Orin's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By morning the cellar was full and the road was empty. Orin did not trust the emptiness. He climbed to the warning post and counted the stones where refugees should have been sitting. He found three fresh bootprints leading back into the trees and a smear of blood on the post itself. The guard on duty was not the young one from the night before. This one was older, thick in the shoulders, and he stood too straight when Orin came near. Orin asked how many had passed since dawn. The guard said none. Orin looked at the blood on the stone and said nothing. He walked back to the tower and found Rook sharpening a blade by the door. Orin told Rook what he had seen. He told him to ride the tree line and find whoever the post had turned away. Rook pulled his hood up and was gone before Orin finished speaking. Orin went to the barracks and pulled the older guard off the post by his collar. He did not use the cleavers. He put the man in the cell and shut the door and told the other guards what would happen if the post turned away one more breathing body. Then he went to find Titus. Titus listened without moving. When Orin finished, Titus said, "Keep him alive until we know who paid him." Orin nodded. He did not plan to kill the guard yet. He planned to ask him questions in a quiet room. Rook came back at dusk on a lathered horse. He had found four of the turned-away sitting under a fallen pine, two already dead, a mother and a boy still breathing. He had put the living on the horse and walked them to the gate himself. Then he told Orin the rest. Half a mile past the pine he had seen figures on the road. Six of them, moving wrong, armor rusted through, jaws hanging. He knew what they were. He had grown up with Titus and he had seen his own family walk that way after the hordes came through. He said they were coming toward Hightree at a slow steady pace and would reach the post by dawn. Orin went to the cell and looked at the guard through the bars. The guard had turned people away into a road where dead men were walking. Orin did not know yet if the guard had known. He would know before morning. He climbed the tower and told Titus what Rook had seen. Titus set down his cup and said, "Wake the barracks." Orin went down to wake them.