Elsa Crane's Arc

Chapter 54 of 66

Elsa slept two hours after the town meeting and woke with the taste of iron in her mouth. The crowning was at midday. She had one thing left to do before she stood in the library, and she could not do it in front of the guardians. She sent Wren to fetch Nancy again, alone, to the driftwood hut. Nancy came fast. She stepped through the arched door and set a covered basket on the vine-woven table by the potion bottles. She did not ask why. She read Elsa's face and pulled the stool close. "The warmth isn't a smile," Elsa said. "That's what the mothers think. It's what I've never told anyone. If you're going to speak it into him when my voice goes, you need the words." Nancy folded her hands in her lap. "Tell me." Elsa reached for the silver-and-gold lantern on the shelf and set it on the table between them. She turned the small key. The star inside brightened until the vines on the table glowed pale. She kept her hand on the lantern's frame. "You look at each mother by name," Elsa said. "You hold her child in your mind while you look. You say: I see you, and I see what you carry, and I will carry it with you. You don't smile until you mean it. If you smile before you mean it, they feel the lie. That's what breaks a village. Not sickness. Not frost. The lie in the smile." Nancy's eyes did not move from her face. "Say it back," Elsa said. Nancy said it back. Word for word. Then again, slower, with her own weight on I will carry it with you. "Good," Elsa said. "When you speak it into Bodhi tomorrow, you say his name first. Then the words. Then you name three children in the room. Larissa's boy. The Peters girl. The cobbler's twins as one. That's the seal. The mothers hear their own children inside the warmth. That's what binds him." Nancy repeated the names. She repeated the order. She did not write anything down. "Once more," Elsa said. Nancy said the whole rite through, from I see you to the last child's name, without a pause. Elsa closed the lantern. The vines went dim. She let her hand fall from the frame and felt her arm shake against the table. "It's in you now," Elsa said. "If I stand tomorrow, I speak it. If I don't, you do. Either way it lands on him." "Either way," Nancy said. Elsa lay back on the cot. She had spent the last of the morning and she knew it. But the secret was out of her and into someone the village already trusted. The rite could finish without her voice. Whatever her body did at midday, Bodhi would be crowned warm.