Kiersten's Arc

Chapter 19 of 33

Aurelius left before dawn to circle the ridge. Kiersten stayed behind in the bathhouse with her teachers. The lock on her signal held, but Aurelius's warning sat with her all night. The hunter would come looking with his eyes now. And a short woman with auburn eyes and tattooed skin was not hard to describe. Mirelle came in from the fountains at first light with her hands wet and her mouth tight. "A man is in the market asking questions," she said. "Not the hunter. A scout. He wants a short woman, brown hair, marked skin, eyes the color of a copper coin. He is buying drinks for anyone who will sit with him." Kiersten set her cup down. Her stomach dropped clean through her feet. She knew this ending before Mirelle finished the sentence. Witness held steady in her chest. She did not bend toward the knowing this time. She stood inside it. "I have to leave the bathhouse," she said. "If he walks past the door and sees me through a window, the lock does not matter." Quantum closed his book. "Then we hide you where he will not think to look. Not in a sanctuary. In a ruin." Aldric knew the place. A broken house sat at the edge of the wood, roof caved, windows boarded with cracked planks. No one had lived there in years. Scouts looked at temples and inns. They did not look at a house that looked already finished with grief. Mother Angel walked with Kiersten across the field. She carried a folded cloth of pressed roses from an old garden study, the petals dried flat between paper. "For the window," she said. "A single sign of care. He will read it as a keepsake left behind. Not a woman inside." The broken home smelled of wet wood and mice. Kiersten stepped over a fallen beam. Aldric planted a small crystal flame in the hearth and shuttered it low. Mother Angel laid the pressed roses on the sill, facing out. Quantum drew a chalk mark on the inside of the door and told her to breathe the pattern if boots stopped on the path. "Do not open the door for anyone," Mother Angel said. "Not a child. Not a voice you know." They left her. Kiersten sat on the floor against the wall where no window could see her. She heard footsteps on the path near midday. A man's boots. They slowed at the sill. Paused. Then walked on. She breathed three, six, nine until the sound faded past the wood. Witness settled. The scout had passed. But Kiersten understood, sitting on the dirty floor of a house that was not hers, that she could no longer walk the town in daylight. Her teachers were outside the walls now, and she was alone with the spirit inside her, waiting for the next set of boots.