Tobias Cartwright's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Tobias pressed the brass compass into RK's shaking hand and told him to stay low. A heavy thud struck the inn door below. Then another. Tobias took the stairs two at a time. He hauled the door open at midnight. A man in torn expedition gear fell across the threshold, blood frozen black on his coat. Behind him, snow stretched out to a stacked stone marker glowing pale in the moonlight — the spot where he must have dropped from the dark and crawled the last yards in. RK came down the stairs and went white. He gripped the rail to keep standing. "That man was left for dead," he whispered. "We buried him in our heads a hundred miles back." Tobias dragged the stranger inside and kicked the door shut. He cut the frozen coat away with his knife. From an inner pocket slid a small mirror rimmed in frost-pale metal, its glass catching the lamplight like scattered snow. RK made a low sound. "He kept it," he said. "He carried it the whole way." The wounded man's eyes opened. He looked at Tobias, not RK, and forced out three words. "Cabin. Ironwood. Maps." Then his breath stopped. Tobias closed the dead man's eyes. He had come for answers and a corpse had delivered the first one. Somewhere out in the dark stood a cartographer's cabin, and whatever the expedition learned had been written down inside it. He looked at RK. "You're going to take me there." RK shook his head, but he did not say no. He only stared at the mirror in Tobias's palm, and at the door, and at the cold pressing against the windows. The night had handed Tobias a direction. It had also told the hunters exactly where to find them.