Zara Veylinn's Arc

Chapter 3 of 12

By late afternoon, Zara could see the capital's outer gate ahead through gaps in the fog. It rose from the road in painted metal and colored glass, tall as three houses, carved with the crests of families who no longer sat under them. The green rot was creeping up the road behind her, low and thick, curling around her boots. She kept walking with the onion sack on her back and her hood pulled forward. A hundred paces from the gate, she saw the shape of a man crumpled in the ditch. He was small, no taller than her shoulder, with black hair and blood down one side of his face. His clothes were fine under the dirt, purple silk stitched with gold thread. He lifted his head when he heard her step and reached one bandaged hand toward the road. "Please," he said. "They left me. The fog is coming." She stopped. Guards stood at the gate ahead. A cart driver had pulled up thirty paces back and was watching her. If she knelt to help, every witness would remember a farmhand and a hurt noble at this gate on this day. If she walked past, the fog would reach him within the hour and he would die where anyone could find her tracks beside him. Zara pressed her thumb against the seal ring under her tunic. She did not call the hound to her side. She pressed the ring once, hard, and thought the word away. Behind her, faint on the road she had come down, she felt the cold shape of the hound slip out of the townhouse floorboards a mile back and pad into the miasma between her and the cart driver. She did not turn to look. She only heard the driver's horse scream and the wheels crack as he wheeled around and fled the way he had come. She knelt in the ditch. She pulled the small man's arm over her shoulder and lifted him. He weighed almost nothing. "What's your name," she said, because she needed him talking, not fainting. "Zex," he said. "Zex Orionis." The name meant nothing to her. She half carried him off the road into the dead grass, away from the gate, away from the guards who had not yet looked up. The fog closed behind them and hid the ditch and her boot prints together. She found a hollow behind a broken wall and set him down. His eyes were purple, steady on her face, taking in the ash in her hair and the marks on her cheeks under the hood. He had seen her. He knew what she looked like. She had lost the gate for today, and she had gained a witness who could name her. She pressed the ring again and called the hound back to her side. She had two days left.