Linny Marsh's Arc

Chapter 22 of 22

Linny came home with her sister, a strange fae, a little boy, and a fox. The vines along the stone walls of the shop were bright with late sun. Her father was thinner than the woods had left her. She let herself be held. Then she went upstairs and slept for a day and a half. The dreams started the first night. The grove was always the same. The warm stone under her hand. The girl in the green dress on the other side. The light moving the way magical light moves. It sparkled with colors she’d never seen. Whispy and free willed. Every night the girl said something a little different. Once she said, "Mix the blue colder." Once she said, "You already know the shape of the door." Once she only pointed at Linny's hands. Linny woke each morning with the color still behind her eyes. By breakfast it was gone. By noon she could not remember what the girl had said, only that the girl had said it. On the fourth morning she went down to the shop and asked her sister for a blank book. Her sister found one under the counter, cloth-bound, the pages rough. She did not ask what it was for. She put it in Linny's hands and went back to her thread. Linny took the book to the upstairs window. She wrote the date. She wrote, The stone was warm. The girl told me to mix the blue colder. She wrote every line she could still hold from the night before. When the words ran out she opened her paint box and mixed the blue. It was not right. She mixed it again. On the third try the color on her brush matched the color in her head for one breath before the memory slid. She painted that breath onto the page. A curve of frost. The edge of a stone. A bare foot at the corner, half turned away. She worked until her hand cramped. Then she wrote underneath: Not ready. Getting closer. Downstairs a bell rang and someone came in for a fitting. Her sister's voice moved through the floor, calm, working. Her father coughed once and then did not cough again. Linny turned the page. She did this every morning for a week. The book filled unevenly. Some pages were only words. Some were only color. The grove did not come clearer, but it stopped fading. She could hold one detail a day now, and the book held the rest. On the seventh night the girl in the dream did not speak. She only stepped back from the stone and waited, as if to see whether Linny would follow. Linny woke before dawn. She opened the book to a clean page and wrote one line at the top. When I am ready, I will know the way in.