Sapphire Crystalline's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Sapphire woke to a knock at the kitchen door before the sun cleared the ridge. She wiped her hands dry and opened it a crack. A woman from two lanes over stood on the step with her arms folded. She said the hunting party had ridden west last night, but her cousin was on the party and had come back uneasy. The tracks split near the creek. One line ran toward the ruins. Another, fainter, curved back this way. The woman looked past Sapphire into the kitchen. She asked whether Sapphire had heard anything strange in the yard three nights ago, and whether her brother had been home. She said the men were meeting again at noon to decide where to ride next. Sapphire kept her hand on the door and made her face tired. She said her brother had been sick in the loft all week and her mother had barely slept for tending him. She said she had heard nothing but the wind. The woman did not move. She asked to see the brother. Sapphire said he was sleeping and needed to stay that way, and if the woman wanted to wait in the kitchen she could, but the answer would be the same in an hour. She watched the woman's eyes travel over the threshold, the boots by the door, the scrape of mud she had not finished cleaning off the sill. The woman said she would come back at noon with two of the men. Sapphire shut the door and pressed her back to it. She had until noon. She pulled on her coat and went out the rear gate toward the tree line, and she was halfway across the field when the air beside her went cold and a voice spoke at her shoulder. She turned and saw nothing at first, then a shape at the edge of sight, a hooded thing with green points where eyes should be, half in the grass and half not. It said its name was Vexeron. It said it had been watching her house. It said the second track, the faint one, had not been laid by her sellsword. It had been laid by the hound handler himself, who suspected her already and was building a case the party would accept. Sapphire asked why it was telling her this. Vexeron said, "I break spells. Yours interests me. Send the handler to me tonight and I will end his certainty. In return, you owe me one favor, named later." She agreed before she let herself think. At noon the woman came back with two men, and Sapphire met them in the yard and told them the hound handler had asked to meet her alone at the old ruins after dark, and she was afraid of him. The men's faces changed. They rode out to find him first. Sapphire stood in the empty lane and understood she had traded one watcher for another, and the debt she now owed had no shape she could see.