Elder Bright's Arc

Chapter 11 of 13

The runner was back on her bench, but the room had not settled. Granny Mossroot stood at the head of the long table, and her hands shook on her staff. The cauldron behind her bubbled wrong — uneven, spitting, the color of the bubbles turning dull. Every witch in the room watched those bubbles instead of her face. Elder Bright saw it. So did she. He did not step forward. He stepped sideways. He opened the heavy red book he had carried in under his arm and set it on the corner of his small table. It was not his book. It was hers — a family record her own mother had kept, which he had borrowed and rebound. He turned it to a page marked with red ribbon and let it lie open. He said nothing about it. He only laid a hand flat beside it and waited. Three witches at the back rose. Their leader, the broad one who had argued loudest for leaving, jerked her chin toward the door. "We're going to the other house," she said. She meant the smaller carved lodge across the clearing, where the breakers had been sleeping the last two nights. "Granny's lost the thread." The cauldron spat again. Granny Mossroot's mouth opened and closed. Elder Bright spoke then, but not to them. He spoke to the open book. "Her mother signed the first peace. Page forty-one. The line under it is Granny's." He looked up at the broad witch, not at Granny. "If you walk out that door, you walk out under both names. Decide that knowing it." Then he closed the book gently and stepped back behind Granny Mossroot's shoulder, one pace, no more. The broad witch sat. So did the other two. Granny Mossroot drew a breath that finally reached the bottom of her chest, and her staff stopped shaking. She took the room back in her own voice. The cauldron steadied to a clean blue boil. The split was sealed — but every witch had seen who had handed her back the floor, and Elder Bright knew that debt would come due before the peace did.