Thorbran's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Thorbran broke camp at first light. He rolled the pelts, kicked dirt over the ash, and shouldered his pack. The raven rode his shoulder, its white eye half-lidded against the cold. They walked a rutted road that wound between low hills. He felt the sour pull in his chest grow stronger with every mile, a sign the raven's instruction was true. Sickness lay ahead of him, and somewhere past it, a village. He smelled the goats before he saw them. A crooked pen leaned beside the road, fence rails split, gate hanging open. Inside, a dozen animals stood in their own filth. Their coats hung in patches. One looked at him with yellow eyes and did not bleat. No farmer came out of the small house behind the pen. The door was open. Thorbran did not go in. People had lived here a week ago, fed these animals, kept the gate shut. Now they were somewhere down the road, walking with whatever the sorcerer had put in them. He fixed the picture in his mind before he moved on. The raven stiffened. It lifted from his shoulder, flew ahead, and landed on the high branch of a bare tree alone in a field. From the branch hung an old rope, frayed, swinging in no wind. The raven cawed once and looked back at him. Thorbran understood. They were close, and they were coming. He stepped off the road into the grass and crouched. He heard them then: footsteps, many, uneven. A child's voice, laughing wrong. He drew the short blade only. He left the katana sheathed. He pulled a strip of cloth from his pack and tied it across his off-hand knuckles. Flat of the blade, he told himself. Pommel. Elbow. Knee. His master had made him repeat one cut ten thousand times so that on a day like this he could choose not to use it. These were not enemies. They were the wound. She came through the grass before the others. A young woman, barefoot, hair loose, a ribbon trailing from one braid. She held a sickle. Her eyes were wet and empty at once. He stepped aside from her first swing and struck her wrist with the flat. The sickle fell. She came at him with her hands, with her teeth. He turned her, pinned her, waited for her to tire. She did not tire. She bit through the cloth on his hand. She drove her thumb toward his eye. He saw, in the half second left to him, that she would kill him and not know she had. He drove the short blade up under her ribs. She sagged against him. He held her until she was still. The others had not yet crested the rise. Thorbran knelt and untied the ribbon from her hair. It was red going to purple in the light. He folded it once and put it inside his tunic, against his skin. Then he picked up her sickle, threw it into the grass, and ran.