Fenn Hallows's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Fenn walked the low road with the leaves already bitter on his tongue. The sun sat low. The paper in his fist named the split arch by dusk, and the arch was still hours ahead on foot. He would not make it. He knew it the way he knew the weight of a bad coin. His legs were old. The paste stung his upper lip. The luma squirrel dug its claws into his collar and would not settle. He stopped where the path bent past a briar hedge. A goat stood in the gap. It was cream-colored and curly-fleeced, with horns tilted back like a lord's hat. It watched him with the calm of something that had been waiting. Fenn had traded with farmers long enough to know a working animal from a wild one. This one wore no rope. It chewed nothing. It only looked at him. "You belong to someone," he said. The goat took two steps toward him and turned its flank. It was broad across the back. Sturdy. It stood. Fenn understood offers. He had made his life on them. He knelt slow on his bad knee and opened his palm. He had one thing left on him worth trading, a small brass button stitched inside his sleeve that hummed faint when weather turned. He cut the thread with his teeth and held the button out. The goat lowered its head. Fenn tied the button into the curls behind its ear. The squirrel chittered once, sharp, then went quiet. He climbed on. The goat's back took his weight without a shudder. It started walking before he had his balance. Its pace was steady and quick, faster than his legs had moved in ten years. The hedge blurred. The squirrel flattened against his neck. The fungal ridge came up gray and wet. Fenn chewed his second three leaves and pressed more paste to his mouth. The goat did not slow. Its hooves clicked on stone the fungi could not seem to touch. Bulbs the size of fists glowed purple and orange on both sides. Spores drifted. Fenn held his breath in long pulls and let it out through the paste. They came out the other side while the sun still cleared the trees. The split arch stood in a clearing, two shafts of dark basalt cracked apart down the middle, moss along their tops, strange fungi glowing at their feet. Fenn slid down. His legs held. The goat waited. He stepped through the gap and set the folded paper on the flat stone between the two halves, as the note had told him. He did not stay to see what took it. He turned back to the goat. It was gone. The button lay in the dirt where the goat had stood, clean of any curl of fleece. Fenn picked up the button. Dusk was still an hour off. He had made the trade. Now he had to get home, and someone had wanted that paper delivered by a stranger for a reason.