Elaris Ashwyn's Arc

Chapter 11 of 12

They left the market and followed the river toward the ferry crossing. Elaris walked fast, the bloom folded in her fist. But a mile from camp, Obsidian dropped from a branch and cried once, sharp. The raven had never made that sound. Elaris stopped and looked back at the water. A thin gray haze hung over the reeds where they had knelt to fill their skins. Not fog. It clung to the ground and moved against the wind, always toward them. "They found the trail," Ren said. He drew his hood back and studied the haze. "That's not weather. That's a scent-mark. The king's trackers use it to lock a name." Elaris's stomach dropped. When she broke Ren's contract, she spoke her true name aloud. The name carried a scent now, and the king could follow it. Every hour near the water pressed her name deeper into the mud. "If we stay by the river, we leave a road straight to us." "Then we don't stay," Ren said. But he frowned at the haze. "They already have this stretch. Run east along the bank and we run inside our own trail." Elaris knelt and pressed her palm to the wet ground. The scent lived in the mud, in the water they had touched. She thought of Garrick's warning. Trust no face you don't already know. She looked at the one face she did. "Cut me," she said. Ren went still. "What?" "The scent is my name in my blood. If I bleed it into the current, the river carries it downstream. Away from us. Away from east." She drew one dagger and held it out, hilt first. "They'll chase the water, not the road." Ren took the blade. His hand did not shake, but he waited a breath. "This could pull them faster." "It pulls them wrong. That's enough." She held her wrist over the shallows. He drew the edge across her forearm, shallow and clean. Blood ran into the river and spread pale in the fast water. The gray haze shivered. Then it bent, low along the bank, and slid downstream after the blood. It thinned as it chased the current away from them. They watched it go. The reeds near their feet cleared. The air smelled of mud and nothing else. "It worked," Ren said, quiet. Elaris pressed a strip of cloth to her arm. Her name was in that water now, running west, false. But her true trail turned east, dry, over stone the river couldn't touch. "Off the bank," she said. "We climb to hard ground and stay dry until the ferry." Ren wrapped her wrist tight and pulled her up. She let him. A day ago she would have bound it herself. "You didn't hesitate," he said. "Handing me a knife." "No," she said. "I didn't." And that, more than the blood, was what she carried up the slope.