Mama Grizelda's Arc

Chapter 1 of 11

Mama Grizelda knelt at the edge of the black water and counted the bubbles. Nine of them rose where the traveler went under last night. Nine breaths the ghost had swallowed. She had bound drowned spirits before, her whole life spent teaching the marsh to keep its dead. But this ghost had grown fat on fresh drowning, and she felt it in her bark-rough hands. They shook. Her white and gold robes hung heavy with cold. She was too old, and Gregor was too strong now. The water bulged. A shape rose from it, black as a hole in the world, hood empty, gray hands trailing mist. Gregor. The reeds bent away from it. Grizelda scattered ash in a ring and spoke the old binding words. The ghost only drifted closer. Her ring of ash meant nothing to it. The dead boy's breath was still inside it, and that breath made it deaf to her. "You waste your ash, old moss-head." Grizelda turned. A one-eyed woman stood among the reeds in a long black shawl. Under the shawl showed a purple dress, the kind worn generations ago. Mira Blackwood. She had not spoken to Grizelda in twenty years, not since they argued over the old rites. But Mira alone still remembered how a drowned ghost was truly bound. "You need what it took," Mira said. "Not ash. A thing the drowned one carried." A boy pushed out of the reeds behind her. Small, blonde, blue eyes too old for his face. He held a wet book against his chest. "Found this snagged on a root," said Jack Crabtree. "Figured somebody'd pay for it." He was a thief; Grizelda saw it in how he watched her hands, not her face. Grizelda took the book. Its pages were soft with marsh water. It belonged to a dead orphan girl, the last one Gregor drowned. Mira's one eye fixed on it. "Give it grief," Mira said. "The ghost feeds on drowning. Grief it cannot eat." Grizelda pressed the wet journal open before the ghost. She read the girl's own words aloud, the girl who came to the marsh seeking work and found only the black water. The ghost stopped. Its gray hands curled. The dead boy's breath shuddered out of it, and the fresh strength bled away. Grizelda spoke the binding again. This time the ash held. The reeds closed. The water went flat. Gregor sank, smaller now, chained under the surface. Not destroyed. Weakened. Grizelda sat back, breathing hard. "It is bound," she said. "For now." Mira did not smile. "For now. It will remember you did this." She turned and walked into the reeds. Jack stayed. He looked at the journal, then at Grizelda's shaking hands. "That thing's not gone," he said. "And it saw your face." Grizelda closed the wet book. The boy was right.