Violet Blackstone's Arc

Chapter 13 of 14

The healed woman slept inside on a cot, faint silver clinging to her ribs. Violet washed blood from her hands in the basin on the porch and looked past the yard to the gate. Marcus was still under the oak. He had not asked to come in. He had not left. A trained fighter with a full night's view of her fences was a problem she could not carry another day. She crossed the yard with the fake chip still in her pocket. Marcus stood when she came close. He kept his hands where she could see them. "You held her shoulders down," Violet said. "You knew the wire before you saw it." "I've cut men out of worse." "You've counted my gate, my shed, my sightlines, and the ridge behind the house." "I have," Marcus said. "I'd be a poor teacher if I hadn't." Colton came up on her left with the axe lowered. Willow watched from the porch. Violet felt the shape of the choice. Send him off, and he walked into the woods with every weak point of the farm in his head. Keep him, and she broke her own rule on the same day the healing light had already broken it. "You came without a chip," Violet said. "You spread a rumor to find my gate. The rule says you don't come in." Marcus nodded once. He bent to pick up his pack. "Put it down," Violet said. "The rule was for strangers. You spent the night watching a woman bleed and you didn't run. That's not a stranger anymore." His hand stopped on the strap. "I'm not opening the gate for you," she said. "You're going to earn it. There's a garden behind the house. Overgrown. A greenhouse with cracked glass and a well that needs a new rope. You work it for a week. You sleep in the barn. You don't touch the fence line, you don't drill anyone, you don't teach anyone to hold a knife until I say. At the end of the week I cut you a chip or I send you off with a day's food. Say yes or walk." "Yes." "Colton takes you to the garden now. He tells you what grows and what doesn't. You listen to him like he's me." Colton's jaw moved. He looked at Violet. She held his eyes until he nodded. "This way," Colton said. Marcus followed him around the house. Violet went inside and lifted the seed box from the shelf. She set it on the kitchen table and opened the lid. The little journal was tucked between the packets, her mother's hand on the first pages, hers on the last. She wrote a new line under today's date. One fighter, on trial in the garden. One week. She closed the box. Outside, the healed woman's glow would rise with the dark. Violet had bought herself seven days to decide what kind of place this was going to be.