Blushfire's Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

By the fourth night, Echo did not come to the ruin. Blushfire waited on the broken step until the moon cleared the pines. The colored glass stayed dark. He walked to the ridge alone, and the white stag was already there, patient as weather. He pressed the wolf mark once and felt the cold reach for him. He shut it before it could take hold. Without someone sitting between him and the animal, he could not work. He came down the slope with an empty page and a dog at his heel. He found Echo at the edge of town by the stone tiers of the memorial garden, where flowers grew for every name he had failed to reach. Echo was kneeling in the dirt with both hands flat against the lowest stone. Their gray robe was soaked through at the knees. They did not look up when he crouched beside them. "I can't come tonight," Echo said. Their voice was thin. "Someone else is sitting on an edge. I have to go." He understood. Echo went where they were needed, and there was always another edge. He put a hand on their shoulder and felt how little was under the robe. "Go," he said. He walked home through the dark. Choji trotted beside him, ears forward, blue eyes scanning the road. Melissa was on the porch with the blanket around her shoulders. She saw the book in his hand and the closed clasp. "Nothing," he said. "How many nights can you lose?" "Not many." She pulled the blanket tighter. "Then stop looking for one watcher. Ask more than one." He sat on the step. She was right, and he had known it since the second night. Echo was a gift, not a shift. He had been trying to spend a friend the way he spent himself. "Who," he said. "The tattoo artist. The Keeper's apprentice. Me." "Not you." He said it before he thought. "Then the other two. And whoever else will sit." She did not raise her voice. "You don't get to carry this alone because it feels cleaner." He went the next morning. He asked the tattoo artist first, because that debt was already open, and the answer was yes before he finished the question. He asked the Keeper's apprentice at the chapel steps, and she nodded once and reached for a key. He wrote three names on the back page of the black book and set a rotation. Four watchers. Four nights covered. One night a week, no work, and he would sleep. That night the tattoo artist climbed the ridge with him and sat in the grass where Echo had sat. The stag stepped out. It lowered its head toward the new watcher and did not move. Blushfire went to the stones and opened the channel and wrote four lines before dawn. He had bought the season. He had spent people he loved to do it.