Rowan Ashfield's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

The morning after Cato left, Rowan came down to the worksite with a fresh bucket of mortar and found blood on the shovel. It stood upright in the dirt where they had left it the night before, a dark handprint smeared across the grip. The trail ran from the shovel to the low wall of the foundation. A stranger lay curled against the stones, one arm pressed to their side, breath shallow and wet. Rowan set the bucket down and knelt. The stranger was not Cato. Not anyone Rowan knew. A gash ran under the ribs, crusted and still leaking. Whoever this was had crawled the last stretch on hands and knees. Rowan searched the stranger for a weapon and found none. What they found instead was a coat, long and heavy, the sleeves stained green with moss. The pockets sagged with dried yarrow, comfrey root, a twist of willow bark. A healer's coat, or someone who wanted to be taken for one. No company mark. No decree. No badge sewn inside the collar where a soldier would hide one. Rowan checked twice. The relief that moved through them was small and mean, and they set it aside. Healer or not, the stranger would die in the open by nightfall. The wind was already turning. Rowan worked fast. They dragged four poles from the woodpile and drove them into the softer ground beside the foundation. They lashed the crossbars with rope from the mortar sled and stretched the old canvas tarp across the top, weighting the corners with stones. It was ugly. It sagged in the middle. Rowan laughed once, short, because their knots had come out crooked and the whole thing looked like a drunk's idea of a roof. Then they carried the stranger inside, one arm under the shoulders, one under the knees. They washed the wound with boiled water and packed it with the comfrey from the coat's own pocket. They built a small fire at the tent mouth and sat beside it with a blanket over their lap. The stranger did not wake. But near midnight their breathing evened out, and the skin under Rowan's palm went from cold to warm. Rowan let out a breath they had been holding since dawn. The stranger would live to see morning. That was the small thing settled. The larger thing sat heavier now. Rowan had six days, minus one, before the next man came up the track, and there was a wounded person in a leaking tent at the foundation of a cottage that did not yet have walls. Rowan fed the fire another stick. Whoever this stranger was, they had come here bleeding, and someone had done the cutting. That someone was still out there.