Orla Oakes's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Orla Oakes charged three coins to open a drawer, but this morning someone had opened one for free. She stood in the records hall and stared at her founding drawer. It hung open. Papers spilled across the floor like fallen leaves. For forty years she had guarded every deed and confession in this town. Only one file mattered now: the buried confession that named the true founder of Forgotten Hollow. She had hidden it here, deep in this drawer, and someone had come for it in the night. She knelt with a groan and sorted the mess. Her ink-stained fingers shook. Deeds, marriage records, a debtor's plea. She counted them twice. The confession was still there, folded tight where she left it. But something else was gone. The old land map that showed the town's first plot lines. She had used it to prove where the confession pointed. Without the map, the confession named a founder no one could place. A wet cough came from the doorway. Fenwick Bale stood there in his long damp coat, the traveling apothecary who kept the old shop across the square. He rarely spoke first. He watched people until they gave themselves away. Orla trusted him about as far as she could throw a bottle. "You're up early," she said. "Or you never left." Fenwick stepped inside. He crouched beside the spilled papers, said nothing, and pressed one finger to the floorboards near the drawer. He lifted it. A single pale berry sat crushed on his fingertip, silver-skinned, the kind that grew only on the fog-berry bushes outside town. "Whoever came through here walked past the bushes first," he said. "Their boots carried this in." He looked up at her. "You didn't. You never leave this hall." Orla's chest tightened. "They took a map. Not the confession. Why leave the confession?" "Because the confession means nothing without the map," Fenwick said. "And a map is easier to burn." She understood then. The thief knew exactly what she had. They had not blundered in. They had chosen. They wanted the founder's name to stay buried, and now they held the one thing that made her proof read true. Orla gripped the drawer's edge and pulled herself up. "They'll come back for the confession once they're sure the map is ash." "Or once they know you noticed," Fenwick said. He wiped the berry on his coat. "You've noticed." She crossed to her desk and locked the confession in the iron box beneath it. Her hands steadied. The thief had a head start and a fresh trail. Silver berries meant they had come from the bushes past the square, and Fenwick's shop sat closer to those bushes than any door in town. "You found that berry fast," she said, watching him now. Fenwick only smiled and turned toward the door.