Mercedes Morgan's Arc

Chapter 20 of 21

Mercedes woke to the herd still feeding at the post and the hide still rolled in her pack. The binding held, but it held only through her mouth. If she caught fever, or walked back to her grandmother's house for a week, no one else could speak the lines. The herd would drift. The post would go quiet. She sat by the ashes and turned the hide over in her hands. The rites needed another voice. She could not be the only voice. The child came out of the alders near midmorning, boots wet to the knee, coat stitched with small dried flowers. She said her name was Fern Willowbrook. She said her village used to have elk too, and that they had wandered east past the ridge, and that her grandmother had gone quiet after. She said she had followed the tracks for days. Mercedes asked how old she was. Fern said old enough to remember what her grandmother told her once. Mercedes watched the bull lift his head at the new scent, then lower it again. The binding was holding even for a stranger at the edge of camp. That decided her. Mercedes brought Fern to the post and unrolled the hide on a flat stone. She read the first line aloud, then had Fern say it back. Fern's voice was small and even. She did not guess at words she could not read. When Mercedes came to a gap she had marked with a charcoal dot, she said the words she had written in the margin, and had Fern repeat those too. They went through all thirty-seven lines twice before the sun crossed the creek. Fern asked about the empty breath near the end. Mercedes said that line was gone and she should never try to fill it. Fern nodded and said the silence back exactly as Mercedes had left it. They spoke the rites a third time together, and the bull stayed at the hay, and the cows did not lift their heads. By evening Fern could speak the lines alone. Mercedes had her stand at the post and do it while Mercedes walked to the far side of the creek and listened. The knot in the air pulled the same way it pulled when Mercedes spoke. She came back and gave Fern the hide to hold for the night. The rites were no longer only in her. If she fell ill tomorrow, the herd would still have a voice at the post. But now a child from a village she had never seen carried half of what bound the herd to Icebenz, and Fern's own village lay east of the ridge with tracks of its own, and Mercedes did not yet know what she owed there.