Marcus Steele's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Marcus Steele counted the coins on the counter twice, because the second count was the one that decided whether he ate tonight or slept hungry in the hills. The shopkeeper watched him the way people watched a stray dog near a butcher's window. Marcus needed rope, salt, flint, and a week of hard bread to reach the ridge where his family's old stronghold sat empty under new banners. He had been planning the climb for six years, ever since his father died naming the place like a prayer. He was three streets from finishing when a pair of small winged girls dropped through the open shutter and landed on the sack of oats beside his elbow. One had gold hair, the other silver. They spoke together, low and quick, and told him a man with a scarred jaw was asking after him at the inn, showing a folded warrant with Marcus's name on it. The silver one said the man had already paid the stableboy. Marcus left the coins where they lay. He took the rope and the flint and nothing else, because a full pack would slow him and a bounty hunter with fresh horses would not. He went out the back through the grain yard and cut through a hedge that opened onto the cart track leading south, away from the ridge he needed. The two winged girls kept pace at his shoulder, arguing about which road the hunter would guess first. Marcus chose the wrong one on purpose and walked it for half a mile before doubling into the trees. By dusk he was moving north again, hungry, with no salt and no bread, and a name he now knew he could not use in any town between here and the stronghold. The fairies stayed with him. He did not ask why, and they did not offer.