Cove Belle's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Cove Belle found the arrow stuck in the trunk of the pine behind her cabin, fletching still bright, shaft warm from a hand that wasn't hers. She knew the cut of the head before she touched it. She had watched him sharpen arrows just like it on a whetstone, three winters back, while telling her she was safe with him. Safe was the word that had done the most damage. She pulled the arrow free and held it against her chest and felt, for the first time in months, that the Fated Forest was no longer hers alone. She lived at the forest's east edge in a one-room cabin she had built herself after the last man left. She had come here to wait. Her grandmother had told her a fated love walked these woods, someone who would know her name before she said it, someone who would not flinch when she pushed. Cove pushed everyone. She picked fights with the trapper who brought her venison. She stopped speaking to the herbalist who asked too many gentle questions. She was waiting for the one person who would stay through all of it, and she had convinced herself she would recognize him by the way her chest hurt when he looked at her. Pain had always meant something real. Inside the cabin she opened the cedar box under her bed and lifted out the bone necklace he had given her. The runes along the beads still caught light the way they had the night he tied it around her neck. She had not worn it in two years. She had not thrown it away either. She turned the arrow over in her other hand and understood what the arrow meant. He had found the ridge. He was close. By the smoke she could already smell on the wind, he had pitched a tent somewhere along the river below, fire pit dug, fishing rod set, the practiced camp of a man who meant to stay until she came down to him. If he reached the cabin first, he would say the word safe again, and she would let him. Cove walked to the fire pit outside her door and laid the necklace on the stones. She set the arrow beside it. Then she shouldered her own bow, took the narrow trail down toward the river, and went to meet him on ground he had chosen, before he could choose hers. She did not know yet whether she would kill him, send him away, or sit at his fire and listen. She only knew she would not wait in the cabin and let him knock. The waiting, at least, was over. Whoever her fated love turned out to be, it was not going to be the man at the river. She needed to close that door herself before anyone else could walk through it.