Bailey Baz's Arc

Chapter 37 of 44

Bailey lay in the mud and watched the loose vines drift on the black pool. The seal held. His chest felt light and empty. But the traded souls his cousin's lantern had once carried still lingered at the water's edge, pale and thin, where he had paid them to Malachar long ago. They had not gone down with the emperor. They stayed, circling the pool like smoke that would not rise. One of them drifted close to Bailey's face. Its voice scraped in his ear. "I know you, boy. I know what you were before the swamp." The pale thing curled tighter. "Not Prince Colton. Not a warden. Something older. Would you like to hear it?" Cora crouched beside her brother and swung her cracked wand at the shape. It thinned but did not scatter. "Don't listen," she said. "It wants to keep you here." Bailey pushed himself upright. His cousin Rufus, the red-bearded trapper who had given him the lantern, stepped between Bailey and the water. His gentle hands were fists now. "Those souls were my mother's," Rufus said. "They were promised down. They've no right to stay whispering." Tyrek drew his knife and stood at Bailey's shoulder, the refugee who had first named him the dead prince. "Tell me where to cut," he said. But a knife could not touch smoke. Bailey understood then. The souls had been paid to Malachar as tribute. With the emperor sealed and silent, their trade had no keeper. They lingered because no one had released them. The whisper offered a secret about his past to lure him back to the water, to make him the new keeper. He looked at the empty lantern lying in the reeds where Rufus had dropped it. Its glow was gone. He picked it up. "You want a keeper," Bailey said to the circling shapes. "There isn't one. The one you served is a cage now. Your debt is done." "Then hear the secret first," the soul hissed. "Before we go." "No." Bailey raised the lantern over the pool. He spoke the freeing words he had used on the locket, the ones that broke a debt and let what was held go free. The old tongue rose clean in his throat. The pale shapes shuddered. Crane, the old commander, stood back and watched the boy work. One by one the souls thinned to nothing and sank into the still water. The whisper cut off mid-word. The pool went quiet. Bailey lowered the dead lantern. His hands shook. He had refused the secret. He would find the truth of what he was some other way, not from a thing that wanted him drowned. Cora took his arm. "It's over," she said. But Bailey looked at the loose vines still drifting free across the water, and he knew it was not. The swamp had lost its warden and its cage both. Something now held nothing in place.