Charlie Morrison's Arc

Chapter 2 of 14

The blue lights led Charlie deeper, weaving between trunks she did not remember from childhood. Then they stopped. A faint line ran across the path, no more than a seam in the moss, but the lights would not cross it. They hovered, blinking, and turned back to her. The one nearest her face bobbed once, then drifted to the seam and pressed against the air above it like a moth on glass. Charlie stepped forward. Cold rose from the ground and pushed her back a full pace. The pendant at her collarbone went dull. She understood without being told. The token had bought her the woods. It had not bought her whatever lay past this line. The lights circled, agitated, and one of them shot ahead into the dark. The others held their places around her knees. Above the trees, the sky had gone the color of a bruise. Charlie could feel the hour turning against her. If nothing changed soon, the lights would leave, and she would be a stranger alone in a wood that had already refused her once. Something small came back through the ferns. Not a light. A figure. She stood no taller than Charlie's hand, barefoot in a dress of stitched leaves, green hair cut short around sharp ears. A soft green glow moved with her like breath. She stopped at the seam, looked up, and her whole face opened. "Charlie," she said. "Oh. Oh, look at you tall." Charlie's throat closed. A memory surfaced without permission: a summer afternoon, a flat stone by the creek, a tiny green friend teaching her to fold a boat from a birch leaf. She had not thought of it in twenty years. She had believed she had made it up. "Fern," Charlie said. The name came before she chose it. Fern Willowgleam laughed, and the sound was too big for her size. She waved a hand across the seam. The cold in the ground went out like a snuffed candle. "Come, come. They sent for me because they could not bring you through. I can. You are mine to bring." Charlie stepped over the line. Nothing pushed back. The blue lights lifted at once and streamed ahead, freed. Fern took Charlie's smallest finger in her whole hand and tugged her forward, chattering as if no years had passed. The path opened onto a clearing. In its center stood a cottage the size of a garden shed, its walls woven from stems, its roof shingled in overlapping petals of every color. Warm light burned in two round windows. A wooden door, no higher than Charlie's waist, stood closed. Fern let go of her finger and flew up to the latch. "Bend down," she said. "You are expected inside. Not by me." Charlie knelt in the moss. The door swung inward. Something older than Fern was waiting in the light, and it had heard her name.