Morg Ana's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The eighty-first traveler was gone. Morg Ana stood in the empty road and stared at the place he had been. The wind still moved salt across her feet in thin white lines. She counted the drifts by habit. Eighty piles. One space where a man had stood and said nothing and then walked away while she watched the salt settle. He had passed her test by refusing to take it. That made him the only mortal in the world she could not yet judge, and she needed to judge him. She walked back to her house at the edge of the fields and sat on the step. An heir had to be tested. A silent man was not an answer. He was a held breath. She could not crown a held breath. She had to find him, put a riddle to him alone, and hear what came out of his mouth. Inside, the salt from the road had gathered in the corner of her front room. It stood waist-high, a bright mound of crystal points and pale grains, catching the light from the doorway. It had drifted in on its own after the mass challenge. She had let it. Eighty travelers were inside that heap. She set two hands on the floor beside it and two on the wall and two flat against the crystal. "Stand up," she said. The heap shifted. Grains climbed grains. A shoulder formed, then a second. A long neck rose from the pile. The salt built itself into a thin figure with hollow sockets where a face should be. It had no mouth. It did not need one. It bent its head to her. "One of you walked away from me," Morg Ana said. "Eighty-one came. Eighty stayed. Find the one who left. Bring him to my road. Do not harm him. He is mine to question." The salt figure tilted its head. Grains fell from its jaw and climbed back up its chest. It stepped past her, ducked the doorframe, and moved into the fields on legs that hissed against the grass. It left a faint white trail behind it. She watched until the trail thinned to nothing. She sat down on the step again. The heap in her front room was smaller now, but still bright, still sharp at its edges. Enough salt for the errand. Enough salt to walk the city and the tavern and every alley the silent man might crawl into. Somewhere in Aquilonia, a man who had watched eighty people fall to grains was hiding behind a barrel or under a bed. He did not know yet that the salt of those eighty was walking toward him on her order. He would know soon. She would have her answer from him, one way, or the salt would bring him to the road and she would ask again. In the meantime, Shapechanger decided to go on an adventure!