Violet Blackstone's Arc

Chapter 3 of 14

Nadia led Violet down a game trail toward the nearest stone marker. The light had turned the color of weak tea. Nadia said the cast-outs would arrive within the hour. Violet walked ahead, eager to reach the clearing before dusk closed it. Nadia caught her sleeve. "Stop." Violet stopped. She saw nothing but ferns and a fallen log. "Look lower," Nadia said. She crouched and pointed with one finger. A thin wire ran ankle-high between two saplings. Beyond it, another. Beyond that, a bent branch and a loop of braided gut half-hidden in leaves. "Trapper's line. Fresh. He set it since morning." Violet followed the wire with her eyes. It cut across the whole slope between them and the marker. Six snares, maybe eight. A person running downhill in low light would hit three before they knew. "The cast-outs come this way?" Violet asked. "They come from the ridge. Straight through here." Violet's mouth went dry. She thought of a starved boy walking into wire in the dark. She thought of her own horse. "We pull them," she said. "No." Nadia set her basket down. "Pull them and he resets by tomorrow, angrier, wider. We spring them. Every one. He finds them tripped and thinks a deer did it." "That takes time." "Then we start." Nadia cut a green branch as long as her arm and stripped it. She showed Violet how to press the branch into the loop from the side, away from the snap line. The first snare whipped up and clenched the stick with a dry crack. Violet flinched. Nadia handed her the next branch. They worked the slope on hands and knees. Violet found four. Nadia found three. The light thinned. Violet's fingers bled where the gut had cut her. She kept counting. On the eighth snare the wire was set higher, throat-height, anchored to a bowed sapling. She sprung it and sat back hard in the leaves. "That one would have killed someone," she said. "Yes." They reached the marker as the last light went blue. The stone stood in a small hollow. Beside it, half grown into the hillside, sat a low shelter of woven branches and thatch, vines curtaining its mouth. Nadia had built it, or someone had. Violet had not asked. No one came to the marker that night. They waited past full dark. Nadia finally stood and brushed her skirt. "He heard us in his woods. Word travels. They will not come to this stone again for a week." Violet stared at the empty clearing. She had cleared the path and lost the meeting. "Then we go to the next stone," she said. "Tomorrow. Before he sets a line there too." Nadia nodded once. "We move at first light." From the black between the trees, two pale eyes watched them go. Neither woman turned. The eyes followed until the shelter was out of sight.