Champion Kevintor Neverloss's Arc

Chapter 13 of 42

Kevintor slept four hours in the spring house and woke before the bell. Lina was already at the gate, two horses saddled, her short blade across her back. She handed him a flask and a strip of dried meat. "Astella picked the road for you. East fork past the marker stone. She said you'd know the name once you saw it." He swung up. The sky over the wall was the color of wet slate. He had no destination, only an order to ride and a dead man with no address. They rode out at first light and made the marker by an hour past dawn. A cracked stone stood at the fork, half its height, grass at the base. Kanji ran down the face in faded orange paint. Kevintor read it twice. The old war road. Lina spat into the dust. "Soldiers used it. Then nobody. Then old men who couldn't let go." She pointed her chin down the east branch. "Astella says the dead man walked it home every spring. If his goods scattered, they scattered here." They followed the road until midday. Houses thinned to one every mile. At a bend, a shrine sat back from the track, its roof half fallen, a wooden box at the front for offerings. Lina dismounted first and lifted the lid. Inside lay a folded paper wrapped in oiled cloth. She handed it to him without reading it. He opened it on his knee. The hand was careful and old. The header named a duel and two fighters. The body listed witnesses, terms, and a place. A scroll. Not the one he wanted, but a sister to it, written by the same scribe. At the bottom, a seal he had seen before, stamped in red wax: a crest of crossed swords over a star. He knew the seal. He had seen it last on a chest plate in the corner of a portrait at Astella's hall, behind her seat. A suit of armor stood in that corner under glass, layered steel, a long sword resting against the greaves. The old man in the portrait wore it. The same old man who had warned him about the seventh art and died a season later. The armor was still in Astella's house. The scroll he hunted had once hung at its hip. "He was hers," Kevintor said. Lina read the paper over his shoulder and did not answer at once. Then she said, "Then she knew the whole time where to send you." He folded the document and put it inside his robe. The shrine was a marker. Someone had left the paper for a rider who knew to look. The trail did not end at a dead man. It looped back to the woman who had armed him for the road. He turned the horse. "We ride back. Now."