Stephanie Williams's Arc

Chapter 2 of 9

The willows were hers now, marked in blood. But a claim needs blood spilled on it, and the village had made that impossible. Word had spread fast. Someone had freed the watching woman at the treeline, and the story pointed at Stephanie. Now no traveler walked the willow road. No horse passed the stone waystation. She had won empty ground. A hunting territory with no prey feeds no one. Stephanie found Vera Bole at the waystation, forking hay into an empty stall. The horses were gone. Vera hummed anyway, that laugh coming a half-second slow when Stephanie stepped through the moss-covered door. "They won't come near you," Vera said. "They think you belong to the woman in the trees. Two monsters, one road." Stephanie understood then. Fear had drawn a line, and she stood on the wrong side of it. She could not kill her way back into their fear. She had to move the line. She went to the treeline at dusk. The gaunt woman in the rotting green dress stood where she always stood. For thirty years the village had fed her a child when the pact demanded one. Stephanie had cut the cord that bound her weeks ago. Now she used what that had bought. "Elara," Stephanie said. "The village thinks you and I are the same thing." Elara did not blink. "They think what keeps them alive." "Then let them think you left." Stephanie stepped closer. "Stand somewhere new. Away from my willows. Let them believe the old danger moved on, and the new one only kills what wanders off the road." Elara studied her a long moment. "You free me from a cord, then ask me to move my feet." "I ask for trade. You take the far side of the lowland. I hunt the willow road. The village stops fearing my ground and starts using it again." Elara turned. She walked, slow, into the deeper trees, away from the waystation. The first steps she had taken in thirty years. By the third night, a peddler risked the willow road. Then two woodcutters. The horses returned to the stall, and Vera fed them without their silence. Stephanie waited in the reeds and took the peddler clean, left the body where the sap ran green over stone. A killing on her ground, answering to her. But a rider came before dawn. Not human. Stephanie smelled it, the way she smelled a kill that was not hers. He dismounted at the waystation and looked at her with flat, tired eyes. Nathan's first childer. She had never met him, only heard the name spat like a curse. "Henry Silverstone," he said, naming himself. "He sent me. Says you moved his pact-keeper without asking." He glanced at the trees where Elara had gone. "That woman kept the village obedient for thirty years. You broke his oldest arrangement to plant your flag." "I fixed my problem," Stephanie said. "Alright." Henry's face went flat. "Now it's his."