Cherriese's Arc

Chapter 3 of 13

Cherriese walked the edge of the middle valley at first light and counted the ways a lost fairy could miss it. The valley mouth was narrow. Two side gullies branched off before it, and both looked more inviting from the air. Any exile flying in tired and scared would take the easy turn and end up in blue-line or gold-line country. She needed a sign at the entrance that her people would trust, and that no one else could copy. She found her stone in a dry creek bed: a tall pink crystal, taller than she was, with flat faces clean enough to carve. She dragged it upright against the slope at the valley mouth and pulled the small hammer from her pack. She worked through the morning. She cut her own pattern into the crystal in sharp, exact strikes — the geometric mark she had used since she was a child, the one no one else had ever bothered to learn. Each strike rang. Pink dust fell at her feet. By midday the obelisk stood at the gate, etched on every face with a pattern only her hand made. The mark was hers, but a mark alone would not guide a frightened flock through the dark. She walked back along the ridge and chose a flat shelf above the valley mouth, visible from a long way off. There she raised a small domed pavilion of pale stone, low and round, its floor traced with glowing lines that pointed straight down into the valley. At night the dome would catch the moon and throw its light onto the path. An exile lost in the air would see the glow first, then the obelisk below it, and know which gully to take. She was tying off the last beam when she saw the second marker. It stood at the mouth of the western gully, half a mile off. A cracked glass frame on a post, etched with symbols that read backward. It had not been there yesterday. Someone had set it during the night, angled to catch the eye of anyone coming in from the north. She climbed down and walked to it. The glass was fresh. The post was still damp at the base. Whoever placed it knew exiles were coming and meant to pull them into the wrong valley before she could meet them. Cherriese pried the marker out of the dirt and broke the frame across her knee. She carried the pieces back to her own gate and buried them under the obelisk, where her pattern would sit on top of them. The lure was gone for now. Her sign was up. But someone was watching the valley already, close enough to plant a trap overnight, and that meant her next problem was not finding her people. It was reaching them before the next false marker did.