Maris Dalewood's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Maris went home that night and read Delaine's list twice. Two names were marked willing. The closer one lived a half day's ride out, in a stone pavilion she received strangers in before she let them past her door. Maris knew what that meant. A wary woman did not give up family stories to a face she had never seen. Maris would arrive with nothing but matching eyes and a journal full of other people's names. That would read as a hunter, not a relative. She sat at her kitchen table and worked the problem. She needed a token. Something a blood relative would recognize and a stranger could not fake. She thought of her mother's drawer, the one she had not opened since the funeral. She went and opened it. Under folded scarves she found a small silver locket, tarnished black at the seams. She had seen it once as a child and been told it came from her mother's mother's side, and not to touch it. Inside was a painted portrait of a girl with a ribbon in her hair. The girl's eyes were two different colors. Maris had never noticed as a child. She noticed now. She closed the case and put it in her pocket. The ride out took most of the next morning. The pavilion stood alone on a low rise, pale stone pillars open to the wind, crystal set into the walls. A heavy wooden door waited at the back. The knocker was a brass hand. Maris understood the shape. You did not knock with your knuckles here. You put your palm against the brass palm. She did. The door opened a crack and an older woman looked out. Her left eye had a wedge of blue. Her right was brown. She did not flinch from Maris's face. She also did not step aside. "I don't know you," the woman said. Maris took the locket from her pocket and held it open on her palm. The woman looked at the painted girl. She looked at Maris. Then she lifted a chain from under her collar and showed Maris a second locket, the same shape, the same tarnish, a different girl inside with the same split eyes. "Sisters," she said. "Yours and mine." She opened the door the rest of the way. "Come in. I won't tell you everything. I'll tell you what I know about the woman who took the child at the market." Maris stepped inside. She had come with a token and it had worked. But the woman had named a thing Maris had not asked about yet, a thing Delaine had not mentioned either, and now Maris understood the lineage was not only marked. It was being watched, and someone in it had been taking children. She sat down across from the woman and opened her journal to a clean page.