Cherriese's Arc

Chapter 7 of 13

At first light Cherriese came down to the pillar with bread and water for her husband. He had not slept. The rope had cut a red band into his wrists. She set the cup against his mouth and waited until he drank. Then she asked him the only question that mattered now. How many more were still on the road, and did he know their names. He answered without pause. Seven. He listed them. He gave their faces, their bloodlines, the marker each had been told to follow. He named the false marker in the western gully and the hour his old contact would be watching it. Cherriese wrote each name on the soft band of the carved stone with the point of the striped wand. She did not look at her husband while she wrote. When the list was cut she stepped back and studied it. Seven exiles, three of them children, all walking toward a trap that already knew their faces. The iron-dust patrols would reach the gully before any runner she sent could. She had hours, not days. She walked to the tall crystal-streaked stone at the inner edge of the clearing, where her husband had stood when he gave up the names. She set both wands against its base. The valley people came out of the lodge and watched without speaking. Cherriese took the slender needle wand in her right hand and the striped wand in her left and lifted them above her head. She spoke the binding her mother had taught her once and never used. The words were short. She said them twice. The air over the valley folded. A pale membrane climbed from the ridge stones, layer over layer, soft pink at the seams and clear at the centers, until it closed above the highest pine. Light moved through it in slow pulses, like a held breath. Along the ridge line at the valley mouth, the boundary stones lit from within and a wide arch of crystal-shot rock pushed up from the ground where no arch had stood before, marking the line any exile would cross to enter safe ground. Cherriese felt the shield draw on her. Her knees softened. She kept her arms up until the seams sealed. When she lowered the wands her hands were shaking and her nose was bleeding. The shield held. Inside it, no iron-dust patrol could see down and no false marker could pull a fairy back out. She turned to the sixteen faces at the lodge door and named the seven on the stone. She said any guardian who would walk through the new arch and bring them in before dusk should step forward now. Four did. She gave them the names, the faces, the gully, and the hour. Then she sat down at the base of the pillar where her husband was tied, and she waited for them to come back.