Ava Thornheart's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Ava Thornheart drove her dagger into the straw chest of the training dummy and twisted. Her sister was three weeks dead, cut down by a swordsman from the East who fought with two blades. Ava had tracked him to this empty guard cottage at the edge of the woods, where the old garrison had left their dummies behind. She worked the short blade against two posts at once, pretending each was a sword longer than her arm. Every pass ended the same way. The imagined steel reached her ribs before her dagger reached him. She knew the truth and kept training anyway. A knife fighter does not close on a man with two swords. She would die in the first step. But she had no other weapon, and no other sister, so she practiced until her braids stuck to her neck and her palms bled through the wrap. At dawn she shouldered her pack and followed the road east. Boot prints pressed deep into the soft ground, one set, a heavy man moving fast. She walked beside them for hours. Near a bend she found the warning, eight bodies arranged in a rough circle around two crossed swords stuck point-down in the dirt. Travelers had done the laying out. The cuts on the dead were clean and paired. She counted them, then kept walking. That night she saw firelight through canvas. A small tent, one horse, no guards. She drew her dagger and pushed through the flap. "You killed my sister." The man inside did not reach for the two blades at his hip. He sat by a low fire with a black bird on a stump behind him. His beard was braided with beads. His brown eyes lifted to hers and stayed there. "She came at me with a knife," he said. "On the road. Her friends ran. I had no choice." He paused. "It was the sorcerer in her. Sickness. I have seen it in others." Ava's hand shook. On the bedroll beside him lay a ribbon, red bleeding into purple at the edges. Her sister had braided that ribbon into her hair the morning she ran off. A tear cut a clean line down through the dirt on the man's cheek. He did not wipe it. "Thorbran," he said, naming himself. "I am hunting the one who poisoned her. The raven tracks him through the sick." The bird on the stump opened one eye, and the eye burned white. Ava lowered the dagger. She picked up the ribbon and closed her fist around it. She asked him about the sorcerer, and she listened while the fire burned down, and when he was done she sat across from him and said she was coming with him. The man she had crossed two days of road to kill became the man she would ride beside at dawn. Her sister's killer was already dead. The thing that had used her sister was not.