Mason Crafton's Arc

Chapter 11 of 15

Mason followed Emma and Lily down to the shelter door. The pine boards stood open where Mason had left them. Emma set Lily on the straw pallet and covered her with the blanket Mason had used the night before. Lily was asleep before her sister finished tucking the wool. Emma turned to Mason with the knife still in her hand. She had given up the earring, but she had not given up the blade. "You said you would end her hold on the dragon," Emma said. "When." Mason weighed the answer. The girl had a valley to walk back to. A mother. Neighbors who would ask where the stud went. Mason could not send her home yet, and could not keep her here by force. "By tonight," Mason said. "If you stay in the shelter until dark, it is done. If you leave now, the princess sees you before the sun drops, and she calls the dragon down before I reach it." Emma looked at Lily. She sat on the pallet beside her sister and laid the knife across her knees. Mason stepped outside and pulled the door most of the way shut. Then Mason heard the boys. Not uphill, where Max and Oliver had gone. Downhill. Voices carrying up the slope through the pines. A man's voice, older. A woman's. Then a boy answering — Ethan. Mason crouched behind the shelter's woodpile. Ethan Rivera was climbing the path with two adults. A gray-bearded man in a checked shirt. A woman with a hand on Ethan's shoulder. Mason had seen them once at the market stall below the ridge. Hendersons. Ethan had not gone with the Cooper brothers into the woods. Ethan had gone home and told. "He had the princess's earring," Ethan was saying. "On Emma. And a piece of the prince's cape. Max took the cape into the woods." The bearded man stopped on the path and looked up at the shelter roof through the trees. "How long ago," he said. "An hour," Ethan said. The woman said, "We send word to the tower. Now." Mason did not wait to hear the rest. Mason went in low through the shelter door, took Emma by the wrist, and put a finger to her lips. Emma saw Mason's face and did not speak. Mason pointed at Lily, then at the back window. Emma shook her head. Mason let go of her wrist. There was no time to carry a sleeping child out a window while three people climbed the last bend of the path. Mason slipped out the front instead, past the woodpile, into the laurel. Behind Mason, the Henderson woman was already calling up toward the princess's tower, her voice thin and clear in the cold air. The silence had held for less than an hour. Mason ran for the birdbath with the earring in a closed fist, and no plan left but speed.