Matthew Sharpclaw's Arc

Chapter 9 of 12

Rarespot stood in the snow long after the cave swallowed her son. A soft drift had gathered at her feet, fine and bright, a thin white blanket pressing down where she could not move. The cave's mouth gaped across the field, ringed in mossy stone and broken ice, its dark throat empty now. Matthew was gone. In her hand, a copy of the signed agreement crackled, the word at the top dark and final. The roc dropped beside her. She climbed on without speaking. The great bird lifted them over the ridge, wings cutting the gray air, carrying her toward the only two people who needed to know. She found Redtail at the hospital, standing by the bright blue and gold bay window where a small dragon dozed in the sun. Lyra was beside her. Rarespot held out the parchment. Redtail read it once. Her ears flattened. Lyra read it next and her hand went to her mouth. "He signed himself over," Rarespot said. "To keep us out of it. The man holds him as long as that paper holds." She set the scroll on the windowsill. "So we break the paper." Lyra looked up slowly. "The agreement only binds because Matthew gave a name. Vesna's name. The one we buried." She swallowed. "If we surface it — if we tell the council who Vesna was, what she did, what she signed away before — the man loses his hook. But Matthew loses the quiet we gave him. Everyone will know the name he wasn't supposed to carry." Rarespot closed her eyes. The name was the last thing she had kept safe for him. She opened her eyes and reached for ink. "Then we give it up," she said. "All of it. Tonight." Redtail's hand closed over hers. Lyra steadied the page. Outside, the roc waited in the cold. The quiet they had built for Matthew ended on that windowsill, traded, plainly, for the chance to bring him home.