Violet Blackstone's Arc

Chapter 6 of 14

The woman ate a second fingerful of honey and lifted the boy onto her hip. Nadia gathered the fern and the rest of the food back into the cloth. Violet turned north, then stopped. The game trail was the fast way home. The game trail was where the trapper worked. And every cast-out in the hollow now knew a tall woman with dark hair was walking the markers. If a trapper heard the same rumor, he would guess her route. "We can't take the trail," Violet said. "No," Nadia agreed. The woman's grip on the boy tightened. "Then how?" Nadia pointed west, away from the ridge. "Old shepherd's cottage. Half a day. My cousin kept it before the winters got long. Roof still holds. We sleep there. We go north from behind it, through the cabbage fields, past the fox den. No trail. No snares." Violet had never heard of the cottage. That was the point. If Nadia had not named it in six winters of walking, no trapper had either. They moved before full dark. The boy walked for the first hour, then Violet carried him. He weighed almost nothing. His mother stayed at Violet's elbow, knife hand free. The cottage sat in a fold of ground behind a hedge of blackthorn. Stone walls. Round windows. A thatched roof sagging at one corner but whole. A rounded door on iron hinges. Beside the step, an herb garden had gone to seed and come back wild, and past it, a patch of wild cabbages grew in tight purple heads among the weeds. Nadia opened the door with her shoulder. Inside smelled of cold ash and dry stone. She lit a stub of candle from her basket. The boy fell asleep on the hearth rug before his mother could lay a blanket down. Violet stepped back outside to check the ground behind the cottage. That was when she saw the fox. It sat on a low rock at the edge of the cabbage patch. Silver, moon-pale, thin at the ribs. It watched her the way the hybrid had watched her — steady, deciding. Then it stood, trotted ten paces north, and looked back. Violet followed with her eyes. The fox had picked a line through the brush that skirted the blackthorn and dropped into a dry creek bed. A creek bed she could walk before dawn. A creek bed the trail did not touch. She went back inside. "There's a way," she told Nadia. "Behind the cottage. Dry creek, north." Nadia nodded once. "Then we sleep two hours. We leave in the dark." The woman was already asleep beside the boy, knife still in her hand. Violet sat against the door and watched them breathe. She had a route now. Not a road, not a trail — a seam through the woods that only three living things knew. It would hold for one trip. That was all she needed.