Laurel Greymourner's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

Laurel held the chisel still against her cracked jaw and listened. The willows had gone quiet the way a room goes quiet before a door opens. Then the branches above her shifted, all at once, and a thought pressed into her mind. Someone had crossed the stones at the far gate. The willows showed her the place in her head: the grey boundary rocks split with glowing blue, the ones that had marked the entrance since before the curse. Something had stepped between them. Something whose magic her own magic recognized on sight. Laurel could not turn her head, but the willows turned it for her. Through their eyes she saw a trail cutting through the garden. The vines that ringed the paths had been shoved aside in a long dragging line, and where they lay bent, they had gone black. A knot of dark thorned strands hung from one of the low branches, still swaying. Whoever walked toward her left rot in the leaves behind them. Laurel knew that mark. It was the same magic that had climbed her feet. Magic knows its own magic. Between two trunks she caught a slip of black cloth. A hood. Long brown hair loose against the shoulder. The robe moved past a bush and was gone, then showed again nearer, between the next pair of willows. Laurel had only seen this woman once, from the corner of her eye, the morning the stone took her. She had not forgotten the shape of the sleeves. Mirella Blackthorn had come back. The butterflies moved before Laurel decided anything. They lifted from the grass in a black cloud and settled over her face, her shoulders, her folded hands. Wings packed tight against the stone. Laurel's view of the garden went dark. The willows' view went with it. The butterflies were hiding her, and in hiding her they had blinded her too. She could hear her own breath in the shell of wings. She could hear footsteps on the path, closer now, slower. Laurel reached for the vines at her feet. She had moved one before. She thought down into the whole tangle now, into every blue coil around her ankles, and she pushed. The vines tore free of the ground and shot forward along the path. She felt the willows lean in behind her. Their roots cracked the soil open. Thorned loops the width of a man's chest burst up between Mirella and the statue, one after another, walling the path. Something struck the first loop hard. A woman's voice cut off in a short sound. The vines drew tight. The footsteps stopped. The butterflies did not lift. Laurel held her captive in the dark, blind, and waited to hear her name spoken by the mouth that had cursed her.