Liliana Blossom's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

Liliana stayed at the spring until her knees ached. The pendant sat on the stone where she had left it, small and plain. She had meant it as a marker, a way to say she was coming. Now she saw what she had done. She had given away every carved thing she owned to the animals on the path. She had nothing left in her fur, nothing folded at her chest. A king did not open his door to a petitioner who arrived with empty hands. That would read as pride, or worse, as thinking her face was gift enough. She stood and turned back down the path. She walked until she found the painted stone she had set at the roots, the boulder-face with its blue lips and ring of neon ladybugs. Two rabbits still sat beside it. They lifted their heads when she came close. She knelt and asked, quietly, if she could take it back. The rabbits watched. She lifted the stone. They did not follow. She carried it under one arm and kept walking. Further on, she found the crooked purple treehouse again, and the same girl leaning on the rail, chewing a grape. "Back already," the girl said. "I need something to bring him," Liliana said. "Something made, not taken. I gave everything away." The girl looked at the painted stone under Liliana's arm and shook her head. "That's a doorstop. Not a first word." She climbed down and led Liliana around the trunk to a bench Liliana had not noticed before, a fat mushroom-topped seat wrapped in grape vine, the words tree hugger cut across its cap. Beneath the bench sat a stack of white boards and a jar of paint. "My aunt makes signs," the girl said. "For people who want to be found. You want the opposite. You want to be let in." She pulled out a board and pushed it into Liliana's hands. "Paint him one. Say who you are. Leave it where the shadow starts. If he wants you past it, he'll answer." Liliana sat on the mushroom bench and worked through the afternoon. She painted lilies along the border in the colors of her own fur, pink and cream and yellow. She painted an arrow at the top, pointing forward, into his silence. In the center she left the wood bare and wrote one line: I came to listen. A blue jay landed on the far edge while the paint was still wet and stayed there, watching her hand. When she lifted the board, the jay did not fly. It rode the corner as she walked. She carried the sign back past the spring, past the pendant she had left, and set it upright where the path first darkened. The jay hopped down onto its face and folded its wings. Liliana stepped back. She had something to offer now, and a witness to prove she had left it. She turned toward the shadow and waited to be answered.