Marrow Fen's Arc

Chapter 8 of 11

Marrow stood in the shed doorway with the warm jar in one hand and the girl's weight leaning against their hip. The collie waited on the threshold. North meant the Fen again, and the Fen had already tried to swallow this girl once. Marrow could not carry her across shifting ground and hold a lantern and read the moss at the same time. They needed another set of hands, and the only hands offered had been spectral rabbit hands that had already gone. Marrow set the jar on the plank and knelt in front of the girl. They told her plain. I cannot lift you the whole way. If you fall behind, the ground eats the trail. The girl nodded. She pressed her palm flat to Marrow's chest, then to her own, then pointed at the door. She meant she would walk. Marrow packed what was left. The green flask went into the inside pocket, closest to skin. Three drops had brought her voice-shape back once. Marrow guessed there were four doses left, maybe five. They tied a length of cord from their belt to the girl's wrist so the Fen could not lift her sideways without pulling Marrow first. They stepped onto the north trail. The collie took point. The ground held for twenty paces, then softened. Marrow felt the trail begin to slide the way it always did, the moss forgetting itself. The girl's grip on the cord went thin. Marrow looked back and saw her edges going soft again, hair lifting like it was underwater. She was fading toward the drifting shape she had been in the hollow. Marrow stopped and tipped one drop from the flask onto her tongue. Her outline firmed. But one drop would not last the whole crossing, and Marrow could count. That was when the rabbit pair came back. Not both. The woman only, thinner than before, edges lit faint blue. She walked beside the girl and put one spectral hand under the girl's elbow. The ground under her paws did not shift. Where she stepped, the moss remembered itself for a breath longer, long enough for Marrow to plant a boot. They moved that way for what felt like an hour. Marrow read the trail. The collie sniffed the turns. The rabbit woman held the girl upright and steady, and when the girl started to thin, Marrow gave a drop and kept walking. Two drops. Three. The flask got lighter. Marrow did not stop. The trail broke out onto higher ground under a clear patch of sky. A single swallow cut across it, low and fast, heading the way they were going. The rabbit woman pointed after the bird and then at the girl and then north again. Then she was gone. Marrow stood on solid dirt with the girl on her feet beside them, one drop left in the flask, and a direction that was not the Fen anymore.