Kieran Wolfe's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Kieran Wolfe pressed his palm to the hole in his chest and felt nothing beat back. A duelist's blade had carved his heart out three weeks ago and left him breathing anyway. Now he chased that man across half a country to prove he could still fight without it. But the trail had gone cold, and cold trails ate days he could not spare. He sat in the corner of a candlelit inn, the fifth this week. Behind the bar, travelers traded rumors of a swordsman in white. Kieran had heard them all. None led anywhere. He laughed too loud at the innkeeper's bad joke, the way he laughed at everything now, testing whether anything still landed inside him. Nothing did. On the table lay the one thing the duelist had dropped fleeing their fight. A silk glove, once white, now brown with old blood. Kieran's blood. He had carried it from town to town, asking if anyone knew the make. Every answer wasted more time. A fox slipped through the inn's open door. Its coat was black as a well, and smoke curled off its tail. No one else looked up. The animal crossed straight to Kieran and set its nose against the glove. He went still. The fox's blue eyes fixed on him. Then it turned and trotted three steps toward the door, stopped, and looked back. "You want me to follow," Kieran said. He did not know if the thing was beast or spirit. He knew only that it had smelled the blood and chosen a direction. That was more than any rumor had given him. He stood, dropped coins on the table, and pushed outside. The fox waited in the road. When he moved, it moved. It led him past the last houses and onto a dark hillside, never letting the distance grow too wide. At the top stood a garden gone wild. One flower glowed among the weeds, its petals pale and layered like folded moonlight. The fox stopped beside it and pawed the dirt. Kieran knelt. Under the flower's roots his fingers found metal. He dug out a small box, teal beneath the grime, its silver clasp still bright. The duelist had buried it here. The clasp broke under his thumb. Inside lay a folded letter and a signet ring. The letter named a place three days north, and a name at the bottom. The man who had hollowed him had a home, and now Kieran knew its road. He closed the box and looked for the fox. It was gone. Only smoke hung where it had stood. Kieran stood and turned north. He had a destination at last. But the letter warned that the duelist did not travel alone, and the name below his was one Kieran knew. The trail was warm now, and it led somewhere he had hoped never to go.