Laurel Greymourner's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

The vine held the chisel against the back of Laurel's stone wrist. She could feel the point through the layers of rock, a small cold spot where iron met her frozen skin. She had held this chisel a thousand times in the shop by the water wheel, where her tools lined the walls and half-finished commissions waited under cloth. She knew its weight. She knew the angle it liked. She did not know how to swing it with a hand that was not hers. She started small. She thought down, and the vine tapped the chisel against the stone. A chip fell. It was the size of a fingernail, pale grey on the outside, indigo where the curse had soaked in. She tapped again. Another chip. The stone answered her the way stone always had. But the curse under the stone did not answer at all. The blue seep in the crack only spread wider, filling the gap she had opened. She worked through the night. Chip by chip, she cut a shallow trench along the back of her wrist. The path stones glowed to keep her company. Black butterflies lifted off her shoulders and settled again. At her feet, the knot of blue vines thickened. New shoots pushed up between the old ones and locked her ankles deeper. Every strike she landed on her wrist, the tangle at her feet grew another finger's width. She understood then. The chisel could cut stone. It could not cut the curse. The curse was not in the rock. The rock was only where the curse had chosen to live. She could carve all night and only hollow out a shell around a thing she could not touch. She tried once more anyway. She lined the chisel up over the joint of her thumb, where her hand pressed against her cheek. If she could free one finger, she could see. She thought down, harder this time. The vine drove the chisel in. The stone cracked, but the crack ran the wrong way. It jumped from her wrist up into her jaw. She felt it split across her mouth and climb toward her closed eye. Indigo welled out of the new fracture and ran down her chin. A piece of her shoulder broke off and fell into the grass. Somewhere behind her, a tall pillar she had struck earlier split from top to base, blue light pouring from the seam. Laurel stopped. She held the chisel still against her ruined face. She was not going to carve her way out. The willows had given her a hand. They had not given her an answer. She would have to ask them for the next thing, and the next thing was not a tool. It was a name. The name of whoever had stood behind her that morning and spoken the curse into her back.