Linny Marsh's Arc

Chapter 16 of 22

The fire ate the last twig by midnight. Linny watched the flame drop from finger-high to a knuckle. Below the platform, the wood-and-ice creature had not moved. Its blue eye still burned in the dark. If the fire died, she would sleep. If she slept, she would not wake. She checked her pockets again. Empty. She pried at the platform boards with her knife. The nails held. She peeled a strip of bark from the pine trunk beside her and fed it in. It smoked and curled and gave almost no heat. Her hand went to the inside pocket. The journal was there. The stolen one. The one with the sketches and the coordinates and the notes in three different hands. The one she had crossed a ravine for. The one the barefoot girl had told her to go home from. She pulled it out and set it on her knee. She tore the first page slow. It was a margin sketch, not one of the good ones. It caught fast and burned bright. Her fingers warmed. She tore the next. A list of supplies in someone else's handwriting. Then a page of her own, copied from the grove — the warm stone, the light with no source. She fed that one in too. The flame jumped. Below, the creature tilted its head. Ice cracked along its antlers as it shifted. The blue eye did not blink. She worked through the pages one by one. Coordinates. A rough map of the ridge. A sketch she had made of the girl's bare feet on snow. Each page bought her ten minutes. Each page was a step she would not be able to retrace. She kept the last four. The three original artists' notes on where the place lay. The girl's answer on the back of her own: GO HOME. YOU'RE NOT READY. She held those over the flame and did not drop them. The rest of the journal went in. Cover and all. The leather stank as it burned. The fire climbed for a moment and threw her shadow long across the boards. Dawn came gray through the trunks. The fire was ash. Her hands were stiff but they worked. Her feet were still hers. She pulled her boots on and looked over the edge. The creature was gone. The snow at the base of the pine showed no tracks leading away, only a melted patch where it had sat. Linny climbed down the frayed ladder. She folded the four saved pages into her inside pocket and pressed her hand flat against them through the coat. The dream was smaller now. Four pages instead of a book. But she had walked out with it, and she knew the way back began at the ridge, and the ridge was south. She started walking.