Cameron stokes's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

Dawn was hours off, and Cameron finally looked down at herself. She wore a thin market dress and soft slippers meant for standing by a flower table. The night air already cut through the cloth. Three weeks of wolf country would eat her alive. She had a road now, but no way to walk it. She found Asher at the edge of the square, crouched over his pack, checking straps by lamplight. "You can't go like that," Asher said. He did not look up. "First cold night, you'll freeze. First wet one, you'll rot." He pulled a folded bundle from his pack and tossed it at her feet. Sturdy boots, a wool coat, a canteen. "Call it part of the fee. I don't haul bodies." Cameron knelt and touched the boots. They were worn but solid, the laces whole. "Why carry extra gear?" "Because clients always dress like you." A short smile. "Pretty, and planning to die." He went back to his straps. "Food and shelter I can cover. The thing I can't give you is nerve. Out there, you keep walking even when your feet bleed." She changed behind the empty stalls. The coat swallowed her, but it held warmth. She laced the boots tight and stood taller in them. When she came back, Asher held out one more thing, flat on his palm. A hunting knife, the blade tipped in bright silver, the handle gripped and solid. "Take it," he said. "Things out there come at night. If one gets close, you cut, you don't think." His green eyes stayed on her a beat too long when she gripped the handle. "Silver bites deeper than steel. Remember that." Cameron turned the knife in the lamplight. "Deeper into what?" "Into anything you'd rather not meet." He shouldered his pack and did not explain. The pendant lay cold against her chest, the silver feather her mother left her, the reason this man had agreed to walk her east at all. She tucked the knife into her belt. The pull behind her ribs still dragged her toward the distant pack, steady as a heartbeat. Now, for the first time, she was dressed to follow it. "We go when the sky grays," Asher said. He settled against a post and closed his eyes. "Sleep if you can. You won't get much past the ridge." Cameron sat across from him and did not sleep. She watched the knife glint in her lap. She had solved the first problem. She had boots and a blade and a man who knew the road. But she kept circling one small thing. He had known her size. He had packed a woman's gear before she ever asked. He had chosen silver, the one metal that bites a wolf, and said it like a warning he meant. She gripped the hilt tighter and watched him breathe. She had hired a guide. She did not yet know what she had hired.