Mara Thornshield's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

The next cart was due at dawn. Mara knew the hound would be waiting. One trick had worked, but the guild had learned. They hunted her traders by scent now, and every cart that rolled through left a warm trail straight to the trading post. She could not scrub a smell off a road. So she stopped trying. Marigold found her at the base of the old watchtower, the ancient wooden one carved with snake-knots and hung with frost. Mara had climbed the notched beams all night, thinking. "You're going to fall and break your neck," Marigold called up. "Then the guild wins for free." "I don't hide the trail anymore," Mara said. She climbed down and pressed a cold charm into Marigold's palm. It was a small silver disc, worked with fine patterns, warm on one side. "I bought this from a peddler two years ago. It calls to guild folk. Pulls them close. Pushes everyone else away." Marigold turned it over. "So it makes a place feel like home to a guildsman." "And wrong to a trader." Mara pointed past the cliffs, toward the far gully where the decoy path lay. "We build a fake post down there. Real fire. Real cart. Then we hang this on the door. The hound leads its handler to the smell. The charm tells the handler he's found it. His own gut backs it up." Marigold's jaw worked. "And when he searches and finds nothing?" "He finds something." Mara held up her other hand. On it perched a strange bird, black-bodied, with wide painted wings like a butterfly's, marked in twisting Celtic lines. It watched them with one gold eye. "A sentinel. Guild scouts think these are omens. Bad ones. I'll set it in the fake post. When they break in, it flies at them. They'll swear the place is cursed and abandoned. They'll report a dead ring, not a live one." They worked through the morning. Marigold cut a rough shelter into the gully wall and lit a fire that smoked all day. Mara dragged a spare cart through, rubbing wheel and rope into the dirt. She nailed the silver charm to the door and set the winged sentinel inside on a beam. The hound came at dusk. It buried its nose in the cart-scent and hauled its handler down the gully. He reached the door, and Mara watched from the watchtower notch as his shoulders eased. The charm had him. He shoved the door. The sentinel burst out screaming, wings flashing color. The handler stumbled back, cursed, and dragged the hound away fast. Marigold breathed out. "He'll write it up as a ghost." "He'll write it up as finished," Mara said. The true cart rolled safe through the real route below. But the peddler was long gone, and Mara had only owned one charm. She'd spent her single trick. The next hound would come to a door with nothing on it.