Elsa Crane's Arc

Chapter 32 of 66

Elsa left Dahlia's door with two days on the clock and a wolf in the back of her mind. She walked the frost path toward her meeting hall and saw the moose again at the tree line. It had circled the village for a week now. Not stalking. Standing between the houses and the woods, its frost-crusted fur pale in the morning, its hollow stare fixed on whatever moved beyond the pines. Elsa had watched it turn a fox back from a child's yard. She thought of Dahlia's hood and Dahlia's dirty hands and Dahlia's eyes on Bodhi, and she understood she needed a witness in the room today. Not Nora. Not Fern. Something the boy would trust to mean protection. She crossed the yard and stopped ten paces from the animal. "Come to the hut," she said. "Stand at the door while I speak with her. If she turns on him, you turn on her." The moose lowered its head once. It followed her at a slow walk, hooves cracking the crust. Elsa sent for Dahlia. She sent for Bodhi to stay at the schoolhouse until she called. Then she waited in her driftwood hut with the arched roof and the door propped open, the moose filling the threshold like a wall. Dahlia came alone. She saw the animal and stopped. "You brought a guard." "I brought a witness," Elsa said. "Sit." Dahlia sat. Her fingernails scraped the wood. "You want to know if I hate him." "I want to know if he'll see it when you do." Dahlia's jaw worked. Somewhere under the floor a root groaned and shifted. Elsa heard it. The moose heard it and did not move. "He held the chalk this morning," Dahlia said. "He asked me if my mother had taught me letters. He asked kindly. And I wanted to break his small hand for asking." "Why." "Because no one taught me. Because you sat at this table for thirty years and let them cast me out. Because he gets the seat and I get to make him worthy of it." Another root cracked below. The moose's ear twitched. Elsa did not soften her face. "Then here is the offer. You teach him. You keep the anger off your face while you do it. And when the lesson ends, you come here. To this hut. You sit at this table and you tell me what he asked and what you wanted to do. Every day. Out loud. To me." Dahlia stared. "You'd listen." "I'd listen. That's the price of the seat at his table. Not the teaching. The telling." The roots stilled. Dahlia's shoulders dropped a finger's width. "Every day," she said. "Every day. Starting now. He comes at noon." Dahlia nodded once and left. The moose stayed in the doorway until she was gone from the yard.