Violet Blackstone's Arc

Chapter 5 of 14

They left the trading post at midday. Nadia said little as they walked. The hybrid was gone, but he knew where Violet was headed. That meant she had one chance left with the cast-outs before her name traveled ahead of her. She had to reach them before rumor did. The next stone marker sat in a hollow ringed by birches. Nadia stopped at the ridge above it and set down her basket. She pulled out a folded cloth and laid it flat. Inside were dried apples, hard cheese, a strip of smoked meat, and a small clay jar of honey. "Bait?" Violet asked. "Proof," Nadia said. "Enforcers take. They don't leave." Violet understood. She helped set the food on the flat top of the stone. Nadia added a bundle of pale silver fronds beside it — a fern she carried from the trading post, its leaves still holding a soft glow in the shade. "They'll know this plant," Nadia said. "It grows where the healer works. It says: friend of the den." They stepped back into the trees and waited. Dusk came slow. Violet's legs cramped. Nadia did not move. When the light thinned to gray, small amber sparks began to lift from the hollow floor — fireflies, dusky-bodied, blinking low near the stone. The food sat untouched. No one came. Then Violet heard breathing behind her. She turned slow. A thin woman stood six paces off, a boy pressed against her hip. Both had the sunken faces of people who had eaten wrong for a long time. The woman held a skinning knife loose at her thigh. Her eyes went to Violet's hands. Empty. To her belt. No pack sigil. No blade drawn. "You left food," the woman said. "I left food." "Enforcers don't do that." "I'm not one." The woman's knife did not lower. "Word says a tall one with dark hair walks the markers. Word says she asks after us. That could be a hunter learning our shape." Nadia stepped into view then. The woman's shoulders dropped an inch. She knew Nadia. Six winters of bread at stone markers had bought that inch. "She's mine," Nadia said. "She has a farm. North gate, a flock, a roof. Room for you and the boy tonight if you walk." The woman looked at the fern on the stone. At the honey jar. At the boy. "How far?" "Two days," Violet said. "I'll carry him if his legs give." The knife went into the woman's belt. She stepped forward and took the honey first. She fed the boy a fingerful before she ate any herself. Then she nodded once. "We come. But if you lie, I cut you while you sleep." "Fair," Violet said. Two. Not the whole hollow. Not the dozens Nadia said were out here. But two who would walk home with her, and two who would tell the rest what they found when they got there.