Thornwyn Mossbrook's Arc

Chapter 10 of 38

Thornwyn read the elf's list of camps by candlelight and understood she could not ride east tomorrow. The trail he named ran four days out and four days back. Eight days alone with the girl and the elf on opposite sides of her ward. No one to watch the door. No one to keep the girl from opening it. The girl had a week to decide his fate. Thornwyn had promised to keep that week. If she left them together and something broke between them, the whole arrangement broke with it. She needed a guardian. Someone the girl would not fear. Someone the elf could not charm or frighten. She had no such person. She had a crow and a deer and a staff. At dawn she went to the shed. The elf was feeding twigs into the tin stove. She held out the list. "I ride today," she said. "You stay in the shed. You do not cross the ward line. If you do, the ward will know and I will know, and you will not see her again." "Who watches her," he said. "The deer." He looked up. "A deer." "Mine." She went to the yard and whistled. The piebald came out of the trees, patchwork coat wet with frost, long tail sweeping the grass. Thornwyn knelt and put her forehead against its neck. She spoke low, in the old words her mother taught her for binding an animal to a task. She told it the shape of the house. She told it the shape of the shed. She told it the girl by scent and the elf by scent and which of them belonged inside which door. The deer listened. When she stood, it walked to the cottage step and lay down across it, forelegs folded, head high. Thornwyn went inside. The girl sat by the hearth with the carved horse. Thornwyn crouched and took her hands. "I have to ride," she said. "Four days out. Four days back. I am leaving the deer with you. She will not let anyone through the door who should not come through it. Not him. Not anyone. If you need me, tell her, and she will find me." The girl looked at the deer in the doorway. She nodded once. Thornwyn packed oats, flint, the elf's list, a spare cloak. She saddled nothing; she had no horse. She would go on foot with the crow overhead. At the ward line she turned back. The deer had not moved from the step. The elf stood at the shed door with his hands open at his sides, where she could see them. She walked east into the trees. Behind her the arrangement held. Ahead of her lay four days of false trail, and men who had kept a father in a cell for a year, and no way to know if they were already on the road.