Rebecka Evertrue's Arc

Chapter 40 of 66

Rebecka tightened the strap on her quiver and looked at the crystal walls. The bottles were passed. Every mouth in the cave had swallowed one. The scrier could not see them now, but the scrier was still out there, on the ground somewhere south, blind and angry. Rebecka did not know her name. She did not know the road. If she rode without both, the woman would climb back on a horse before Rebecka found her. "I need a face," Rebecka said. "And a place. Before she stands up." Katia set the last empty bottle in the box. "Ninka can't look. If she looks, she gets seen again." "I know." Rebecka pulled a small vial from her belt and thumbed the cork loose. Blue light rose out of it and thickened into an eye the size of a fist, gold threads curling at its edges. It hung in the air above the cauldron and turned once, slow, taking in the chamber. "Find the woman who fell," Rebecka told it. "South. Off her horse within the hour." "Working," the eye said. It drifted toward the cave mouth and stopped. "Ditch beside a stone road. Woman, brown coat, blood at the temple. Horse standing ten paces off. She is sitting up." "Name." "She wears a ring. Inside the band: Halvery. Not her given name. A house." "Place." "South fork road. The milestone reads eleven. A low farm to the east with a red gate." Rebecka pulled her map from her coat and marked it. "Anything else." The eye held still. It did not answer. "Speak," Rebecka said. "She is not alone." The eye's pupil narrowed. "A rider is coming down the road toward her. He carries a doll in a leather sleeve. He will reach her in twenty minutes." Rebecka's hand closed on the map. "Another student." "He wears the same knot at his belt as the woman in the gray coat wore. I did not tell you when I first saw him at the inn. I was deciding." Rebecka looked up. The gold threads around the eye's rim flickered. "Deciding what," she said. "Whether you needed the weight. You did. I was wrong to hold it." She did not answer that. Later, maybe. Not now. "Aiyana," Rebecka called. The spectral figure stepped from the wall. "Between-road. Milestone eleven, red gate. Twenty minutes." Aiyana nodded and lifted her hand. The air split open in a ring of runes, spinning slow, its middle a churn of pale light. Rebecka slung her bow and stepped through with the eye trailing behind her. The portal closed. In the cave, Katia set her hand on Ninka's head. The child was breathing evenly. The scrier had a name now, and a road, and twenty minutes.