Ember's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

The fragment on Elara's forearm was only half the mark. The rest waited behind her old master's door, days away. But Ember would not send the girl to steal blind. If Elara copied the wrong strokes, the mark would fail, or worse. So they stayed in the dead keeper's tower one more day. Ember meant to learn which lines on the wall were safe before they risked anything. Elara knelt by the lowest band of carvings. She traced each groove with one finger. "This part I know," she said. "This part I don't. Some of these strokes are banishing. Some are just the keeper's name. I can't tell which." Ember lowered herself beside her. Her gray ankle dragged. She could not read the marks now. Her eyes were too far gone. But she had watched the old keeper cut them, long ago, and her memory held more than her hands could. "Copy nothing yet," Ember said. "Read them to me. Out loud. One stroke at a time." Elara frowned, then obeyed. She named each line as she touched it. Ember listened. When the girl reached a looping cut, Ember stopped her. "That one is dead weight. The keeper's signature. I watched him add it. It does nothing." Elara's jaw tightened. "You're sure." "I'm sure of that one." They worked down the band like that. Elara's voice, Ember's memory. Hour by hour. The girl's finger moved; the old woman called out live or dead. Some marks Ember could not place. Those they left alone. But the shape underneath grew clear. The real banishing mark was shorter than it looked. Half the wall was decoration. By dusk Elara stood and pulled the spare staff from her back. She set its tip against her own forearm, against the fragment cut there. Then she laid the clean strokes beside it in the dust, drawing with the staff's point. She compared the two. Her hand did not shake. "It fits," she said. "The part I stole and the part you remember. Together they make one mark. I know every stroke now. Which to cut and which to skip." Ember let out a long breath. The knowledge was out of the dead keeper's wall and into a living head at last. Her own work could end. It would end in Elara. "Then you don't need the rest from your master," Ember said. Elara went still. She looked at the staff, at her arm, at the wall. "No," she said slowly. "I have the whole mark. But a mark is only half of it." She touched the fragment. "He never taught me how to power it. How to hold a banishing without the light calling the blight straight to us. That part isn't on this wall. It's in his head." The reading was done. Elara knew the shape. But to cut it safely, she still had to face the man who had kept her small for six years.