Bran Wolfe's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Bran buried the watcher in the ditch and rode hard for the last name on the list. The half-written name he could not save. The sixth name was his own. That left one captain still breathing, if Bran reached him before the next grey cloak did. He rode two days east with the hound trotting beside the horse and the wristblade housing tight against his forearm. He knew the place by the chimney smoke before he saw the roof. A low farmhouse sat in a hollow of cut hay, its shingles patched, its porch swept, a milk pail turned upside down on the rail. The kind of house a soldier picks when he wants to be forgotten. Bran remembered the man who lived here: a captain who had held the left flank at Ansel Ford for six hours with forty men. He had walked away from the war before the treaty and never sent word. Bran tied the horse a quarter mile out and sent the hound ahead. He waited in the tree line and counted to two hundred. The dog came back easy, tail loose, no hackles. No stranger near the house. Bran walked in openly, hands where they could be seen. He wanted the man to recognize him from the lane. No one came to the door. The shutters were closed against a bright afternoon. That was wrong. Bran drew the wristblade and went in low. The front room was tidy. A kettle sat cold on the stove. In the back room he found the captain in a chair, hands folded in his lap, throat opened clean from ear to ear. The blood on the floorboards had dried to a black crust. Two days, maybe three. Whoever had done it had sat him up afterward and closed his eyes. On the table beside the body lay a folded paper. Bran already knew what it was. He opened it anyway. Six names. Five crossed out now in the same hand. His own still waiting at the bottom. He stood a long time in the quiet kitchen. The last witness to the old command was gone. No captain left to speak his name, to muster the First Company, to say aloud in daylight that Bran Wolfe had once worn a crown and could wear one again. The proof he had ridden two days for was a corpse in a chair. He took the list. He took the signet ring off the captain's finger — a match to the one Bran wore turned inward — and put it in his pocket. He whistled the hound in from the porch. Outside, in the hay road, he saw the fresh print of a bay horse with a shoe worn on the inside edge. The rider who killed the captain had not gone far. And the rider knew Bran would come. Bran mounted up and followed the tracks.