Rosalind Emberheart's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

Rosalind stepped toward the round with the elder's silence bought and the sky graying above her. Her second caught her arm before she reached the first fire pit. A scout had been spotted at the north edge of camp, past the picket line. Red hair. Fire wings. He was watching the assembly form. If he heard her speak before Blazen Emberwing's tribe heard it from her mouth, the diplomatic visit would end in blades before it began. Rosalind turned on her heel. She told her second to hold the tribe at the round for a quarter hour longer. No explanation. She crossed the camp toward the tree line, satchel buckled tight over the burn ring on the strap. She found the scout crouched in the fork of a low pine, watching the heart-stitched canopies below. He was young. His hand was already on the hilt at his belt. He had heard enough movement in the round to know something large was about to happen. He had not heard the words yet. Rosalind did not draw fire. She stepped into the open beneath his branch and held up her hand, palm out, empty. She said his tribe's leader's name once, plainly. Blazen Emberwing. She said she was carrying a message meant for him and no one else, and that the scout could carry it faster than she could. She uncapped the heart-shaped bottle at her hip and let one grain of dust drift up on the cold air. Not enough to bind him. Enough to slow the hand at his belt for the length of a sentence. She told him the truth in four lines. She was fire-born on her father's side. Her tribe was learning it this morning, from her. If Blazen heard it from a scout before he heard it from her at his own fire, she would understand him treating it as an act of war. She was asking the scout to carry the message ahead of her, and to tell his leader she would arrive within three days to say it again to his face. The scout stared at her for a long breath. Then he dropped from the branch, landed light, and did not draw. He said Blazen would decide, not him. He said if she was lying, he would know before her tribe crossed the border. Then he lifted off through the pines toward the ember-lit shelters east of the ridge. A blue-marked butterfly lifted from the canopy rope behind her as he went, startled by the wingbeat, and a spotted fawn broke cover in the brush and bolted north. Rosalind stood alone at the tree line with the bottle still uncapped in her hand. She had traded one secret for another. Her tribe was waiting at the round to hear it, and now a fire fairy was carrying it ahead of her toward a camp that had every reason to burn her at the gate.