Thorn Vale's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Thorn Vale found the doe at first light, its leg crushed in iron jaws beside a smear of honeyed bait. The trap was new. She had walked this slope two days ago and seen nothing. She knelt and ended the animal with her knife, then wiped the blade on the moss. The poacher lord was laying faster than she could clear. That was the problem she had carried out of Embermere alone, while the townspeople stayed behind their fences and let one elven hunter walk the trees for them. She took the doe's body off the path so scavengers would not gather and trip the next jaw. Then she headed for her cabin to think. The cabin sat under three old pines, its log walls green with moss, its windows looking onto a table she had covered in a hand-drawn map of the forest. Red pins marked traps she had broken. Black pins marked traps she suspected. There were too many black pins. Each one was a bait pile working through the night, calling deer and fox and bear toward wire and steel while she slept. She could not reach them all in time. That was the plain fact. She needed something to stand at a bait site and turn animals away while she was elsewhere. She had carried the answer in her pack for a year and never trusted it. Her mother had given her a set of warding stones cut into a ring, old elven work, runes that pushed animals back from whatever ground the ring enclosed. Thorn had not used them because using them meant admitting she could not do this alone. She took the ring out and walked back to the bait site before noon. She set the stones in a circle around the honey smear and the iron jaws. The runes warmed and began to glow a steady green. A squirrel on a nearby branch turned and went the other way. Thorn watched for an hour to be sure. The ring held. She marked the spot on her map and moved to the next black pin, and the next, planting wardings she could not get back until the traps under them were broken. By dusk she had six stones placed and two left in her pack. She returned to the cabin and stood at the map. The red pins had not grown. The black pins had shrunk by six. But the ring had been a gift meant for one place, one den, one season of need, and she had scattered it across the forest in a single day. When the last two stones went down tomorrow, she would have nothing left to hold a site she had not yet reached. Something moved at the tree line behind her. She turned and saw a wolf made of dark and small white lights, watching her through the window.