Vera Bole's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Vera Bole loved the horses, and the horses were dying of her. She stood in the stable of the Creaking Timber Travelers' Inn with an armful of hay. The bay mare backed into the corner. Its eyes rolled white. It would not eat, would not blink, would not make a sound. Every horse she touched went like this. Three had already stopped eating for good. She did not know why. She only knew she carried something inside her, something that scared the animals silent, and she had to find it and drive it out before a guest noticed and called it what it was. She laughed, a half-second late, at nothing. The sound cracked in the quiet barn. Then she heard boots on the stone outside. Gideon Ash stood in the doorway. She knew him from the road, the preacher with the chalk-scrawled board and the burning red eyes. He preached floods to travelers who crossed themselves and hurried past. Now he stared at the mare, then at Vera, and did not hurry anywhere. "They go still around you," he said. Not a question. "You've watched me." Her hands tightened on the hay. "Two weeks. From the trees." He stepped inside. The mare pressed harder into the corner, though he came nowhere near it. "It isn't the horses that are wrong. It's what's riding you." Her stomach dropped. "You know what it is." "I know what to look for." He set down his board against the wall. On his shoulder sat a small owl, brown and pale, its yellow eyes glowing steady in the dim. She had not seen it come in. "He sees what's hidden. Hold still." Vera dropped the hay and held still. The owl fixed both bright eyes on her chest. Gideon watched it, not her. The barn went colder. The mare stopped trembling and stood frozen, staring at the same spot on Vera the owl stared at. "There." Gideon's voice went flat. "Behind your ribs. Something threaded through you. Old. Put there on purpose." "Put there." The word scraped her throat. "By who?" "Blood work. A cord of it, wound into a living thing. I've seen the kind before." He named nothing. He looked away from her. "You're a made thing, Vera. Someone shaped you to watch, then sent you out to sit near their enemies. The horses feel it because animals always feel it first." She thought of the inn full of sleeping guests, of her own laugh that never landed right. Made. Sent. "Then take it out," she said. "I can't. I can only tell you it's there, and that whoever wound it will know the moment it starts to unravel." He lifted the owl to his shoulder. "You wanted to stop guessing. Now you know. That's worse." He walked out. Vera stood alone with the frozen mare and the truth: she was someone's tool, and someone was watching to see if she noticed.