Lady Cordelia Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Cordelia followed the moth past the mound of half-sunken relics. Bones and rusted fragments broke the dark water. Flowers glowed pale on the old bog. The moth flew ahead, low and steady, marking the trail her lover had left. She trailed her torn glove through the muck and kept close. Then the moth lifted higher. It crossed a stretch of black open water and vanished into the night. She stopped at the water's edge. The dark closed around her. She looked for the moth and found nothing. She looked for the next marker her lover had left and saw only black. Without the moth's faint blue glow, the trail disappeared. She drifted forward, then back. She had lost the path again. "No," she whispered. "Not again." She would not circle for years more. She looked down at the locket on her chest. She opened its cracked face. His warped portrait stared up. The moth had come to that same portrait once and led her here. She pressed the locket open in her cold hand and held it toward the water. Nothing moved. She waited. She thought of his face, his eyes, the night he pushed her under. She held the memory hard and would not let it fade. A shape stirred beneath the surface. A long fish rose, heavy and slow. Its body caught the little light with a smooth, waxy sheen. An alligator gar, lurching upward, its snout scarred and its teeth pale. It did not snap. It turned its blunt head toward her, then swung toward the far shore. Cordelia understood. The moth had guided her by air. Now the water would guide her. She followed the gar's slow wake across the black stretch. It swam in a straight line, the same as the moth had flown. She kept the locket open and the gar in sight. The fish slowed near a low bank. There, wedged in the mud, something small and dark stood upright. She drifted closer. It was a marker, a carved stub of wood driven into the bank. Beside it lay a second thing, half-buried. She reached down. Her fingers passed through cold cloth. Velvet. Frayed. A scrap torn from a cuff, not a glove. His cuff. He had stopped here too. He had left another piece of himself in the mud. The gar sank away beneath the water and was gone. Cordelia lifted her head. The bank climbed toward dry ground she had never touched. The moth was lost, but the trail was not. She had found the next marker without it. She would not need a guide again. She followed the torn cuff's direction and moved toward the far shore, closer now to the man who had drowned her.