Creusus's Arc

Chapter 27 of 43

Creusus walked back to the shack before dawn. He wrapped Kallista in the sheet from the bed and carried her out past the ribbons on the porch. He found soft ground under a fig tree at the edge of the garden. He dug with his hands until his black wrappings were caked with dirt. He laid her in and set the grapes she had brought him on her chest. He covered her slow. He said nothing over the mound. He stood a while, then turned north. He went to the stables and paid a boy for a horse and a skin of water. He rode toward the road that ran between Embermere and the neighboring kingdom to the north. He did not push the black wrappings for a thread. He knew there was none. He rode looking at the dirt. At the last village before the border he got down and walked. He read the ground the way his old trainer had taught him years back. Bootprints churned by carts. A crow feather. Nothing. He worked outward in circles from the last place he was sure Diablo had stood. By noon he had one print in soft clay at a stream crossing. A sandal. Narrow foot. Fresh. He followed it. The trail went cold on stone, then picked up again on a patch of moss. A thread of black cloth hung on a thorn at knee height. A robe hem. He pulled it free and kept it in his fist. A farmer at a fence said a man in a black robe with red at the hem had passed at first light, walking north with no pack. "Long hair," the farmer said. "Silver at his ear. Smiling like he owned the road." Creusus asked which way. The farmer pointed northwest, toward the low hills. Creusus went northwest. The trail thinned again. Bent grass. A sandal scuff on a root. He lost it. He found it. He lost it. By late afternoon he was walking the edge of a pond where a small wooden bridge arched over the water. Painted posts in bright colors stood along the rails. The boards were dry. No prints on them. No hem catch on the rail. He crossed. On the far side he found a stone marker cut with the sigil of the northern kingdom. The border. He stopped there. The trail was gone. He had followed a man he could not touch to a line on a map, and the man had walked over it and vanished into a country that was not his own. Creusus sat on the marker. He opened his hand. The thread of black cloth lay on his palm. He closed his fingers on it. His fists were still his. The road went on north. So would he.