Marrow Fen's Arc

Chapter 4 of 11

Marrow moved fast through the birch, the four behind them in a loose line. The white-haired boy came first, then the girl in the nightdress, then the smaller shape that held itself together like fog around a lamp, then the dark-haired boy with his arm tight to his ribs. The trail Marrow had cut on the way in was already softening. In some spots it was only a suggestion of pressed leaf. Marrow kept their eyes on the ground and did not look back. Twenty paces past the cherry, the trail stopped. Not faded. Stopped. The dirt ahead was smooth as a swept floor. Marrow crouched and pressed a palm to it. No give. No prints, not even their own coming in. The Fen had taken the way out while they were fetching the children who were not children. "Trail's gone," Marrow said. They kept their voice flat, the way their uncle had taught them to speak bad news to a horse. "I can't read us out from here." The girl in the nightdress said, "Then we sit down and we're done." She said it like a fact. The smaller girl drifted closer to her and did not speak. The dark-haired boy tried again to say something, coughed, and shook his head. He pointed at his own chest, then at the trees, then made a walking motion with two fingers. He had been in here longer than the rest. Marrow understood him anyway. He knew a way. "You've walked it before," Marrow said. He nodded. Ollie stepped up beside him. "He can't call it out. I can. Point," Ollie said to the dark-haired boy, "and I'll say what you mean." The boy pointed left of the cherry, away from where Marrow's trail had died. Ollie said, "Left. Slow. He says the ground holds if you step where the moss is dark." The boy nodded once, hard. Marrow stood. The scout in them wanted to argue. The scout in them was out of trail. "Name yourself," Marrow said to the dark-haired boy, because the dead who forgot their names could not leave, and Marrow needed him to be able to leave. He opened his mouth. A dry sound. He closed it, frustrated, and pressed a hand flat to the moss. Ollie watched him a moment. "Orin," Ollie said, quiet. "He said Orin. Wanderwood. He wrote it in the dirt for me back in the hollow. I didn't say so before." Marrow looked at the dark moss he'd pointed to and stepped onto it. It held. They walked, five of them, on a path a dead boy remembered and a living scout could not see. The Fen let them pass. Marrow did not know yet where it would put them out, or which of the names on the board would be waiting, or which would not. But the ground held under each step, and none of the four behind them had gone quiet.