Genevieve Thorn's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Morning had barely settled on the yard when hooves pounded the path. Genevieve looked up from her workbench. Lance rode in fast, a man slung across the horse behind him, blood dark on the saddle. Haroel lifted his head but did not move. "Found him near the village edge," Lance said. "Half dead. No time to ask where to go." Genevieve cleared the table with one sweep of her arm. Bottles rolled into the grass. "Bring him here." Lance lowered the man down with careful hands, setting him flat where the sun fell warm. Haroel stepped aside, giving the ground without being asked. "He smells wrong," the elk said quietly. "Under the blood." She cut the man's shirt open and pressed her palms to the worst wound. Green light bloomed under her hands. As she worked, a folded scrap slid from his belt — dark metal, a star inside a ring, faintly warm. A necromancer's sigil. Her hands did not stop. She finished closing the wound, then sat back on her heels. Lance saw it. He picked it up between two fingers. "That was in his clothes when I lifted him." He turned it once. "Should have checked. That's on me." Genevieve wiped her hands on her apron. The man was breathing. Alive. And now lying in her open yard, where Haroel grazed, marked by something she did not understand. "He stays," she said. "Until he wakes and tells us what he is." Haroel lowered his head back to the grass. Lance nodded once and tucked the sigil into his own pocket. The yard was no longer just hers. Something had walked in with the stranger, and it would not walk out before she knew its name.