Old Rusty's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Old Rusty felt the coin pressed into his palm before he could pull his hand back. The butcher closed his fingers around it for him, the way a man closes a trap. The coin was heavy and gold, stamped with a sunburst worn smooth by other palms doing the same thing to other hunters. "Ogre in the north wood," the butcher said. "You've been paid. Bring us the head by week's end." Behind him, three women pretended to sort onions and listened to every word. Old Rusty had hunted ogres for forty years in Rothollow. He had not killed one in two. He could have given the coin back. He thought about it on the path home, turning the gold over in his fingers until the edge bit. Refuse the job and the butcher would call him a fraud before sundown. The women at the onions would carry it from stall to stall. He had taken Rothollow's coin for years and let them whisper behind him; that bargain only held while he still brought back proof. Without proof, he was a thief in a coat. Without the coat, he had no way left to change their minds about the thing waiting in the trees. He walked past his own door and kept going into the woods. The cottage sat low between two pines, its shutters crooked, its chimney cold. He did not stop. He went on to the clearing he had been visiting since spring, where a flat stone sat in the grass and the young ogre had begun to watch him from the far treeline without bolting. Old Rusty unslung his axe and laid it on the stone. He set his knife beside it. He took the skinning hook from his belt and put that down too. Then he opened the cloth in his coat pocket and scattered torn bread across the moss in a thin, bright line leading from the trees to where he sat. He waited. The wind moved. After a long while a green shoulder pushed between two trunks, and a face he had been learning for months looked at the bread, then at the axe on the stone, then at him. The young ogre took one step into the clearing. Old Rusty did not move. He kept the butcher's coin closed in his fist where the ogre could not see it. He had until week's end to bring back a head. Instead he would bring back this creature, alive, walking beside him into Rothollow, and let the butcher choke on his sunburst gold. If he failed, the town would hang him for the coin in his hand.