Zara Veylinn's Arc

Chapter 2 of 12

By the second morning, Zara heard her own story before she reached the next town. A carter passed her on the road and did not meet her eyes. At a well outside the walls, two women stopped talking when she filled her flask. One of them looked past her at the hound and crossed her fingers. Zara heard the words blue hair and ghost dog and old blood before she was out of range. She had thought the fog was her only enemy on this road. She had been wrong. Word was running ahead of her, and the people on the throne kept agents on every road into the capital. She needed to disappear before nightfall. She counted what she had: a coat with documents sewn in the lining, a seal ring on a cord, a spectral hound that no cloak could hide. The hound was the tell. Any rider sent to find her would ask one question in every village, and the answer would point straight at her. She left the road and cut through a dead orchard into the edge of the next town. Most of the houses were shuttered against the fog. She picked a townhouse with boarded windows and a door hanging loose on one hinge. Inside, the floor was gray with dust and old plaster. She knelt in front of the hound and held the seal ring against its chest. "Stay out of sight," she said. "Come when I press the ring. Not before." The hound lowered its head. Its pale outline thinned, then sank into the floorboards like breath into cloth. The room felt colder without it, and closer to the fog pressing at the boards. She cut her hair short with the knife from her boot and left the blue strands in the fireplace. She rubbed ash into what was left until the color dulled to gray. She pulled her hood low over the purple marks on her cheeks. Then she went out into the street and found the shop she had seen from the orchard, a run down place with cracked windows and a faded sign. The old man inside did not look up. She traded a silver clasp from her coat for a farmhand's tunic, a dirt-colored scarf, and a sack of onions to carry on her back. He counted the clasp twice and asked no questions. She walked out of the town on the main road, hunched under the onions, alone. Two riders passed her going the other way within the hour. Neither slowed. She kept her hand on the ring under her tunic and did not call the hound. By dusk she was six miles closer to the capital and no one had spoken her name. But the fog was thickening on the road ahead, and without the hound walking beside her, she had no way through it.