Thardwin Everheart's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Thardwin slept two hours and woke before dawn with the map still on the workbench. The purple seal in the corner had not changed overnight. Madness Everthorn knew the tower. She had sent one man and she would send more. The runed door and the thick walls had bought him a night. They would not buy him a week. He rolled the map, tied it to the reeds and stones, and started packing the workshop before the sun cleared the ridge. He worked fast. He wrapped the two components in oilcloth and stacked his tools in a single crate. He left the heavy books. He left the copper basin his teacher had loved. He wrote a short note for the old man and pinned it inside the door where no thief would think to look. Then he stepped outside to check the yard one last time. At the edge of the yard, near the wood line, someone had driven a fresh stake into the ground. A small board hung from it by two nails. The board read, in the same blocky hand as before, I am watching you. Beneath the letters, a row of tiny bone figures had been carved into the wood, twenty or thirty of them, shoulder to shoulder, spears raised. A promise of what was coming next. Thardwin pulled the stake up, broke it across his knee, and threw both halves into the ash pit. He took the back path down from the tower and cut east through the orchards. He knew where he was going. Two valleys over, behind a collapsed manor wall, there was a walled garden his teacher had once shown him. A fountain, a stone bench, a gate hidden behind ivy. No one had tended the place in years. The wall was high and the ivy was thick, and the gate could be locked from inside. It was not a workshop. It could be made into one. He reached the garden by midday. He forced the gate, dragged it shut behind him, and set the crate down by the fountain. The water still ran. He cleared a flat stone near the wall and laid out the reeds and the stones side by side. He drew a fresh binding sigil across the inside of the gate, deeper than the one he had used on the thief. Then he sat on the bench and made himself eat. His hands were shaking and he needed them steady. The tower was gone to him now. He could not go back for the books or the basin. But the two components were safe, the map was safe, and Madness Everthorn's next agent would climb an empty stair. Thardwin unrolled the map on the flat stone and set a pebble on the nearest mark. A river cave, four days east. He had one place to hide and one direction to walk. That was enough to start.