Bailey Baz's Arc

Chapter 38 of 44

Bailey left the deep water with the empty lantern and no answer. The souls had offered him the truth of what he was, and he had refused it. He would not learn his nature from a thing that wanted him drowned. But one witness still lived who had read his mother's own hand and never spoken the whole of it. Calla Voss, the marsh butcher. She had translated his mother's pages once. She had held something back. Bailey turned the elk toward her shack. Cora rode behind him. Rufus and Tyrek followed, with Crane the old commander at the rear, his hand never far from his sword. "She reads the old tongue clean," Cora said. "But she picks what she says like she picks her cuts." They found Calla outside her door, hacking a swamp bird into strips. Meat hung drying on cords behind her. Bone charms clicked in her white hair. She did not look up. "You came back," she said, cleaver falling. "I wondered how long." Bailey climbed down. "You translated my mother's writing. You told me where she meant to fetch me. You never told me what I was before she made me a cage." Calla set the cleaver on the block. Her yellow eyes found his. "Because your mother wrote it plain and I hoped you'd never need it." She wiped her hands. "You want it now?" "I refused a ghost for it," Bailey said. "Tell me." Rufus stepped close, his gentle trapper's hands open. "She was our kin, Calla. He has the right." The old woman looked at Rufus, then at the boy. She went inside and came back with a strip of hide, ink shimmering across it. "Your mother's last line. The one I folded under." She held it where only Bailey could read. "She didn't seal that thing into just any child. She needed a vessel it couldn't kill. A child already dead once and brought back." Bailey went still. "I ate the green mushroom. That was a hundred years after." "The first time," Calla said. "When you were small. You drowned in this swamp as a babe. The water gave you back. That is why the curse could live in you and not burn you out. You were never only Colton Fenwick. You were the swamp's own returned child. That is what it feared. That is what it wanted back." Tyrek swore under his breath. Crane's hand closed on his hilt. Cora took her brother's arm. Bailey breathed slow. He had his answer at last, spoken clean, not whispered by a trap. He was the swamp's returned child, and the swamp had lost both its warden and its cage. "Then it will come for me," he said. "But this time, it’s not going to play nice. It wants me dead. Finn wants me dead." Calla nodded once. "It already knows what you’ve done. Now so do you." Crane asked, “Who is Finn.” Bailey answered, “He’s the swamp.”