Iris Starling's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Iris carried the crest sketch with her for three days. She showed it to no one yet. She studied it under her lantern each night — a fox paw ringed by forest leaves, pressed into bronze. It was old work. Someone had carried that mark for a long time. On the fourth morning she walked a delivery route she usually skipped. The path bent past a stone wall she had never followed to its end. She followed it now. The wall opened onto an iron gate, tall and dark, with the same fox paw worked into its center panel. She crouched in the ferns and copied every line of it. Her enemy had a house. Her enemy had a name carved in iron. She did not knock. She turned back the way she came, walking faster than she meant to. Knowing was not the same as being safe. If the gate stood here, the fox could find her blind again, and her notebook with it. That night Iris dragged a battered oak cabinet from her shed out under the junipers. She lined its hidden compartment with oilcloth and laid her map inside. She closed the iron bands, turned the small key, and buried the key beneath a flat stone she would remember. Her map was hidden. Her enemy was named. The next move was not hers to make.