Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 31 of 39

Elaria reached the lodge door and stopped. The mirror in her palm had fogged again at the lower edge. Not behind her this time. Ahead. Downhill, past the birches, where her marker flag stood in the snow. That was where the merchant expected her. The paired stone was pulling her crystal toward it, and the merchant's guards had staked the road between. She could not walk down to meet Lyra's directions. She could not walk back either. The lodge door opened before she knocked. An old man stood inside, gray beard down to his chest, wool cap pulled low. He held a short auger in one hand and a coil of line in the other, as if she had interrupted him on his way out to the ice. He looked at the cooler under her coat, then at the mirror, then at her face. He did not speak. He stepped aside and jerked his chin toward the back room. Lyra's voice from deeper in the lodge called, "That's Eliost. He knows the ways under the hill. Go with him." Elaria followed him through a low door behind the hearth. He pulled a folded cloak off a peg and pushed it into her arms. White wool, patterned with pale gray shadows and soft flecks like drifted snow. She fastened it over her coat and pulled the hood up. He nodded once. Then he lifted a floor board and showed her a stone stair going down into the dark. The passage under the lodge ran cold and straight. Eliost went first with a stub of tallow candle. Elaria kept the mirror in her free hand and checked it at every bend. The glass stayed clear. After a hundred paces the tunnel bent uphill and opened behind a fall of ice on the far side of the ridge. He held the ice curtain aside and pointed. She saw her marker flag below, small and orange, and two men in dark coats crouched behind the pale birches near it. Waiting. She had come out above them and behind them. The flag was still theirs. But the road to it no longer mattered. Eliost tapped her locket through the cloak and pointed the other way, along the ridge line, where the crystal's pull would guide her without the flag at all. She raised the mirror one last time toward the birches. The glass fogged at both edges now. Four watchers, maybe more, all fixed on the empty flag. None facing her. She lowered the hood over her hair and stepped out onto the snow. The cloak took the light and broke it. She moved along the ridge, silent, and the men below did not turn. The ambush was still set. She was no longer walking into it.