Inkthorn the Drawn's Arc

Chapter 6 of 7

Inkthorn returned to the pavilion at dawn and found the sand dark and wet. The basin had split down one side overnight. A thin crack ran from its lip to its base, and the ink he had spilled the day before was already leaving him. It crept into the soil in a slow black tongue. Every drop that reached the earth was a drop he could not get back. He knelt beside the basin and pressed his flat hand against the crack. His fingers left no mark. He could not lift stone as a drawing. He could not seal the leak from the page. To fix it he would have to rise, and rising would cost him more ink, and more ink would fall through the same crack he was trying to close. The pilgrims came when the light grew. The builder woman touched the split stone and shook her head. Freeze got under it, she said. It will not hold water again without new stone and a full day to set. Inkthorn watched the ink pool slide lower. He did not have a full day. He had minutes. A girl stepped out of the group with a folder under one arm. She said her name was Lily Morrison. She was not a pilgrim. She had followed the path up from the forest looking for someone who might have seen her sister. She set the folder down in the sand and knelt at the basin without asking permission. Move the ink first, she said. Fix the basin after. You need something to hold it now. She pulled a leather glove from her folder, dark with old ink stains and wrapped in green vines from the forest. An offering someone had left on the path, she said. She scooped the vines aside and used the glove to lift a flat, pitted stone from beside the basin. The stone was already stained black from an older spill. She set it under the crack so the ink ran onto its porous surface and soaked in instead of vanishing into the ground. Then she took the small figures from the nearby shelf-shrine, tipped their clay bowls empty, and lined them along the basin's inner wall to catch what still pooled inside. Inkthorn rose. He held three-dimensional form for the count of thirty and pushed his palms flat against the crack from the inside. His ink filled the split as he drained. When he collapsed back to the page, the crack was sealed with a dark seam of himself. The basin held. The pooled ink stayed. The stained stone under the lip held the rest. He was thinner than he had been in days. He could feel the missing weight in his own lines. But the ink was still his, gathered in bowls and stone and seam, witnessed by a girl who had come looking for something else. Lily picked up her folder. She said, Now help me read this.