Elowen Cask's Arc

Chapter 4 of 10

Elowen dried her contracts by a low fire and studied the map. She had rattled Petra's arrangement, but rattling was not proof. To make the fae lord fear her, she needed something written, something in Petra's own hand. So she went to find the woman who had sold her the trap. She tracked Petra to the base of the great iron clock. The tower rose black and studded with rivets, its gears turning behind bars, its face marked with numerals worn soft by weather. Petra stood beneath it in her pale silk gown, ringlets neat, pearls at her ears. She was tearing pages from a folded chart and feeding them into a fire she'd built between the tower's legs. "Burning your maps," Elowen said. "He's hunting you now." Petra didn't turn. "You did that. He thinks I sold him out." She dropped in another page. "So I burn the proof before he sends someone to read it off my body." Elowen stepped closer. "Then we want the same thing. You want to survive him. I want the debt he owes my mother." Petra curtsied. It was perfect, and Elowen knew the blade would drop into her palm. She had seen it before. Elowen caught the wrist before the steel cleared the sleeve. "Kill me and you're still alone against him," Elowen said. "Give me one page. One map with your name on it, proving you charted his court for years. I show it to him. He fears what else you wrote down. And you—you get to say I stole it. You stay clean." Petra's smile held, but her hand went slack. She looked at the half-burned chart in the fire, then at Elowen. She reached into the flames and pulled out a scorched page. Her signature ran along the bottom, dark ink above a drawing of the old tree and the river beneath it. "This one shows his back door," she said. "The route you swam. He'd give up a great deal to know I mapped it." She pressed it into Elowen's hand. "Now we've never spoken." Elowen tucked the page into a dry pocket. As she turned to leave, a low sound came from the dark beyond the tower. Hooves on stone. A shape stepped into the firelight—a wild horse, coat bone-white, a single horn rising from its brow. Its eyes were amber and unafraid. It should have bolted. It didn't. "That thing follows the underground river," Petra said, backing away. "It drinks where the serpent swims. Nobody tames it." Elowen held out an open, empty hand. The unicorn lowered its head and pressed the flat of its horn to her palm. Cold, then warm. It let her rest a hand on its neck. She had her proof now, and something Petra could not sell or trap. A creature that knew the water road into the fae lord's court. Next time she would ride it down.