Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 27 of 39

Lyra shut the compass into Elaria's palm and held it there. "There's one more thing. If you want to know who's coming to meet you, you need someone who tracks people, not stones. Go up the street. The cottage with the smoking chimney. Ask for the old scribe. He kept the ledgers for three courts before he retired here. If a paired stone left a kingdom, he wrote the name down." Elaria strapped Lia's cooler to her chest and climbed the packed path. The cottage sat between two bare trees, stone walls, runes glowing above the door in the same pattern as its weather vane. She knocked. The man who opened it was barely to her shoulder, white beard to his belt, round glasses slipping down his nose. He looked at the cooler first, then at her face. "Lyra sent me," Elaria said. "About a paired stone." "Then come in before the sprite cooks," he said. "I'm Aldric. Sit." He cleared parchments off a bench. Elaria set the warmth crystal on the table. Aldric bent over it, sniffed, and grunted. "Southern cut. Two were made. The other one went to a fur merchant out of the low country. Big man, red coat with gold clasps, travels with four guards. He buys anything that hums. He's been asking after this stone in every waystation for a month. He'll be at the ridge inn tonight." "How do you know tonight." "Because I still read the mail that comes through. He sent word ahead for a private room." Aldric rummaged in a drawer and drew out a silver locket shaped around a frosted heart, two small paired stones set inside. "Wear this under your collar. It was cut from the same vein. It'll pull toward home the way yours pulls toward him. If you get turned around in the dark, it walks you back to my door." Elaria closed her hand around it. "He'll know my face if he's been asking." "Then don't wear your face." She went back down to Lyra's lodge and traded for what she needed. A merchant's fur coat off a peg by the door, red wool, gold clasps, thick collar that hid the cooler's shape against her ribs. She pinned her hair up with a slim frosted hairpin, edge honed to a blade. She practiced drawing it twice. It cleared the coil in one motion. Lia's thread pulsed steady blue in the cooler. Elaria fed her a shaved sliver of frozen ration and latched the lid. "You stay quiet in the coat," she said. "When I open the lid, you breathe on whatever I point at." She tucked the locket under her collar. The warmth crystal went in an inner pocket, muffled in frostcloth so its heat would not betray her. She stepped out into the dusk with a name, a face, an hour, and a blade in her hair.