Ben holt's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

They followed the scroll's trail to the parking lot at the edge of town. A festival was packed into the cracked pavement, stalls and bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder under strings of paper lamps. Ben and Aria pushed into the middle of it. The striped horse trailed behind them, ears flat. At the center of the lot stood a tall wooden post, weathered gray, the kind people tied notices to. Ben stopped beside it. He had carried a broken piece of the wagon wheel under his arm the whole walk in. Aria touched the post once with her palm. "Here," she said. The crowd flowed around them and did not part. Then the music stopped. The crowd pulled back in a slow wave, and Barren stepped through with four hunters at his shoulders, yellow scarves bright, rifles low. He looked at Aria first. He looked at Ben second, and his face did not change. Ben lifted the wheel shard. Aria dropped her sword belt to the ground and raised her fists. "No blade," she said. "I want my hands." Barren smiled a little and waved the hunters forward. The first hunter swung his rifle stock at Ben's head. Ben caught it on the wheel shard and felt the wood crack down to his knuckles. He drove the jagged end into the man's ribs and the hunter folded. Aria was already in the air, one short beat of her wings, and she came down on the second hunter with both fists on his jaw. The third hunter raised his rifle at her back. Ben threw the wheel shard. It hit the barrel and the shot went wide into the lamps overhead. Glass rained down. The striped horse screamed and reared and kicked the third hunter into the post. The crowd stumbled back, then stopped stumbling. They had nowhere to go. Barren and the last hunter were neither winning nor losing. Ben took a rifle butt to the mouth and tasted blood. Aria's wing tore on a knife. She kept swinging. Barren caught Ben by the collar and held him at arm's length and looked at his face for a long second, the way a man looks at a ledger he isn't sure he wants to read. Then a stallholder, an old woman in a white head covering, picked up a length of broken lamp pole and brought it down on the last hunter's shoulder. A boy threw a clay jug. A man in a dark robe stepped in front of Aria and took the next knife on his forearm. The crowd had watched too long. They moved all at once. It was over fast after that. Hands came from every side. The hunters went down under boots and fists and the kicking hooves of the striped horse. Barren let go of Ben's collar to swing at the old woman, and Ben drove his shoulder into his father's stomach and put him on the ground. Aria landed on his chest. Her wings were torn and bright. She did not raise a fist. She only held him down while the crowd closed in around them, and she said, quiet enough that only Ben and Barren heard, "You don't get to make another one of us." Ben pulled the scroll from his belt and dropped it on his father's face. The dark ribbon lay across Barren's eyes. The crowd took him from there. Later, when the lamps were out and the lot was quiet, Ben sat on the curb beside Aria and the striped horse. His mouth was swollen. Her wing was bandaged with strips from a stranger's robe. The old wooden post at the center of the lot still stood. Someone had nailed Barren's torn yellow scarf to it without a word. Ben opened his mail bag and took out the folder he had carried across seven towns. He set it on the pavement between his