Bran Wolfe's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

The woman met Bran at the porch. She was near forty, thin at the wrists, with a burn scar down one forearm he remembered from a bad campaign. She did not smile. She looked past his shoulder at the lane. "You shouldn't have come yourself," she said. "There's a man on the road to your forge. Two days now. My boy saw him from the woodpile." Bran felt the cold drop into his gut. He had ridden a day and a half to reach her. If a watcher waited on the road home, the assassins already knew the shape of his life. His anvil. His shutters. The hour he banked the coals. "Describe him," Bran said. "Tall. Grey cloak. Rides a bay with a cut ear. He doesn't come close. He watches the bend where your lane meets the mill track." Bran knew the bend. A stand of alders. Good cover. A man could sit there a week and see every rider in and out. He did not go inside her house. He would not bring it to her door. He whistled the hound up from the porch step and knelt to untie the scent cloth from its collar. The dog leaned into his hand, warm and steady. "I need paper," he said. She brought a scrap and a stub of charcoal. Bran drew the bend, the alders, the ditch behind them. He marked where a man on foot could come up from the creek without crossing open ground. "You ride ahead of me," he told her. "Not to the forge. To the miller's. You buy flour. You walk your horse past the bend, slow. You look tired. You do not look at the alders." "And you?" "I come up the creek." She studied him. "Alone?" He tapped his sleeve. The housing under the cloth clicked once against the bone of his wrist. She nodded. They rode separately through the night. Near dawn Bran left his horse tied a mile out and went the rest on foot through the creek bed, boots wet to the knee. The hound moved ahead of him without sound. He had trained the dog for this too. He came up behind the alders in the grey light. The watcher was there. Grey cloak. Bay horse tied off. The man was eating bread and watching the lane for a woman with a flour sack. Bran was three steps behind him before the man heard the leaves. The wristblade snapped out clean. It was done in a breath. He searched the body. A folded paper inside the cloak. Six names. Four crossed out in the same hand. A fifth name, half-written, unfinished. His own name was the sixth. Bran wiped the blade on the grey cloak and stood up. The watcher was dead. Whoever had sent him would know by nightfall.