Kestrel Thawbrook's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Kestrel Thawbrook rode into the valley before dawn with the crown of Varilia on her mind and a price on her head. The usurper had offered coin for her body a year ago, on the same night his men killed her father, her mother, and the two servants who could have run and did not. She had grown into her fighting leathers since then. She had trained under someone whose name she would not say aloud, not even to herself in the dark. She had once stood close enough to the usurper to smell the wine on his breath, one hand on her sword the whole time, and she had walked away because one blade against a hall of guards was not a plan. She needed allies. She could not ride into the fortress alone. From the ridge she could see the citadel squatting on the plain, towers bristling, gates shut, banners of the wrong house hung over her father's stone. Below her, at the treeline, a plain wooden stable waited with its shutters closed. A man inside had sent word that he would meet her. He had served her father once. He might still. He might also sell her for the bounty and sleep well after. She had thought about how to know the difference. Before she left camp, she had folded a small square of forest green cloth into her glove. Her mother had woven that pattern into every banner in the hall, a knot that closed on itself and could not be undone. Anyone who had truly served the house would know it on sight. Anyone who did not would only see a scrap of cloth. She tied the black stallion behind the stable and went in through the side door with her sword drawn. The man was already there, sitting on a hay bale, hands open on his knees. He was older than she remembered, thinner. He looked at her face and did not stand. She dropped the green square on the boards between them. He picked it up. He turned it in his fingers, found the knot, and held it against his chest without a word. Then he reached into his coat and drew out a strip of the same green cloth, older, stained brown at one edge, and laid it beside hers. "I kept mine," he said. "There are eleven of us left. We have been waiting for someone to ask." He named a place three days' ride north where the others were hidden, and a suit of black armor her father had ordered before he died, still crated, still hers. Kestrel sheathed her sword. She had an ally, and a road, and a name she could not yet trust with the whole truth. She swung back onto the stallion before full light and rode north, because eleven men waiting in a barn were still eleven men who could be bought, and she meant to reach them before the coin did.