Kate Bush's Arc

Chapter 21 of 21

Will slept on. Kate sat by the fire with her list of written questions on her knee. Every line had a mark beside it now. Where he went. How he died. What took his voice. Who kept him. All answered. She should have felt done. Instead her hand kept turning the paper over, looking for the questions she had not thought to write. Elara came in from the garden with dirt on her sleeves. She set a purple bottle on the table beside the empty green one. "For him, when he wakes," she said. "It puts the blood back where it belongs." Kate nodded and did not move. Elara watched her a moment. "You have that look. The look of a woman with a new question." "She said the trade lasts until her next debt," Kate said. "What debt. Owed to who. When." Elara sat down slowly. "I do not know. She takes on debts the way a river takes on rain. Any of them could tip." Kate lifted the paper. "Then I need to ask her. One more time. Before she forgets my face is a face she cannot see." Marrow came in from the porch with the collie at her heel. She had heard. "She will not come for you now," Marrow said. "You made sure of it." "Then I go to where she can be reached," Kate said. "Not the hill. Not tonight. I cannot climb it again in this body." She looked at the green bottle on the table. Empty. Then at Elara. "You said the drinker speaks where the dead speak. Is there another dose." Elara went to a shelf and came back with a second small green bottle. The liquid inside threw green light on her hand. "One," she said. "The last I have. Drink it and you reach where she listens. But she does not have to answer, and you cannot bargain twice in one turn of the moon." Kate uncorked it and drank before she could weigh it further. The room slid. She was in the orchard again and not in the orchard. The lost ghost girl stood at her elbow in a white dress, barefoot on the grass, and pointed past a patch of wild daisies toward the sagging shape of Creakfall House. The pale woman was not there. But the girl was, and the girl heard the dead. Kate spoke past her, into the air the pale woman breathed. "What debt comes next. Name it." The girl's mouth moved with words that were not her own. "A promise on the hill. A child not brought home. Owed by the plant woman. Due at the next new moon." Then the girl was only a girl again, and she was crying without sound. Kate came back to the cottage floor with the answer in her mouth and no time to hold it. Three nights to the new moon. Elara was the debt. When Elara paid, the pale woman would see them again. Kate folded the paper of answered questions and put it in the fire. She would need a new list by morning.