Finn Ashford's Arc

Chapter 4 of 12

Finn shut the broken door behind him and worked fast. He pulled a sturdy backpack from under the bed and dropped his diary and both daggers inside. He cleared a closet shelf and found the rolled tent he had stored there last fall. He stuffed the tent under the pack's top flap and cinched the straps. The map and scroll case went deep against his spine. He took flint, a coil of rope, and the strip of foxling fur from the rack by the stove. Whatever he left behind, he would lose. Another visit from her would clean the house to the boards. He stopped at the door with his hand on the frame. The bracelet sat in his pocket like a coin he could not spend. He pulled it out and squeezed it until the chain bit his palm. She had smelled like roses the night she sat across from him in that tavern. She had laughed at his bad jokes. They had talked until the lamps burned low and slept in the same room, and in the morning his pack was light and she was gone. She had made him love a woman who did not exist. He shoved the bracelet back into his pocket and stepped out into the snow. He went into the trees and kept the crooked fire tower at the corner of his eye. As long as he could see it, whoever sat in its lookout could not flank him without crossing open ground. He moved in short pushes from trunk to trunk. He aimed for the falls. The relic had left his hand near that water. If any thread of the trail still held, it held there. He decided he would only light fires in daylight, when smoke blended with the gray sky, and sleep cold at night. A mile in, he stopped. A bush stood beside a frozen creek with red blooms open on its stems. Roses. In deep winter. The petals looked wet. He touched one with a gloved finger and the petal held its shape. He stepped back and scanned the snow around it. No tracks. No broken branches. He moved on faster. He found another cluster at the base of a pine. Then a third on a stump where no roots could reach. The sun dropped behind the ridge and the woods turned blue. He rubbed his eyes hard. The bushes stayed. He could not tell anymore if she was leaving them for him or if his own head was placing them in the snow. Both answers frightened him in the same way. Neither answer made him turn back. Finn climbed a shelf of rock above the falls and pitched the tent in a hollow screened by deadfall. He hung the pack from a branch inside, knotted twice. The house was finished. This patch of ground was his shelter now. He sat in the dark with a dagger across his knees and watched the trees for petals he did not want to see again.