Petra Pallbrook's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Petra Pallbrook walked into the market at dawn and found every stall shuttered. The long timber hall usually opened before first light. Today the awnings hung down like closed eyelids. A crow had been nailed to the center post overnight. Someone had painted a red ring around it. That was the omen, and it had done its work before she could. She had come to warn them. Three nights running she had dreamed of a horned thing crossing the pine archway at the north trail, its hide cracked with fire. She knew the shape of it now. She knew the hour. If the village did not move the children and block the north road by dusk, the dream would walk in on its own feet. She went from door to door. She knocked at the miller's. She knocked at the tanner's. She knocked at the house where she had delivered two babies. Bolts slid. No one answered. At the fourth house a woman spoke through the shutter and told her to take her white hair and her hollow eyes back up the hill. An oracle at the door on an omen day was worse luck than the omen. Her bear waited in the lane, patient as a stone. She spoke to him because he was the only one who would hear it. "The thing comes through the arch at sundown," she said. "They will not open." The bear watched her. She had one thing left she had not tried. She walked back to the market hall, climbed onto the shuttered center stall, and pulled the dead crow off the post. Shutters cracked open along the row. Faces appeared. She held the bird up so they could see her hands were steady. "You think this is the warning," she said. Her voice carried across the empty stalls. "It is not. The warning is me. A beast crosses the north arch at sundown. Move your children south. Block the trail. Do it today or bury them tomorrow." A man she had known forty years stepped out from the tanner's door. He picked up a stone from the gutter. He did not throw it. He held it so she could see him holding it. "Go," he said. "Take the bear. Go." Other doors opened. Other hands found stones. No one spoke against him. The woman who had shouted through the shutter came out with her broom and stood beside him. They did not want a prophecy. They wanted her gone before the sun climbed higher and fixed the curse to their roofs. Petra set the crow down on the stall. She climbed off. She walked back to the bear and put her hand on his shoulder and turned him toward the north trail. "They will not be warned," she said. "Then we go and meet it ourselves." The sun was already above the pines. She had until sundown to reach the arch alone.