Orla Oakes's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Fenwick reached the door, but Orla was already moving past him. Silver berries had dried in a smear across her threshold. She followed the smear with her eyes. It ran out the door and along the packed dirt toward the bushes at the town's edge. The thief had walked this line twice. She could trace it back to the door they came from. But the confession sat in the iron box under her desk, and the moment she left the hall, the thief could slip in behind her. She stopped in the doorway and gripped the frame. Follow the trail, lose the confession. Guard the confession, lose the trail. The berries would not last the day. One good rain and her only lead washed away. "You can't do both," Fenwick said behind her. He had watched her think it through. He always did. "The trail dries. The box does not walk off on its own." Orla turned on him. "You'd like me to leave it. Then you'd have the whole hall to yourself." Fenwick did not flinch. He pulled the box from under the desk and set it on the floor between them. "Then take it with you. Carry your proof where your eyes can watch it." She had not thought of that. The box was heavy iron, but she was not walking. She whistled once, low. Outside, her riding elk lifted its antlered head from the grass and came to the rail. Forty years she had kept the beast for the days her knees failed her. Today her knees would not fail her lead. Fenwick helped her lash the iron box behind the saddle. His hands were quick and sure, too sure for a man with nothing to hide. Orla watched every knot. When the box sat tight, she climbed up with a groan and took the reins. "Walk beside me," she told him. "Where I can see your boots." The elk stepped along the berry trail. The smear led them past the square and toward the bushes. Orla kept her eyes down, reading the crushed silver in the dirt. It bent left where she expected it to run straight. Not toward Fenwick's shop. Away from it. The trail ended at a broad print in the mud. Not a boot. A cloven hoof, wide as her two hands, ringed by a second set of berries. Another rider had come from the bushes on a mount larger than her own. The thief had never walked at all. Orla reined up and stared at the hoofprint. Fenwick crouched beside it and said nothing for a long moment. "You've been chasing the wrong door," he said. "So have I." She had her point of origin now. The thief rode in and rode out, and left a track no rain could hide fast. But the confession was strapped to her back, in the open, on a slow beast, and whoever owned that hoofprint knew the way to the bushes better than she did.