Lady Cordelia Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Cordelia climbed the far bank and lost the trail again. The torn cuff had pointed her here, to dry ground she had never touched. But the ground gave her nothing. No footprint. No marker. No moth to lead her. She turned in a slow circle and saw only the black swamp behind and a wall of dead cane ahead. The trail ended at the water's edge, and she could not tell where he had fled next. She pressed her hands to her face. Years of circling had taught her one thing: standing still was defeat. So she opened the locket at her chest. His warped portrait stared up through the cracked glass. Twice now his face had summoned a guide. She held the locket toward the mud and thought of him hard. Nothing rose from the water. She waited, cold and afraid. Then a small shape stirred at the bank's edge. A salamander crawled from the mud, pale as a gutted fish. Its damp body lurched over a root. It did not flee her. It lifted its blunt head and looked at her, the way the moth once had, the way the gar once had. She understood. The water had guided her. Now the land would. But the salamander did not move toward the cane. It turned back to the mud and began to dig. Its small feet scraped the wet earth beside a rotted stalk. Cordelia knelt. She pushed her fingers into the muck where the salamander scratched. Cold cloth met her hand. She pulled. A strip of dark fabric came loose, frayed and heavy with mud. Another piece of his cuff. He had not fled into the cane. He had turned along the bank, and the salamander marked the way. She followed it. The pale creature crawled along the water's edge, past the wall of broken sugarcane. The stalks stood rotted and bent, spotted with mold, thick with crawling beetles. She kept the locket open and the salamander in sight. It stopped where the bank rose into firmer land. There, half-sunk in the mud, lay a boot. A man's boot, split at the seam, the leather cracked and old. Cordelia lifted it in both hands. It was his. She knew the shape of his stride, the weight he had carried the night he drowned her. He had come this far and lost his boot in the mud. He had gone on, wounded, slower now. The salamander sank into the water and was gone. She did not need it anymore. The boot told her more than a marker could. He had left the swamp here. The trail climbed toward high ground, toward a house or a road she had never seen. She stood and faced the rise. The water no longer held her. For the first time she walked away from the swamp entirely, the boot clutched to her chest, following a man who could no longer run fast enough to escape her.