Bran Wolfe's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

The letter had been sitting on Bran Wolfe's anvil for three days, and every hour he did not answer it, another old friend might be dying. He read it again by the forge light. Six names. Six captains who had once knelt to him before he walked away from the crown and traded a scepter for tongs. The list came from a peddler who owed him a debt and could not read what he carried. Four of the six, the peddler swore, were already in the ground. Two still breathed. The letter did not say which two. Bran was fifty-three and grey through the beard. His knuckles were scarred from twenty years of hammering horseshoes in a village that thought him a widower. He kept a signet ring turned into his palm. He had not spoken his real name aloud since the war ended. He knew what reaching out cost. A wrong knock, a wrong face at the door, and the assassins who had chased him into hiding would come again. This time they would finish it. He pulled a strip of oilcloth from under the anvil and unrolled it. Inside lay a fitted metal housing with a spring-loaded blade. He strapped it to his forearm under the sleeve and tested the release twice. It snapped clean. Then he whistled for the hound. The dog came at once from the yard, ears up, tail low. A brown-and-white scent hound, four years old, trained by Bran himself. The dog had followed him from a burnt village where Bran had pulled him from under his dead mother. He knew the dog's nose better than his own eyes. "Two stops," Bran said. He tied a scrap of cloth to the dog's collar. It carried no message. Only his scent. "You go in. You come back. That's all." He rode a day and a half and stopped in the trees above the first house on the list. A stone cottage with smoke. He sent the hound down. An hour later the dog came back panting, alone, with the cloth still tied. No one had followed. But the dog's fur smelled of pitch and horse sweat, not hearth. Strangers were camped in that cottage. Bran struck that name off. He rode on. The second place sat in a clearing at the end of a rutted lane: a weathered farmhouse with a low porch and a red brick chimney. Yellow curtains in one window, pink in another. A child's boot on the step. He sent the hound down again. This time a woman came out. She knelt, read the collar, and looked up the hill directly at the treeline where Bran crouched. She raised one hand, palm flat, then closed it into a fist against her chest. The old salute of his First Company. Bran let out the breath he had held for three days. He stood up from the ferns and started down toward the porch. One loyalist, alive. And now she knew exactly where he was.