Stephanie Williams's Arc

Chapter 5 of 9

The road was full and Stephanie was starving. Travelers packed the stone waystation each night. They slept shoulder to shoulder under the mossy roof, in each other's sight the whole dark through. She could not draw one aside. She could not feed with forty pairs of eyes at her back. She had built a busy road and locked herself out of it. So she stopped waiting for stragglers and built somewhere to make them. She spent three nights raising a cluster of huts near the stone shelter, under the glowing willows. She told Gideon they were overflow lodging, for the nights the waystation ran full. He preached it. The huts looked like mercy. Each one held a single traveler, alone, behind a door she could bar from outside. A private place, at last, with no witness inside. Vera Bole found her testing the doors. Stephanie's sire had placed the stablehand here to watch this ground, and Stephanie had spared her once instead of killing her. Now Vera leaned on a hut wall, boots caked with mud, grinning her gap-toothed grin. Her laugh came a half-second late, as it always did. "Cozy," Vera said. "Horses won't come near them." She tilted her head. "Neither will I." "You don't have to," Stephanie said. "Tell him what you see. That's your job." "He already knows." Vera nodded past the willows. Stephanie turned. A man stood among the hanging branches, still in a dark suit, watching. Henry Silverstone. Nathan's first childer, sent once before to scold her over the pact. She had not called him. Her sire had. "Clever," Henry said. He walked the row of huts, tried a door, let it swing. "You cage them one at a time. Feed quiet. Road stays full." He stopped. "He wants to know it's his ground when you're done." "It benefits him," Stephanie said. "A safe road, a fed road, under his banner. Lead with the result. That's what he told me." Henry studied her. She braced for a blow, an order, a threat. "Fine," he said. He was flat and final. "It holds. For now." That night she used the first hut. She walked a lone traveler in, barred the door, and fed with no eyes on her. The man went quiet under the willows. No one at the waystation heard. At dawn she carried him out through the back and buried the count where Gideon would never reach it. Her ground fed her again. She had turned the crowd from a wall into a supply. But Henry had walked the huts and reported them. Her sire now knew exactly how she hunted, and how much this district was worth. She had proven the ground could pay him. She had also handed him the map. Whatever he chose to do with it, she would learn from Henry, and not before he decided.