Stephanie Williams's Arc

Chapter 7 of 9

The huts ran without her now, but a running district was not a proven one. Stephanie had a keeper and full beds, yet no tally she could set before her sire. Nathan Roberts had told her once to lead with the result, not the excuse. Word had reached her that Henry pressed the same claim on this ground, and a lord decides between two childer by numbers. She rode to the crumbling manor at the edge of the willows to build her count. Rowan kept the crate. She would count what filled it. The manor sagged behind cracked stone. Vines split its walls. Inside, she found Rowan's records at last, hidden under a loose board. He had kept them all along. Coats, rings, coin, a ledger of drained travelers stretching back before her partnership. She had proof of her yield in her hands. She copied the numbers by candlelight and rode for her sire's estate before dawn. Nathan received her in the empty east wing. He turned no lamp on. He never did. "You have something," he said. "Forty-one travelers since the willows opened." She set the copied ledger on the table. "Blood mine. Goods held by my keeper. Henry never fed a soul on this road. I did." Nathan read the page. He did not sit. "The count holds," he said. "The ground is yours. Henry will not be told twice." Stephanie's chest loosened for the first time in weeks. She had won it. The district ran under her banner now, not Henry's. Then Nathan spoke again, flat. "You went to the manor tonight." "I did." "You were not the only one carrying something through my willows." He looked at her fully. "A woman crossed your ground before you. Gaunt. Green dress. She carried a child toward the old ground beyond your trees." Stephanie's win turned to stone in her stomach. Elara. The pact she had dissolved and moved to the lowlands. Elara had not stayed gone. "You freed the village of her," Nathan said. "Someone tied her back to it. She takes a child through your district to finish an old debt." He closed the ledger. "Your ground. Your dead. If a village child dies on land I just gave you, every villager on that road stops walking it. Your forty-one become zero." "I ended her pact," Stephanie said. "Someone reopened it." He set the ledger in her hand. "Lead with the result. You have a district now. Keep it walking." He turned to the dark and said nothing more. Stephanie held her proof and her territory. She also held a problem her win had just made her own. Elara was already crossing the willows. The child was already taken. And the road that made her count possible would empty the moment a body turned up on it. She rode back toward the trees before the sun climbed.