Elsa Crane's Arc

Chapter 1 of 66

Elsa Crane pressed her thumb into the wax of a fifth honey-cake and set it beside the others on the vine-woven table. Five cakes, five candidates, and by the first snow she would crown one of them to keep Alpenglow smiling after she was buried. The trouble sat in her chest like a swallowed pit. She could feel a false smile the way other people felt a draft, but feeling was not proof, and the village would not hand its warmth to a woman's hunch. Her meeting hut smelled of driftwood and crushed mint. Strawberry vines curled up the table legs, and small bottles of tincture rattled when she leaned her weight on the wood. She needed a test. Something private. Something a liar could not talk his way out of. The gravedigger ducked through the low door without knocking. Mud flaked off her waders onto the swept floor. She had slept in the hut for three winters now, and Elsa had stopped pretending it was strange. The leather ledger was already open in her hands. "You added another name," Elsa said. "Two." The gravedigger, Nora Lund, did not look up. "Both on your list of five." Elsa set down the honey-cake she was holding. "Which two." Nora turned the ledger. Two fresh names sat above the ruled line, ink still wet. No dates. Elsa had told no one which five she was considering. She had written the list only in her own head. "How do you know them," Elsa said. "I don't." Nora finally looked up. Her eyes were steady and tired. "My hand knows. It's been writing ahead of me since the thaw. It hasn't been wrong yet." Elsa understood then that she had been looking for her test in the wrong drawer. The ledger was the test. Whatever moved Nora's hand did not care about a smile. It cared about what a person was underneath one. "Show me the other three," Elsa said. Nora flipped back a page. Three of Elsa's five candidates were already written there, weeks old. Beside each name, a small mark: a circle, a cross, a circle. "What are the marks." "Circles are the ones I'll bury clean," Nora said. "Crosses are the ones who'll take someone with them." Four circles. One cross. Elsa found she was smiling, the wide unblinking smile the village trusted. She closed the ledger under her palm. "I want the cross out of my hut before nightfall. I want the other four at this table tomorrow, one at a time. You sit in the corner. You bring the book. When each one speaks to me, you write." Nora nodded once. She did not ask what would happen if her hand wrote a new cross while a candidate sat across from Elsa drinking her tea. Elsa did not ask either. They both already knew. Outside, a pale wolf watched the hut from the tree line and did not blink.