Rowan Ashfield's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

The poultice held. Elara's breathing slowed against the stone pillar, and by late afternoon she could sit up without listing. Rowan stayed close, dagger across their knees, listening to the tree line. The hunter would come from the south, along the same wet track Rowan had cut for willow bark that morning. There was no talking such a man down. Rowan had known his kind. Rowan had been his kind. Elara reached into her coat and set a small wooden box on the ground between them. She flipped the latch. Inside, on folded cloth, lay a blackened iron key. "He wants this back more than he wants me," she said. "It opens a room where they keep records. Names of healers. Families who hid them." She closed the lid. "If he takes it off my body, people die for weeks." Rowan looked at the box, then at her face, and understood the shape of the thing at last. This was not one hunter chasing one woman. This was a list. Rowan stood. They went to the half-built foundation and lifted the corner stone they had never mortared. Underneath, wrapped in oiled canvas, lay the sword. Rowan carried it to the water butt and set the sharpening stone on the flat rock beside it. They worked the edge in long, even strokes. Fresh metal shavings curled onto the stone. Swamp water pooled dark at its base. Elara watched from the pillar and did not speak. Rowan did not look up. The laugh they saved for spilled milk and stuck carts was nowhere in their hands now. At dusk Rowan walked the south track alone. Half a mile out, where the reeds thinned around a stand of alder, they found what they were looking for. A rusted iron cage trap, the kind trappers left for wolves, had been dragged up out of the shallows and propped against a trunk. Chains coiled beside it. A fresh boot print pressed the mud at its foot. A cold pipe rested on the top bar. He was using the trap as a marker, or a message. Rowan stepped back into the reeds without touching it and went the long way home. They met him at the creek bend where the willow leaned over the water. Rowan did not speak. Neither did he. The fight was short and ugly and ended in the shallows with Rowan on their knees in cold mud, breathing hard, the man face down and still. Rowan cleaned the blade on the man's own coat and sat a long time before they could stand. Back at the tent, Elara was upright and waiting, the iron key already strung on a cord at her throat. Rowan set the sword down inside the doorway, not under the stone. "He was not alone in his work," Rowan said. "Others will come asking where he went." Elara nodded once. "Then we don't wait here to answer."