Sapphire Crystalline's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Sapphire Crystalline scrubbed dirt from under her nails and found a tooth on the washstand. It was not hers. It was small and yellow and still had root on it, and she knew what that meant before her hands could stop shaking. Three full moons in a row, the shadow-beast had hunted closer to home. Her mother slept upstairs. Her brother slept in the loft. In six days the moon would rise full again, and she had until then to find the cure that had failed her twice before, or the thing she became would take a piece of someone the village could name. She wrapped the tooth in cloth and walked to town before the bakers opened. Two men stood outside the smithy with lanterns and a hound on a short rope. They spoke of tracks behind the miller's barn. One said the prints came from the woods near the Crystalline place. The other said they should ride out that afternoon with dogs and check the yard. Sapphire kept her face still and passed them and did not slow until she reached the door of the Angry Crow Inn. The half-serpent sellsword sat at the back table with a bowl of broth and her jade plates stacked beside her. Sapphire had heard of Vessa Dre'kiir from a peddler who said the woman took any contract that paid. Sapphire set the wrapped tooth on the table and then set a purse beside it. "I need you to lay a false trail," she said. "Away from my house. Toward the old ruins. Tonight, before the villagers ride." Vessa opened the cloth and looked at the tooth and closed it again. "Whose?" she asked. "I don't know," Sapphire said. Vessa weighed the purse in one hand. "Enough for three nights of tracks," she said. "After that you pay again or I stop." Sapphire nodded. Vessa asked one more question. "What's in the ruins?" Sapphire thought of the strange folded object her father had hidden there before he died, the interlocking frames he swore held the shape of the curse itself. "Something I need anyway," she said. By dusk the hounds were baying west of the village, toward the dwarven ruins, and no rider turned down the lane to her mother's house. Sapphire stood at the kitchen window and watched the lanterns move away from her family and toward the place she would have to go herself. She had bought six days and pointed the hunt at the one door she still needed to open. If the folded thing in the ruins was what her father believed, she would have her third chance at the cure. If it was not, she had led armed men straight to it, and the next full moon would find her family with nowhere left to hide.