Tamsin Reed's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Tamsin Reed climbed the watchtower before dawn, counting hooves through the narrow window. She was the deerkeeper of Larchgrove, and her work was simple to name and hard to do: gather the three scattered bloodlines under one living guardian, as no one had done in centuries. But she could not gather a herd that was being cut down. Smoke threaded the trees to the south. The poachers had come back. She found their camp by midmorning. A drying rack stood between two pines, strips of red flesh swaying above a shallow ash pit. The frame was fresh-cut. They meant to stay. Tamsin walked the trail back into the trees and found the stone. It sat half-sunk in churned earth, streaked rust-brown, scored by the desperate scrape of hooves. A bark-flanked stag had bled out here. She knelt and pressed her palm to the cold mark. Her thorn-tipped antlers tightened against her scalp before she heard the snap of a twig behind her. She did not run. She rose slowly and turned, and let the poachers see her face, and her antlers, and the quiet that came with both. She told them the herd was kept. She told them what kept it. One man laughed. The other did not, and after a long moment he touched the laughing man's sleeve, and they went. They left the rack standing. They left the stone. Tamsin watched them go and knew they would tell others, and others would come, and the herd she meant to save was now a story moving outward through the woods.