Lily Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 5 of 17

The slope was steeper than it looked from the lip. Lily started down and the ground did not push back against her feet. She drifted a step sideways for every step forward. The flask in her palm held one squeeze of cold. If she spent it now, she would reach the fire with nothing. If she waited, she would slide off the hill into the trees and lose the path. She stopped between two pines and pressed the flask against her chest. A small shape sat on a root below her. A black cat, watching. Its tail moved once. It did not run when she came closer. It walked three steps down the slope and looked back. "You want me to follow you," Lily said. The cat did not answer. It walked again. Lily tried to walk in its prints. The prints held her better than open ground. She kept her feet where the cat had been, and the drift eased. Halfway down, another ghost stepped out from behind a trunk. A small girl in a white dress, bare feet on the pine needles. She did not speak. She held out both hands. Lily saw a second flask in them, smaller, with gold bands and a green shine inside. The girl pushed it toward her. Lily shook her head. "I can't take what you need." The girl set the flask on a flat stone and stepped back into the trunk she had come from. Only her face stayed a moment, then that was gone too. Lily picked up the small flask. It was warm, not cold. A different kind of anchor. She did not know the rules of it. She put it in her pocket and kept the old one in her hand. The cat waited three trees down. Behind her, up the slope, a pale drifting shape watched from a branch and did not come closer. A hill ghost. It had not come to help. It had come to see if she made it. At the bottom the trees opened. The fire sat in a metal bucket on the ground, clean and contained, not a wild burn. The smell of her mother's garden poured up out of it in a slow column. Someone had fed it leaf by leaf. No one stood beside it. On a log by the bucket sat a folded paper with her name on the outside, and next to the paper, a green cloth she knew. Marrow's cloth, from the satchel. Lily squeezed the last of the cold flask and stepped into the clearing. The glass went quiet in her hand and did not warm again. She was in. She had reached the fire, and whoever had lit it had already gone, and had left the note and the cloth for her to find. The clearing where she had died was empty, and it was waiting.