Ben Dover's Arc

Chapter 65 of 150

Ben walked east across stubble with empty hands. The sky was the color of skimmed milk. Behind him, Paige's cottage sank into the low mist. Ahead, the pines held the crate's future if he could reach them with help. He could not. Joe was north. Amber south. Lolly stayed at the hearth. He had scattered his people to make four small targets, and now he had none of them within a shout, and no place set for meeting again. He counted paces the way his father counted crates. Four hundred by the time the field ended at a broken stile. Two hunters on the ridge road, small as ticks. He knew their pattern. By midday they would come down to the cottage. By dusk they would sweep the field. If the crate stayed in Paige's thyme past sundown, someone with a spade and a sharp guess would find it. He needed a body. Any body strong enough to lift one end of the crate before dark. He had no rendezvous. He had a field, a stile, and a road he could not walk. He crossed the stile into a lane of trampled grass and stopped. A girl sat on a stump at the bend, cleaning a short sword across her knee with a rag. Armor plated her shoulders. A red scarf hung to her hip. Two thin scars crossed her cheek. She looked up without surprise, the way someone looks up who has been waiting. "You walk like a man who lost his cart," she said. Ben stopped three paces off. "Eileen." "Brother." He had not seen his sister in six years. The last word between them had been a door closing. He felt it close again in his chest and then, oddly, open. "How did you find me?" "A woman in a cottage told a boy on the road that a plague-looking man passed through last week. I followed the smell." She sheathed the sword. "Also, Anita wrote me. Two weeks ago. She said if the letter reached me I was to walk west until I found you or a fresh grave." "You came for that?" "I came because she said thirteen and then said twelve, and I wanted to know which one of you was lying." He almost laughed. "Neither. It's twelve." She stood. She was shorter than him by a head and built like a post driven deep. "Where is it?" "Buried. Two hundred paces back. Under thyme in a garden. I need it up and moving by dark or I lose it." Eileen looked past him at the ridge. She counted the two figures the way he had counted them. "One end each," she said. "I take the heavy end." "Why?" "Because you always drop yours." He turned back toward the field with his sister at his shoulder. His hands were still empty. They would not be by nightfall.