Morg Ana's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Morg Ana stood in the road at dawn and counted the line of travelers waiting to be turned to salt. Twenty-three. Yesterday it had been thirty. She was six-armed and grey as a millstone, a crown of cracked bone sitting crooked on her brow, and she had guarded every road into Aquilonia since before the city had a name. She asked riddles. Wrong answers ended in salt. The right answer, someday, from the right mortal, would end with an heir at her side. That was the bargain she kept with herself. That was why she still stood in the road. The first man in line grinned before she spoke. "A candle," he said. "The answer's a candle. Or a river. Or a name." He rattled off nine more before she'd opened her mouth. Behind him, a woman clutched a greasy slip of paper covered in scrawled answers. A boy mouthed words from a folded pamphlet. None of them had listened for the riddle. None of them cared. Morg Ana let the man finish. Then she asked him what walks the road he had not walked. He said, "A candle," and crumbled into a pillar of white grains. The wind took his shoulders first. The line did not shrink. Two more travelers stepped forward from the fields, pamphlets in hand. She walked into the city. The rumor was loudest inside a tavern near the market, a wooden barn of a place hung with dangling pots and strung peppers, its awnings striped like a festival tent. She ducked under the doorframe. Six arms folded, she listened. A drover was selling answer-sheets for two coppers. "Straight from a man who passed her," he said. "Straight from the giant's mouth." Coins clattered onto his table. No one had passed her. She would know. She was the one who counted. Morg Ana set one hand on the drover's table. The boards split under her palm. The tavern went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when a roof beam cracks. "There is no sheet," she said. "There is no cheat. Tomorrow at dawn I will stand in the road, and I will ask one riddle to all of you at once. Wrong answers salt. Right answers pass. Bring your papers if you like." She walked back to her house at the edge of the fields, a small stone thing with a crooked chimney and runes cut above the door. She sat on the step until dark. At dawn she returned to the road. Eighty-one came. She asked her riddle. Eighty of them answered from the pamphlets. Eighty of them fell to grains, and the wind lifted the salt into a long drifting shape with hollow eyes that stared at her once before it broke apart over the fields. The eighty-first stood alone in the road and had not spoken yet.