Alice's Arc

Chapter 16 of 20

Tuesday the rain came in hard before dawn. Alice stood under the cedar with Biscuit pressed against her leg and water running off her hood. The tall creature crouched under a pine with the raccoon inside his coat and the red-headed bird tucked against his neck. Rose stood in the open in her green and yellow, wet through, unbothered. The scent tins in the leather satchel were beading up. The notebook pages curled at the corners. Alice had no dry place to work from. She had been running the sessions off the ridge itself, packing everything up each night and hauling it home. The team had outgrown that. They needed a base. "We can't train in this," Alice said. "And I can't keep carrying the gear up and down." Rose wiped water off her jaw. "There's a place. (You won't like the door.)" She pointed uphill, past the deadfall, into a stand Alice had never crossed. "Old gate. Dry inside. The forest people used it. Some still do." Alice followed her. Biscuit came at her heel. The creature ducked branches behind them. Twenty minutes up, past a shelf of rock, they stepped into a clearing Alice had walked around a dozen times without seeing. A ring of stone stood in the middle of it, taller than the creature, wound with living vines. The center held an image like a window: small wooden houses, a dirt path, hair-covered figures waving. One of them held up a card. Another laughed. Alice's stick went dim in her hand, then bright again. Biscuit's ears stayed up. He did not sit. A winged woman stood at the edge of the clearing with a gray wolf at her knee. Horns curled from her head. Her wings were folded tight against the wet. "I use it too," she said. "When the weather turns. I'm Skywing. The wolf won't come near your dog unless I say." She looked at the creature and nodded once, as if they had met. "There's a chamber behind the ring. Dry stone. Shelves cut in. Room for gear and people both." Alice walked around the gate. Behind it, set into the hillside, was a low doorway she would have missed from any other angle. Inside: a stone room the size of a small cabin, dry, cold, quiet. Shelves along one wall. A hearth cut into the far corner. Water did not reach the floor. She set the satchel down on a shelf. Biscuit walked the room, sniffed each corner, and lay down by the door. He did not get up. That was her signal. She took out the notebook. The pages had stopped curling. She wrote: base found. Gate clearing. Dry. Skywing uses it. Wolf steady around Biscuit. She closed the book. Outside, the rain kept coming. Inside, the team had walls. She did not know yet who else came through the gate, or what the image in the ring meant, or why Skywing had been up here in weather like this. Tomorrow she would ask.