Lily Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 17 of 17

Selene gave Orin the potion in a cup of water at his own kitchen table. He drank it without knowing. Ten minutes later he stood up and walked out the door with them, his face slack, his feet steady. Rose walked ahead. Lily walked at her mother's side, invisible to everyone but Rose. Elspeth followed behind Orin. Ollie ran ahead to scout the path. The hollow lay past the church wall and down through a thin belt of trees. The path to Lily's grave ran open the whole way. Farmers used it to cut through to the north fields. A boy on a cart could pass at any moment. Lily understood the problem before Elspeth spoke it. Elspeth needed a quiet circle. She needed the earth undisturbed and no living eye on her while she pulled the buried truth up through Orin's hands. One stranger on the path would break it. "We need the path shut," Elspeth said. "I cannot work with feet passing." "How long," Rose said. "Long enough to make him dig with his own hands and name what he did into the dirt." Ollie came back down the path fast. "Two men with a hay cart at the top. Coming this way." Lily looked at her mother. Then at Elspeth. Then at the small pale ghost girl who had drifted up beside Ollie, the one who had given Lily the second flask on the slope. The girl held Lily's eye and did not speak. "I can turn them," Lily said. "Mother. Walk back up. Tell them a woman collapsed on the low road. Send them the long way around. She," Lily nodded at the pale girl, "can walk behind you and shift the light so they hurry." Rose did not argue. She turned and went back up the path with the ghost girl trailing at her heel. Selene stayed with Orin, one hand on his sleeve. Elspeth stepped off the path into the hollow and knelt at the headstone. She set her palms flat on the turned earth above Lily's body. Lily heard the cart stop up the slope. She heard her mother's voice, plain and short, telling the lie. She heard the cart creak and turn. The wheels went away east. Ollie came back. "Path's shut. She sent them around. No one else in sight." Elspeth opened her eyes. "Bring him." Selene walked Orin to the edge of the grave. Elspeth took his wrists and pressed his palms down into the dirt over his sister's body. The soil darkened under his hands. Orin's mouth opened. He began to speak, low and even, the words not his own choosing. He named the clearing. He named the note. He named the log he had used. Up the slope, Rose stood alone on the closed path and listened to her son confess into the earth.