Crone Mudwhisper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Crone Mudwhisper had been sixty-three years inside a body that was not hers, and tonight she meant to keep it from being eaten before she could trade it away. She crouched at the window of her moss-wrapped cabin and counted the bells on the fence outside. Forty-eight bells, three rows, strung on wire she had pulled tight herself the morning after she first smelled the cat. The hex jar sat on the table behind her, sealed in wax, eleven failures older than the woman it was meant for. Mira Thorn lived an hour's walk through the swamp, tending her sick raptors, green-eyed and unaware. Mudwhisper needed two more nights to finish the binding. The cat did not know that. She had seen its tracks at the edge of the flat stones that ringed her door. The stones held a film of algae that caught starlight like spilled glass, and a paw print as wide as her hand had pressed one stone clean. Many-legged. She had counted six pads in the mud beyond it. A sabercat with too many legs did not stop at one old woman if it had decided she smelled like meat. She could not run. Her knees gave out on the third step most mornings. So she had built the fence, and she had built a second thing she had not yet used. From under the table she drew a clay pot of rendered fat mixed with the gland of a bog hare. She smeared it on a rag, tied the rag to a long pole, and pushed the pole out through the door slot until the rag hung above the stones. The first bell rang before she had latched the door. Then a row of them, soft, the wire shivering. She put her eye to the slot. The cat came low across the stones, shoulders rolling, two extra legs folded against its ribs like spare knives. It lifted its head to the rag. Mudwhisper struck flint to the oil-soaked end and the rag caught with a sound like a held breath letting go. The cat screamed and reared. Fire dropped onto its face. She yanked the pole back, slammed the slot, and threw the burning rag into the iron pan she had set by the door for exactly this. Outside, the bells went wild, then quieter, then quiet. She waited until her hands stopped shaking. When she opened the door at dawn, a clump of singed black fur lay on the nearest stone. No body. No blood trail. The cat had run, and it had learned her door. She shut the door and looked at the hex jar. Two nights was too long now. The cat would come back angrier, and it would bring its hunger with it. She pulled her cloak from the peg and began to wrap the jar for travel. She would finish the binding closer to the girl.