Sable's Arc

Chapter 18 of 18

Sable looked down at the slope. Her boot prints and scuffs ran plain through the scree, from the valley all the way up to the crack in the rock. The hunters followed it like a drawn line. In an hour they would reach the hidden route. Then the ledge. Then the dragons. Everything she had built would end with three poles and three ropes. "They're following my trail," she told her father. "I made it. I have to hide it." Her father gripped his pack. "We can't hide a whole slope." He was right. The dust ran too far. She could not sweep it clean before they arrived. She needed the trail to lead somewhere else. Somewhere wrong. Sable studied the rock below the crack. Loose scree lay heaped against the wall. She remembered how the cub had gone sure-footed down the hidden crack, how one wrong-looking gap could swallow a climber for an hour. If she scattered fresh tracks toward a dead gully, the hunters would chase a false path. "Help me," she said. She climbed back down to the scree and began dragging her boots sideways, cutting a bold new trail toward a steep chute that ended in a sheer drop. Her father caught on fast. He raked the stone with his heel, scuffing deep marks. Together they churned a wide, obvious track that pointed away from the crack. Then Sable climbed back and brushed loose gravel over the real route until the crack looked like plain broken rock. Far below, a hum rose. Not the hunters. A bell, then a whir of wheels. Pastor Paul Brightwell came up the valley trail on his black electric bike, white streamers flapping from the handlebars, his helmet catching the sun. He braked hard beside the three hunters and planted his boots. Sable could not hear every word, but she heard his voice carry, calm and certain, the way it had carried in the chapel. The hunters pointed up at the peaks. Paul shook his head. He opened a cloth sack tied to his bike and held out warm bread and a glossy berry tart, the same gifts he brought the fishers who guarded the willow. One hunter took the tart. Paul kept talking. He pointed at the false track Sable had cut, then spread his hands wide, as if to say there was nothing up here but goats and bad footing. "He's buying us time," her father whispered. Sable watched the hunters hesitate. One started toward the false chute. The others followed. They took the bait. Paul lifted a hand toward the peaks, a small wave only Sable would catch, then turned his bike and coasted back down to keep them talking. The hunters climbed the false trail. It steepened. It narrowed. It ended at the drop, as Sable knew it would. From the shelf she saw them stop, confer, and point back the way they came. The dust she had scattered showed no path onward. The real crack sat below them, brushed over, silent. One hunter kicked a stone off the edge. Then all three turned and began the long climb down. Sable let out a breath she had held too long. Across the gap the mother dragon lifted her head, scented the wind, and found nothing to fear. The hatchling tumbled over her tail in the sun. Beside the ledge grew a strange willow Sable had never seen, its branches blazing with red and gold and blue, birds and butterflies drifting through them. The dragons had made this place their own. No rope would ever reach it now. Her father sat on the shelf and pulled out the candied pear and a pink lidded cup of flower nectar the neighbor had pressed on them at the gate. He split the pear and passed her half. "You turned three hunters with a false trail and a borrowed pastor," he said. He almost smiled. "Your sling's a child's toy, is it." Sable touched the sling at her hip. She had carried it up here to kill a dragon, long ago. She had never thrown the stone. They stayed until the hunters were small shapes far down the valley. Then Sable led her father back to the brushed-over crack and down the hidden route, careful now to leave no mark. The dragons slept safe above them, beyond any hunter's reach, in a place only the goats and the cub and Sable knew. She had set out to slay the beast that burned Birchrot. Instead she had hidden it from the world and kept it alive. Walking home beside her father, telling no lies, she decided that was the braver thing, and the better one.