Elsa Crane's Arc

Chapter 16 of 66

Elsa walked back toward her hut with Bodhi's honest words still warm in her ear. She heard something behind her that was not the wind. A whisper, low and close, running along the wall at her shoulder. She turned. The lane was empty. She kept walking, and the whisper kept up. It said Bodhi's name once, then again, softer, like it was testing the shape of him. She knew what it was. A blue-tinged thing had haunted the cellar once and pointed her toward the old lantern. It had helped her then. It was not helping now. It was moving toward the boy. If it reached him first and spoke into his ear the way it was speaking into hers, Jasper's wide shoulders would not matter. A whisper slips past a woodcarver. A whisper does not knock. She could not out-walk it. She needed a wall between it and Bodhi that the village already trusted. A person, not a man with big hands. She thought of the schoolhouse. She thought of the young woman every mother in the village left her child with without a second look. Fern Osley. The teacher. Stern enough to make the children sit. Kind enough that they wanted to. Elsa turned off the lane and cut through the pines to the cottage grown into the old tree, where strawberry vines hung heavy and the teal crystal door caught the afternoon light. Fern was on the step, sorting a basket of berries, the crystal key strung on a cord at her neck. The pale wolf padded out from behind the trunk and sat between them without being called. "I need to tell you something," Elsa said. "All of it. Then I need you to say yes or no." Fern set the basket down. "Sit." Elsa sat and told her. The ledger. The baker in the tunnels. The horned thing under the fortress and the price still owed. Brynn's berries on Bodhi's doorstep. Jasper standing between them. Bodhi's lies and the lesson in the pines. The whisper on the lane, moving toward the boy right now. Fern did not smile the easy village smile. Her mouth stayed flat. Her green eyes stayed on Elsa's face the whole time, the way she watched a child who was building up to a lie. When Elsa finished, Fern picked up a strawberry and turned it in her fingers. "You want me between you and him," Fern said. "Not a regent. A teacher. Someone the mothers will hand him to." "Yes." "Then he comes to the schoolhouse tomorrow. With the others. He learns to read before he learns to rule." She looked past Elsa, toward the lane. "And the whisper. Send it here. This door holds." Elsa felt the sound at her shoulder pause, then thin, then go. The wolf's ears flicked once and settled. "Tomorrow," Elsa said. The whisper had not reached him. She had put a lock on the door in time.