Marcus Webb's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Marcus Webb had crossed three borders to reach the man who burned him. Now a corpse was hunting him instead. He crouched in the dead leaves of the Thorngrip woods and listened. Somewhere behind him, hooves scraped bark. Marcus had built a career on charm and lies. He meant to smile his way into the spymaster's trust, then gut the man's network from the inside. But charm meant nothing here. Night had fallen, he had no shelter, and something dead had found his scent. He pressed his back to a trunk and checked his knife. The blade was short. His hands were steady, though his lungs burned from running. He had lost his pack at the river. No fire, no rope, no gun. Just the knife and forty years of knowing how to stay alive. The thing stepped into the clearing. A deer, or what a deer becomes when it stops dying. Its ribs showed white through rotted hide. Its jaw was gone, torn clean away, leaving a black tongue that dripped down its neck. One eye glowed yellow. It swung its head low and sniffed the ground where Marcus had passed. Marcus did not move. He had faced men who wanted him dead. This was simpler and worse. He looked past the deer and saw a strange tree at the clearing's edge. Pale bones grew from its trunk, ribs and skulls woven into the bark. Something about the deer's slow steps told him the animal circled that tree, never touching it, always keeping its distance. So the tree was a border. Prey went in. The dead did not follow. The deer lifted its head and locked its yellow eye on him. Marcus stopped guessing. He ran. Branches cut his face. Behind him the hooves came hard, tearing earth, closing fast. He felt the cold rot of its breath on his neck. Ten steps to the tree. Five. The deer lunged, and its skull cracked against his shoulder. Marcus fell forward into the roots. He rolled, scrambled, and pressed himself between two bone-marked limbs. The deer skidded to a halt an arm's length away. It screamed through its ruined throat, a wet and airless sound. Then it stepped back. It circled once, twice, and would not cross into the bones. Marcus lay against the trunk and breathed. He was alive. He had a wall the dead would not pass. But dawn was hours off, the deer still paced the edge, and the tree offered no way out that did not lead back to the teeth. He wiped blood from his shoulder and thought of the spymaster sleeping warm behind stone walls. First he had to survive the woods that guarded the man's door. Marcus set his back against the bones and watched the yellow eye circle, and he began to plan.