Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 164 of 619

They rode until the last light bled out of the sky, then made camp in a stand of pines two ridges from the empty house. No fire. Grayson took first watch. Ajax sat with his back to a trunk and pulled the two rings from his pocket. The stone ring lay warm in his palm. He had worn it since the chest. Chalam had called it a finding ring. It pointed to the wearer's kin while they lived. Ajax had not thought hard on that at the house. He thought on it now. "Chalam." The wizard came over and crouched. His staff caught the little moonlight through the branches. "The ring finds kin," Ajax said. "Whose kin." "Whoever owned it last." Chalam took it and turned it in his fingers. "It answers to the last blood that wore it." "The woman at the gate. The daughter." "Yes." "Then it points at the Keeper." Chalam went still. "It points at her line. Mother. Sisters. Any left." Elara sat up in her blanket. Marco lifted his head from his saddle. Asher and Tucker came in from the dark at the edge of the trees. "Both ways," Chalam said. "A finding ring pulls two threads. You feel her. She feels the ring." Ajax looked at the band on his hand. He had carried it a full day. "How long before she reads it." "If she has not already, soon." Ajax pulled the ring off. It sat cold in his palm at once. "Break it," he said. Chalam took his satchel down. He set the ring on a flat stone and drew out pressed chalk and a pinch of powdered lodestone. He laid a line around the ring and spoke three words under his breath. The stone in the ring flared once, milk to gray, then went dead. Chalam struck it with the butt of his staff. The band split. He struck it again and the stone cracked across. "It is a ring now," he said. "Nothing more." Grayson had come in from the watch line. "She knows where we were." "She knows where the ring was," Ajax said. "Not where we ride." Tucker crouched by the broken pieces. "How far could she read it." "A day's ride," Chalam said. "Two at most, with a working." Ajax picked up the halves and buried them under the pine needles with his heel. He kept the plain gold band. He kept the map and the silver. The rest stayed in the dirt. "Saddle up," he said. "We ride now. Not at dawn." Asher was already at the horses. Marco rolled his blanket without a word. Elara stood and shook her hair loose. Ajax swung up. The Keeper had felt him for a day. She would come for the ground where the ring had been, not the ground he stood on. He meant to be far from both by sunrise.