Madame Celeste Gearhart's Arc

Chapter 9 of 24

Three days after Mei-Ling swam home, Celeste tested the limit she feared most. She stood at her workbench and pressed both hands to the ghost-silver. She reached out through the totem and called every restless spirit in Everblack at once. They came. The candle guttered. The crow shrieked. But the single core in the totem could not feed them all. Halfway through the binding, the pull went weak. Spirits slipped her grip and scattered back into the fog. The stone cooled. Celeste sagged against the table, breathing hard. One core split her commands well. It could never power the whole swamp. She needed a second source of power, and she knew where sap ran green with poison. Celeste took her cane and her cutting knife and limped out into the marsh. She followed the black water until the tree loomed above her. Its trunk twisted like rope. Its canopy hung heavy with poison-green caps that dripped slow onto the roots. Steam-bugs died at its base. Old bones lay tangled in its roots. This tree drank the dead, and the dead answered it. Its sap could hold spirits the way her core did. Celeste cut into the dark bark. Green sap welled up and ran down the blade. She caught it in a clay jar. A cap shifted overhead. A low hum rose from the roots, like many voices at once. The spirits already tangled here did not want to be tapped. A root lashed loose from the mud and coiled toward her ankle. Celeste struck it with her cane and pulled back. She kept cutting. She filled the jar and sealed it before the tree could take her too. Back at the cottage, she worked through the night. She hollowed a channel beside the core and poured the poison sap into it. She fed a thread of ghost-silver through both. Then she pressed her hands to the totem and called again. The sap woke cold and hungry. It pulled with the core, not against it. Twice the power now flowed through her hands. Spirits poured in from every corner of Everblack, and this time none slipped free. She held them. All of them. The crow went silent on her shoulder. The whole swamp bent to her will at once. Celeste lifted her hands, shaking, and the totem still held its charge. She had solved it. One core and one poison well, joined, could bind the dead across all of Everblack. The master totem was nearly whole. But the sap did not sleep. It kept pulling after she let go. It fed on the spirits she'd bound and wanted more. Celeste watched the ghost-silver glow long after her command should have ended. She had built a totem strong enough to hold Everblack. Now she had to learn to hold the totem.