Ida Rose's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Ida Rose walked into the Wolf Moon Tavern with a name she was not supposed to speak and a plan she was not sure would work. Thorne Blackwood sat at the back table, his back to the wall, one hand flat beside a cup he had not touched. He belonged to a rival court's throne by a chain no one living remembered forging. Ida had come to break it, and she did not yet know what it was made of. She sat across from him. Snow melted off her boots onto the plank floor. "I need the story," she said. "Where the curse started. Who cast it. What it wants." Thorne's green eyes moved over her face like he was measuring the cost of an honest answer. "If I knew, I'd have said so on the walk yesterday," he said. "My grandmother knew. She died before she wrote it down. The court keeps the rest under lock." Ida set her palms on the table. "Then guessing will bind you tighter. I've read enough to know that much. A wrong word in the wrong ritual doubles the knot." She pulled a folded scrap from her coat and set it between them. On it she had written one line: Whoever holds the truth of Thorne Blackwood's binding, answer. She had been saving the raven for something she could not solve at the market or in books. A soft weight shifted on the beam above the bar, and the bird dropped down to the table's edge, feathers catching blue in the lamplight. Thorne did not move. "That's a Loveguide," he said. "It won't carry a question like that." "It will carry it to whoever loves you enough to answer," Ida said. She tied the note to its leg. The raven took the paper, watched her once, and went out through the open shutter into the snow. They waited. The tavern emptied around them. Near the third hour the raven came back and dropped a second paper into Ida's hand, warm from being carried under a feather. The writing was not Thorne's grandmother's. It was a woman's clean script, and it named the caster, the year, and the object the curse had been anchored to. It named, at the bottom, the price of undoing it: the anchor had to be returned to the one who forged the binding, in person, by the mate who sought to break it. Ida read the last line twice. She looked up at Thorne. "I know where to start," she said. "And I have to walk into your rival's court to finish it."