Rowan Pinwell's Arc

Chapter 4 of 8

Rowan followed the ink toward the square at a run. Voices rose ahead, the kind of murmur a small crowd makes when one person is reading and the rest are leaning in. Rowan rounded the curved corner of the deco duplex and saw them — six or seven townsfolk packed close around a thin woman holding a scrap above her head. She had already read one line. Her mouth was open on the next. Rowan's twig antlers caught on a low branch as they pushed through. They yanked free and kept moving. The baker's name had not been spoken yet. There were maybe three words left before it was. Rowan could not snatch the paper. A grab would only make the crowd want it more. So Rowan did the other thing — the thing the keeper of the noticeboard had never done in public. They stepped up onto the rim of the wooden storytelling circle behind the reader and spoke loud enough to cut her off. "That's mine," Rowan said. "It blew out of my window. I was drafting a story for the circle. A practice piece." Rowan held up a weathered cloth map pulled from their satchel, charcoal lines and plant stains catching the light. "Routes for the character. I wrote the confession part to sound real. It is not real. The baker in it is invented." Rowan looked straight at the reader. "Please. I've been chasing scraps all morning." The reader hesitated. A man at the back laughed, the awkward laugh of someone who wanted the gossip but did not want to be the fool holding fiction. The reader lowered her arm. She looked at the line she had not yet said, then at Rowan, then at the map. She folded the scrap and handed it over. The crowd thinned fast, the way crowds do when the story turns boring. Rowan thanked her and stepped down. Their hands were shaking. Rowan walked past a pineframe cottage and an earthen A-frame and did not stop until the square was behind them. The scrap was safe. The baker's name had not been spoken. But Rowan had lied in public, in front of neighbors, and called the noticeboard's work a practice piece. The lie would travel. People would repeat it at dinner. By tomorrow, someone would come to the board and ask if the confessions had ever been real at all — and the thief, whoever they were, would know exactly what Rowan would say to protect a secret. Rowan tucked the scrap into their coat and counted what was left to find. Two more were still out there, and now the thief knew Rowan would burn their own credibility to catch them.