Elsa Crane's Arc

Chapter 22 of 66

The clapping faded from Elsa's ears by nightfall, but the worry didn't. A crown on a boy's head was not a village's love. She had watched the elders' wives at the ceremony. They smiled at Bodhi, then looked at Jasper, then looked at each other. Warmth for the boy would not come from a woodcarver with big hands. It had to come from someone the women already trusted at their own kitchen tables. Fern came to the meeting hut in the morning with snow on her boots and the crystal key in her fist. Bodhi trailed behind her, chalk on his fingers. Fern shut the door and did not sit. "They're polite to him," she said. "That's not the same as fond." "I know." "I have an idea. My aunt." Fern watched Elsa's face. "Clara Covett. She catches half the babies in this village. Every mother in Alpenglow has trusted her with a screaming child at three in the morning. If Clara stands beside Bodhi at the next gathering and treats him like her own, the wives will follow." Elsa knew Clara. Rosy cheeks. A braid that never came loose. A strawberry wreath on her door that had hung there longer than Bodhi had been alive. "She'll ask why." "She'll ask everything," Fern said. "She raised me after my mother went. She won't take a soft version." "Then bring her." Clara came that afternoon, stamping snow off her boots inside the door, already smiling before she'd looked around. She kissed Fern's cheek. She looked at Elsa the way a midwife looks at a laboring woman — measuring, not warm. "You crowned a child," Clara said. "Fern says you need me to make him lovable. Sit down and tell me what I'm walking into." Elsa sat. She told her the parts a midwife could carry. Bodhi was young. Jasper was a wall, not a mother. The women needed a woman they already trusted to lean toward the boy in public. She left out the ledger. She left out the creature. Fern's hand on the table said, later. Clara listened without moving. When Elsa finished, Clara said, "I'll do it. But he learns from me too. Village trust isn't a smile. It's remembering which child had croup last winter and asking after him first. I'll teach him that." "Teach him," Elsa said. Clara took Bodhi's chalky hand across the table. The boy looked up at her. She smiled at him the way she smiled at newborns, and Bodhi, who lied for a living, smiled back like he meant it. Elsa walked them to the door. Through the window she saw the pale wolf at the tree line, blue eyes on Clara now, not on her. Something had shifted. She had her warm hand. She had also given Fern's aunt a seat at a table where names got marked in a book — and the wolf had noticed.