Mama Grizelda's Arc

Chapter 10 of 11

The witch was dead, but the girl's warning left Grizelda no rest. She sent Jack down into the cellar with a candle. He came back up dragging a heavy thing wrapped in iron. It was a wooden sphere, bound tight with rusted chains. A cracked eye of blue light pulsed at its heart. "It hums," Jack said. "Like it's counting." Grizelda knelt over it. The chains ran deep grooves into the wood. She pressed her bark palm flat against the sphere. Under her hand it throbbed once, hard, and a cold pulled at her chest. She felt the marsh in it. The witch had tied this thing to her black water. If it woke fully, it would call out across the miles and shake the buried anchor loose. Gregor would rise. "We can't carry it home," Grizelda said. "Moving it might trip whatever she set." She did not know how the chains held it, or what breaking one would do. The freed girl crouched beside her. The bloodied rag still hung across her mouth. She had watched the witch build this weapon for weeks. She reached out and touched one chain link near the top. "She fed it," the girl rasped. "Every night. She'd loosen this one, whisper into the crack, then lock it again." Her finger trembled. "It's not sealed. It's leashed. Cut the leash and it stops reaching." Grizelda stared at her. This child had every reason to run and never look back. Yet she stayed, on her knees in the dirt, handing over the one secret that could save the marsh. "Which link," Grizelda said. The girl guided her hand to the loosened chain. It sat slightly proud of the others, worn bright where the witch had opened it nightly. Grizelda took Jack's stained dagger. She worked the blade into the seam. The sphere's blue eye flared. The hum climbed to a whine, and the cold clawed up her arms toward her throat. "Names," the girl said. "She hated names. Use them." Grizelda spoke the drowned girl's name, then her mother's, the way she had at the burial. The whine faltered. She pried harder. The worn link split with a crack. The blue eye dimmed. The hum died. The sphere went still and heavy and dumb in the mud, just wood and dead iron now. Grizelda sat back, shaking. The weapon that survived the witch was broken. The marsh was safe from this. But the split link had spilled a black grit into her palm. It stank of the marsh, of grave water. The witch had fed this thing something. Grizelda knew that smell. It was a piece of Gregor, carried here, kept alive outside the binding. "Grizelda," Jack said quietly. "If part of him was in there—" She closed her fist around the grit. Then the ghost already knew a way out.