Mama Grizelda's Arc

Chapter 2 of 11

The water stayed flat for three days. On the fourth, Grizelda felt the binding slip. She knelt at the black water and pressed her bark-rough palm to the mud. Something pushed back. Gregor stirred below, testing the ash chain. The ropes of her magic were fraying, and she did not know what would hold them long enough to make them last. She had bound spirits before, but never one that fought back from under the surface. Jack Crabtree crouched beside her, chewing a reed. He had not left the marsh. "It's coming loose," he said. He nodded at the bubbles rising in a slow line. "You can smell it. Same cold as before." He watched her hands, not her face, the way a thief watches a lock. "So what keeps a ghost down? Real question. Not the old songs." Grizelda had no answer, and that shamed her. She sat with the dead girl's wet journal in her lap. The pages had dried and curled. She turned them again, past the last line she'd read aloud. There, on the final page, the girl had written a name. Her mother's name, and a plea to be buried beside her. The girl was not just drowned. She was lost, far from home, unmourned. "Grief weakened it," Grizelda said slowly. "Mira was right. But grief that ends lets go. This girl was never grieved. No one wept for her. No one buried her." She closed the book. "An unfinished mourning. That is the weight. If the marsh keeps the girl's sorrow open, it keeps Gregor pinned." Jack frowned. "So you need somebody to keep grieving. Forever." "The marsh can hold it," she said, "if I give it something to hold." She took the journal and wrapped it in a strip torn from her white robe. Then she waded into the black water to her knees. She spoke the girl's name and her mother's name into the cold. She pushed the wrapped book down into the mud, deep, where the roots would grip it. She wept as she did it, true tears, the first she had let herself cry since the woman she failed two years ago. The water shuddered. Below, Gregor's cold pressed against the mud and could not rise. The girl's unmourned grief settled into the marsh like a stone into silt. The binding drew tight. This time it did not slip. It held, rooted in sorrow the ghost could never eat. Grizelda climbed out, soaked and shaking. "It will keep now," she said. "As long as the marsh remembers her." Jack stared at the water, then at her. "You buried the one thing that held it down." His blue eyes were older than his face. "So if that book ever comes back up, the whole thing lets go." Grizelda looked at the flat black water. The boy was right again.