Ingrid's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Ingrid walked east through the reeds until the ground turned soft and the trees leaned lower. The ridge was still a mile off. She meant to reach it before moonrise, pay the keeper what she had to pay, and be gone by dawn. Then she heard the horses. Not one rider. Four, maybe five, moving fast along the low road behind her. The barkeep had sold her name already. She cut north off the trail into deeper water. Mud sucked at her boots. She pushed through a wall of tangled shrub and dropped flat behind the roots. A whip cracked once, sharp as a snapped bone, and a voice carried across the bog. Short words. Flat. He told his men to spread out and take her alive. He said the village needed to watch what happened next. She knew the voice belonged to the lord himself only because the men answered without question. Ingrid crawled. Green moss and low ferns hid her back. She kept her face near the water and moved toward a stand of dead willows where the ground rose. A horse passed close enough that she smelled it. Fresh droppings steamed on the path six feet from her hand. She held her breath until the rider was gone. She reached the willows and looked back. Lord Byron sat his horse at the edge of the reeds. Grey armor, spiked helm, brown cape wet at the hem. He was not searching. He was waiting. His men were driving her toward him, the way dogs drive a hare. She turned and ran the other way, into the wet. Water rose to her knees, then her thighs. A stone basin sat half-sunk in the muck, old and cracked, vines choking its rim. She used it for cover and pushed past into open water. Something long slid off a log to her left. She saw the ridged back, the yellow side, the slow curl of the tail. An alligator, not ten feet away, watching her the way the lord watched from the bank. She froze. Behind her the men crashed through the shrub. Ahead the animal waited. She had one choice and she made it. She unwrapped her mother's copper ring from the cloth at her belt, drew her knife, and cut her palm. She smeared blood on the ring and threw it hard to her right, past the alligator, into the deeper pool. The animal turned. The water broke white where it struck. Ingrid went left while it fed. She reached a mud bank on the far side and pulled herself up into the swamp grass, shaking, empty-handed. Behind her a soldier shouted that they had lost the track. Lord Byron's whip cracked again, farther off now. She had escaped the net. She had also thrown away the only thing she could have traded to the ridge keeper. The east road was closed to her now. Only the deep swamp was left.