Dusty Spellwood's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Dusty Spellwood had one hour of daylight left, a silk gown down to his boots, and no coat. He stood on the porch of his family's crooked mansion and read the tracker's note again. The frost stallion had been sighted at the edge of the northern glacier, and it would move on by dawn. Everyone in three counties knew the story. Ride the spell-branded stallion and it carries you straight to the person you're meant to love. Dusty had spent two years reading every scroll in the study wing about it. He was twenty-four, unmarried, and tired of eating supper alone under a chandelier built for twelve. He shoved the note in his sleeve and went to the paddock. His own horse, a gentle bay, watched him with a bored eye. Dusty pulled on his cowboy hat, the one thing his father left him that fit. The hat was oiled leather. The gown was thin embroidered silk. Neither would keep a man alive one night on the glacier. He knew this. He had known it since the note arrived. The problem was that his winter cloak had burned in a spell mishap last week, and the tailor in town needed six days. He had one afternoon. The calico cat wound around his ankles, chirping. Dusty crouched. "I know," he said. "I'll freeze solid before I see him." The cat trotted off toward the garden wall and sat under the small flowering tree there. Then she looked back at him. Waited. Trotted three more steps. Looked back again. Dusty followed. Behind the chamomile tree, tucked against the willow's cascading branches, grew a plant he had walked past a hundred times. Layered leaves. Pale blossoms giving off a steady, low heat he could feel on his cheeks from two paces away. A warmnight bloom. His mother had planted it before she died. He had forgotten what it was for. He pressed a palm against the largest blossom. Warm as a banked stove. He counted the flowers. Seven open, four in bud. He went to work. He cut the blooms at the stem, careful of the roots. He stitched them into the gown's hem and the hatband, one at every point where wind would find him. The silk began to glow faintly from inside. When he pulled the gown back on, warmth moved up his legs like bathwater. He saddled the bay and rode out with the cat watching from the porch rail. By the time he reached the tree line the temperature had dropped past bearable, and he was still warm. The gown held. The hat held. Three miles on, he saw hoofprints in the crust, each one ringed with faint colored light where the brands had touched down. The stallion was close. And now Dusty had no excuse to turn back.