Prince Folly's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Folly rode west until the trail thinned into marsh. His horse picked through the reeds slowly. The light was failing when he saw it — a scrap of cloth pinned beneath a stone at the edge of the path. He dismounted and knelt. The fabric was hers. But the stone pointed south, away from the treehouse the dying man had described. Folly held the cloth in his palm and tried to read what she had meant. He followed the line of the stone south through wet ground. After a mile he found the cairn. Someone had stacked the rocks with care, the tallest stone angled like a finger toward a stand of cypress. Beneath the base lay a small curve of shell, pale blue and shimmering faintly. A piece of drake egg. Folly turned it in his fingers and understood. She was not hiding. She was leading something away from what she protected. He walked the cypress stand and found her horse tethered to a low branch. The mare stood patient in her dressage tack, blue and gold cloth muddied at the hem, tassels heavy with marsh water. She nickered when she saw him. Folly ran his hand along her neck. The saddle was cold. She had been left here a day, maybe two. Elara had gone on foot, deeper south, drawing the hunters after her with bits of cloth and stone. Folly tied his own horse beside hers and stood very still. He had been three days behind a woman who was sprinting away from the thing he needed to find. He could follow her trail south and meet her where the hunters would. Or he could turn back, ride to the treehouse she had emptied to save, and wait for her there. He looked at the shell in his hand. Then he untied both horses and turned them north, toward the marsh she had tried to keep him from.