Kate Bush's Arc

Chapter 20 of 21

Will slept. Kate kept her hand on his wrist and watched the fire. Outside, the thread of the lure thinned to nothing. Elara felt it go. She set a small green bottle on the table beside the hearth. The liquid inside caught the light and threw green stars on the wall. "The hunter will circle back," Elara said. "She saw your face on the hill. She has his scent from the ritual. Walls will not hold her twice." Kate looked at Will. His chest rose and fell. He had been dead. She would not lose him again to a thing that hunted by faces and smells. "Then we take those from her," Kate said. "Tell me how." Elara tapped the green bottle. "One dose. Drinker sees what the dead see and speaks where they speak. You go out to her. Not with salt. With a bargain." Marrow set down her cup. "She does not bargain." "She does," Elara said. "For payment she wants. A moss debt bought me guides on the hill. A face and a scent are smaller things." Kate uncorked the bottle. The old woman put a hand on her wrist. "Understand it. She will take the memory of your face from her own knowing. She will take his scent from the air she reads. In trade she takes something from you. She chooses. You cannot barter that part." Kate thought of the three years of soup gone cold. She thought of Will's pulse under her thumb. "Fine." She drank. The room slid sideways. The fire went quiet. Kate saw the orchard through two sets of eyes at once, her own and something colder. The lost ghost girl stood at the window with her palm on the glass, waiting. Kate stepped outside. The girl walked ahead of her between the trees and stopped at a bare patch of ground. The pale woman was already there. Tall. Still. Her mouth a thin line. Kate spoke, and her voice carried where the living voice would not. "Take my face from your memory. Take his scent from the wind. I will give you what you name for it." The pale woman tilted her head. She lifted one long finger and touched Kate above the heart. Kate felt something come loose there. A morning. A kitchen. A pot of soup she had made for a brother who never came home. The taste of that day thinned and went out. The pale woman closed her hand and the memory was gone. Then she turned her head as if listening, and could not find what she had been listening for. She walked into the trees and did not look back. Kate came back to herself on the cottage floor. Elara was watching her. "She is blind to you now," Elara said. "Blind to him. It will not last past the next debt she is owed. But tonight he sleeps." Kate touched Will's wrist. She could not remember the soup. She remembered him.