Madame Celeste Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 22 of 24

Percival's brass buckle still sat on Celeste's workbench when the totem woke her at dawn. Its brass cradle rattled. The wards Gideon had wired around it hummed a warning note. She swung down from her bed, took her cane, and crossed the gear-cluttered floor of her tree cottage. She laid her palm on the totem. Baron Shadowveil stirred inside, and she felt it clearly. It was too strong. Her word to feed had become a request. Soon it would stop asking. She pressed her mind against the spirit. Sleep, she ordered. The purple skull inside the totem turned its green eyes toward her and did not obey at once. It waited, weighing her. Then it sank back. But the pause had lasted a breath too long. The totem's hold on the Baron was slipping, and every corpse she fed it widened the crack. She could bind all the dead of Everblack only if she could still command what she bound. A servant she could not stop was no servant. Celeste needed a leash the Baron could not chew through. She thought of the marsh, and the twisted tree with its poison-green caps. Its sap had doubled her totem's power. But raw force had made the Baron stronger, not tamer. She needed a cage, not a whip. She went out to the plant at the edge of her dock. The carnivorous bloom rose on thick coiling stems, its fanged mouth open and wet. She had fed it pirate corpses and Percival both. It hungered like everything she owned now. That was the answer. Hunger against hunger. She cut a length of ghost-silver wire and wound it through the plant's stem. Then she carried a shard of the poison tree's bark and worked it into the totem beside the Baron's chamber. When the Baron next pulled for freedom, its own force would run down the wire into the waiting mouth of the plant. The plant would drink the spirit-force meant for escape. The more the Baron strained, the more the bloom fed, and the weaker the Baron grew. She tested it. She loosened her hold and let Baron Shadowveil rise. The skull lifted from the totem, green eyes bright, torn shadow spreading. It reached for the door. The plant's stems went taut. Its fanged mouth flushed dark, drinking. The Baron's shadow thinned. Its reach shortened. It looked at the plant, then at Celeste, and understood. It could hunger, or it could roam. It could not do both. The Baron sank back, sullen, held. Celeste leaned on her cane and breathed. She had her leash. But she saw the shape of the trap she had built for herself. The plant that caged the Baron now hungered too, and it fed on the same spirit-force she needed to bind Everblack. She had one mouth watching another. Both were still growing.