'd remember where they gathered. Chalam laid it out plainly. A god slept sealed under the grove. The seal was failing. Someone reached these sites before him and meant to open them. "I can't stop it alone," he said. "I need eyes in the grove, a blade at my back, and a place no one watches." "You've got the place," Asher said. He tapped the table. "This one. Any man who fights for the grove drinks here first and last. That's my price." Kael nodded once. "Fair." Rowan pushed off the wall. "I'll walk the grove at dawn and read the rot. I'll bring back what I find." They clasped hands over the table. The plan was made. Asher had his fighters, and his tavern had its first true crowd. They left for the grove.