Nathan Roberts's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The broken cord lay on Nathan's desk three nights later. He had turned it over a hundred times. The braid held colors no village dye could make. A neat charm hung from the tassel. Whoever wove it knew his craft. But the cord told him nothing about the hand that made it. His rival struck from the dark, and Nathan could not name him. So he went to the one who had held it first. Elara Moss stood under the willows where she always stood. Thirty years of stillness had ended when the cord bound her, and now she moved again, though barely. The glowing sap ran green through the bark above her. Her black eyes fixed on Nathan without blinking. He had steered a whole village for years and never once faced her. She frightened him, and he did not let it show. "You wore the demand," Nathan said. "You felt the maker's will. I want the hand behind it." Elara did not answer at once. When she spoke, her voice cracked from disuse. "You come to me. The village comes to me. All of you want the same thing. Someone to blame." She tilted her head. "The cord smelled of blood. A drop, smeared on the charm. Fresh." "Whose blood?" "Not mine. Not the mother's." She raised one thin arm and pointed past him, toward the tree line where an owl sat watching. Its yellow eyes glowed steady in the dark. "It watched the one who tied it. It watches you now." Nathan turned. The owl did not move. He understood then. The bird was no bird. His rival had left eyes in the trees, the way Nathan left favors in the village. He had been observed the whole time. "You knew," Nathan said. "You knew and said nothing for thirty years." "No one asked," Elara said. "They only feared me." She stepped back into the shadow of the branches. "The blood was a woman's. Young. Cold, like yours. She smells of your house." Cold blood. A vampire. Young. Someone tied to his own estate. Nathan's mind went to the one childer he trusted, and then away from her, because Elara had not named Stephanie. The rival was another of his kind. Perhaps one he had turned. Perhaps one who had survived when he thought her lost. Nathan looked back at the owl. He walked toward it slow. It let him come within an arm's reach, then lifted off without a sound and flew north, past his own walls, into the hills he did not control. He had his answer. The rival was a vampire, young, bound to his household by blood. She had watched him rule from the shadows and meant to take the shadows for herself. Nathan turned toward the manor. He no longer fought an unknown hand. He hunted a name he almost knew.