Mama Grizelda's Arc

Chapter 11 of 11

Grizelda held the black grit in her fist. It stank of grave water and pulsed against her skin, warm as a living thing. The sphere lay dead in the mud, but this piece of Gregor still breathed. If she kept it whole, it would call the ghost awake, the way the witch had planned. She had cut the leash. Now she had to end the thing on the end of it. Jack crouched close, the candle shaking in his hand. "Bury it," he said. "Deep, like the journal." "No." Grizelda opened her fist. The grit shivered toward the marsh water at the cellar's edge, straining like iron toward a lodestone. "It wants to go home. Bury it and it'll dig itself back to the black water. It has to be unmade here." The freed girl knelt beside her. The bloodied rag still covered her mouth. She had watched the witch feed this thing every night for weeks, and she had not run once since the witch died. She pointed at the grit, then at the candle in Jack's hand. "Fire," the girl rasped. "She never let it near flame. She was afraid of it." Grizelda understood. Grief had bound the ghost's whole body beneath the marsh. But this scrap had no anchor of sorrow. It was raw, small, and cut loose from the water. Fire could take it. She pinched salt from the pouch at her belt and rubbed it into the grit. The black stuff hissed and curled. It fought her. Cold clawed up her wrist toward her throat, the same cold she felt at every binding. She spoke the drowned girl's name, then her mother's. The grit shrank. "The candle," she said. "Now." Jack pressed the flame to her open palm. The grit caught. It screamed, a thin whistle only the three of them could hear, and threw a stink of drowned flesh across the cellar. Grizelda did not close her hand. She held the fire steady while it burned bark and skin alike. The girl leaned in and whispered the names with her. Jack said them too, clumsy, but he said them. The whistle died. The grit went to gray ash. Grizelda tipped it onto the dead sphere, and the cold let go of her arm. She sat in the dirt, breathing hard. The witch's weapon was broken. The piece of Gregor she had carried here was gone. The ghost could not reach out through this door again. But her palm was black and blistered where the fire had eaten in. And she knew now what the grit had been proving as it strained toward the water. Gregor had learned he could travel outside his grave. He had done it once. Somewhere under the marsh, the buried thing still remembered the trick. "Mira's at the anchor alone," Grizelda said. She got to her feet. "We go back. Tonight."