Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 28 of 39

The ridge inn sat above the road, windows yellow with lamplight, snow packed hard around the porch. Elaria climbed the last stretch with the fur coat heavy on her shoulders and the cooler warm against her ribs. She counted four horses at the rail and a fifth tied apart, taller, better kept. The merchant was already inside. She had come to trade a lie for a name, and she had not yet worked out how to leave. She took a bench near the back wall and set the paired-stone locket on the wood between her hands. The warmth crystal in her pocket pulled toward a big man in a red coat by the fire. He was turned away, drinking. Two guards flanked the door. Two more sat at his table. Elaria felt the room close around her. If she stood up now, they would see the crystal answer his. If she stayed, they would see her face when he turned. A girl named Lia shifted in the cooler and tapped once against the lid. Elaria opened her hand over the latch and thought through the coat's inner pockets. She had a vial of dark powder Aldric had pressed on her at the door, small, stoppered, cold to the touch. She had the frost-bladed pin in her hair. She had one breath from a dying sprite. She uncorked the vial under the table and tipped the powder onto the iron lip of the hearth grate across from her. Then she cracked the cooler lid and whispered, "Now." Lia's breath threaded out, thin and blue, and found the powder. The hearth coughed black smoke in one hard wave. Somebody shouted. A guard knocked his chair over reaching for the door. The merchant stood, red coat flaring, and turned his face into the smoke instead of toward her. Elaria walked, not ran, along the wall and out the side door. The cold hit her lungs. Behind her, boots hammered the porch and a voice barked to search the yard. She had no plan past the threshold. She had known she wouldn't. The tall horse at the rail was not a horse. A snow elk stood there in its place, broad antlers lowered, dark eyes fixed on her. It knelt. She did not think. She climbed on and gripped the fur at its neck, and it rose and ran. It carried her off the road, through birch and drift, past a pale owl that lifted from a branch and paced them a while before turning back. The elk stopped at a low stone building set into the slope, door iced shut, roof sagging. A forgotten icehouse. It knelt again. She slid down. When she turned to thank it, it was already gone into the trees. Elaria shouldered the door open, stepped inside, and shut the ridge behind her.