Joren Rale's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Joren Rale knelt in the mud and pressed two fingers to the last bootprint. It was old. Rain had softened the edges, and the man he had hunted for three years was gone again. Joren had glimpsed that man's face once, in a burning doorway, and had chased it beneath a dark cloak ever since. Now the trail had died in the wet forest, and he had nothing. He walked in circles until dark. Broken twigs told him nothing. He crossed the same stream twice. His enemy could be a day ahead or a week. Joren stopped when his legs shook and admitted the truth aloud. "I've lost him." That was when he saw the light. High above, threaded through the branches, a warm glow leaked from a home built into a great tree. A ladder climbed the trunk. Beside it stood a cluster of small sheds, each door open, each shelf packed with jars and rolled cloth. Someone lived here, hidden and careful. Someone might have seen a stranger pass. Joren climbed. He kept one hand near his knife. He reached the platform and knocked. The door opened a crack. A girl faced him, small enough to reach his belt, a green scarf wound to her chin. She held a blade low and steady, and she did not step back. "You're hunting him," she said. It was not a question. Joren's grip tightened. "How could you know that?" "Only his hunters look that tired." Her eyes moved over his cloak, his mud, his knife. "I'm Kira. He left me out here to die." She said it flat, the way people say things they have finished crying over. "I fed myself off those sheds a whole winter. I know his habits. I know where he sleeps when he thinks no one follows." Joren studied her. A child alone in the wild, fierce enough to hold a knife on a man twice her size. The enemy had made her, then thrown her away. That made them the same kind of person. "Why help me?" he asked. "Because you can protect me, and I can point you." She opened the door wider. Warm air spilled out. "He crossed north four days ago. There's an old mill past the ridge. He waits there when a job goes bad." Joren's dead trail turned live in a single breath. He had a name for his enemy's habits now, and a witness who wanted him found as much as Joren did. "Show me the way at first light," he said. Kira nodded and sheathed her knife. "Then you sleep here tonight. But understand one thing." She met his eyes. "When we find him, you don't let him run. I've watched too many hunters watch him run." Joren stepped inside. The door shut behind them. For the first time in three years, he knew exactly where to go, and he was no longer walking alone.