Elder Bright's Arc

Chapter 12 of 13

Granny Mossroot did not wait for the cauldron to cool. She crooked one finger at Elder Bright and walked out the clubhouse door, and he followed her across the clearing and down a path he had not walked in a hundred years. The old stone church rose at the end of it, spires sharp against the gray sky. She stopped on the steps where he had once stopped, and turned. She was wearing the dress. It was torn at the hem and yellowed at the lace, and she had kept it folded in a chest for longer than most marriages last. The witches behind them could see it through the trees. That was the point. "You owe me," she said. "For the floor. For the book. For sixty-three years of carrying your page." Her voice was flat. "I am naming the price now, before you go to the wire-folk." Elder Bright's mouth was dry. He had rehearsed a hundred apologies in three centuries and forgotten all of them on the step. "Name it," he said. She held out her palm. On it sat a small gold ring, diamonds in a row, the band scratched from being kept too long in a pocket. "You wear this when you walk in to the technologists," she said. "You tell them you speak for the coven and for the woman who backed you. You tell them whose name is on the other half." She did not smile. "You do not get to broker this peace as a free man. You broker it as mine, or you do not broker it at all." He took the ring. He put it on. It fit, which was the worst part. Granny Mossroot nodded once, gathered the torn train of the gown over her arm, and walked back up the path without looking at him. Elder Bright stood on the church step with the weight of the band on his finger and understood that he could go to the technologists now — but not as himself. The debt was paid in the only currency she had ever wanted, and he had spent the rest of his name to do it.