Roslyn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Roslyn tied her green braids back at the window and watched Silas cross the village square for the fourth morning that week. He did not look up. He never looked up. She had spoken to him once, when he asked if she had dropped something and she said no, and she had been replaying his laugh from a different day ever since. It was Tuesday. The corset had already rubbed her ribs raw under the laces. She meant to be the woman he chose in front of everyone, and so far she had managed to be the woman he passed. Her mother watched her from the table. "You look like trouble," she said again, the way she said it every morning. Roslyn pulled a shawl over the corset and went out before the sentence could grow a second half. The other girls would be at the well by now. Roslyn knew the red-haired one paid the baker's boy to tell her which path Silas walked. Roslyn did not consider any of them a real problem. None of them had been asked if they had dropped something. None of them knew his laugh from up close. What she lacked was a reason to be in his way without looking like she wanted to be in his way. She found her reason behind the tavern, in the kitchen yard where the cook let her wash mugs three afternoons a week for coin. A short sword sat propped against the woodpile, its tip wedged into a split stone the cook used as a doorstop. The blade was old and chipped. The cook said a traveler had left it as payment and nobody in the village could pry it loose. "Take it off my step if you can lift the stone," the cook said. "I'm tired of looking at it." Roslyn lifted the stone. She carried it on her hip past the well, where the red-haired woman stood in a white skirt and a tube top, drawing water she did not need. Scarlett's grey eyes tracked the stone, then Roslyn's face, then the path ahead. "Heavy errand," Scarlett said. Roslyn kept walking. The cabin at the pine edge was Silas's. Everyone knew it. A chipped blade in a stone was the kind of thing a man who patrolled at night might want to look at, and a woman carrying it would have a question to ask, and a question was a door. She knocked. Silas opened it with a nunchuck in one hand and tired eyes. She held up the stone. "The tavern wants this gone," she said. "I thought you might know what to do with it." He looked at the blade. He looked at her. "Come in," he said. "Set it down." Roslyn stepped across his threshold and the door closed behind her.