Gemma Silvestre's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

The dark carriage stopped outside Gemma's school at dusk. Pale horses stood still as bone. The Mirrorstone on her dress pulsed cold against her chest. Its face had gone sharp and watchful. Gemma pressed her hand over the stone and stepped out to meet the rider. The rider was a hunched old woman in a moth-eaten velvet coat. Edna Mull. She set a folding table on the grass and opened a ledger thick with names. Gemma knew her from the crossroads. People said Edna traded in debts no one remembered owing. "You hold something that belongs in my book," Edna said. Her smile did not reach her eyes. "The Mirrorstone. I have come to collect." She tapped a blank line in the ledger. "Sign, or give it freely. Either way, I leave with the stone." Gemma did not move. "It is set in my dress. It opens my school. You will not take it." Then the air near the carriage went thin and cold. A flock of ghosts rose from behind it. They drifted up, soft and weightless, their faces wide with fright. They swarmed toward Gemma. She stumbled back against her own door. Steps sounded on the path. A chipmunk mother came fast, skillet in one paw, flour still on her apron. Hazel Acornwood. Behind her walked a tall figure in a navy coat, tentacles trailing on the ground. Captain Chromis Deepwater, the fishing quarter captain. Both had come running at the chill. "Those are hungry things," Hazel said. "Hungry things take. Robbed my acorn tin all autumn. I know the look." She raised the skillet. Chromis studied the ghosts, then the stone. "They mirror," he said. "Fear calls fear. Calm calls calm. Same as any wild thing." Gemma understood at once. The Mirrorstone fed back whatever stood near it. The ghosts were afraid, so they spread fear. She unpinned the stone and held it high. She fixed her mind on her workbench, on steady hands cutting a flawless gem. The face in the stone grew still and sure. The nearest ghost drifted close and stared into the glass. Its wide eyes softened. Its mouth closed. One by one the flock calmed. They sank low and drifted off toward the pond behind the school, quiet now, trailing over the peach-colored rocks like mist. Edna's hands shook. Without her ghosts she had nothing. She snapped the ledger shut. "This is not finished," she said. She folded her table, climbed into the carriage, and the pale horses pulled her into the dark. Gemma pinned the stone back to her dress. "Thank you," she told Hazel and Chromis. "Both of you." Chromis nodded once. "She signs names," he said. "Yours is in her book now, unpaid. She will come back with worse." Gemma looked at the empty road. The stone had saved her. But it had also marked her. Edna knew exactly what the Mirrorstone could do now, and she would not come alone again.