Linny Marsh's Arc

Chapter 5 of 8

Linny stood in the frostwood cluster with her charcoal in her hand and watched the gray creature watch her. It had led her off her route and into a wood no map had shown her. It would not stay her guide forever if she could not keep up. The trees pressed close. The ice on the branches threw the light back in a hundred small flashes, and every trunk looked like the last. She took three steps forward to test the ground. When she looked back, the gap she had come through was already gone. The trunks behind her looked the same as the trunks ahead. She turned in a slow circle. Every direction was the same silver flare of ice and bark. The creature waited ten paces off. It swung its flat head to see if she was coming. She could not tell it she was lost. She could tell it she needed a moment. "Wait," she said. It sat. Linny knelt and opened her bundle. Rope. Blanket. Journal. Food she could not spare. She had no ribbon, no chalk, no paint that would show on frost. She had her coat. She put the charcoal between her teeth and worked her knife under a seam on the inside of her hem. The stitches she had sewn last spring gave with a small clean sound. She cut a strip of painted cloth the length of her forearm. Purple and yellow. Her own hand had made those marks. She could see them from twenty paces in this light. She tied the strip around a low branch at eye height. It hung bright against the ice. She cut another. She cut a third. The creature stood up. It did not like the stopping. It took a step north and looked back. "I'm coming," Linny said. "I have to see where I've been." She cut until her hem was ragged and her coat was shorter at the front than the back. She counted twelve strips folded into her pocket. She stood and followed the creature, and every twenty paces she tied one to a branch at the height of her own eyes. The cluster went on longer than she thought a wood could. Twice she stopped, looked back, and found her last marker exactly where it should be, a small bright flag between the trunks. Her chest loosened each time. On the twelfth strip the creature stopped. It sat down in the snow and did not go forward. Ahead the trees thinned. Through the last trunks Linny saw a clearing, and in the clearing the light did not move. “This is not the place,” she huffed. The creature laid down. Linny walked into the clearing with a frown. She’d walked all day. It was growing dark and she was nowhere near finding her magical landscape.