Mercedes Morgan's Arc

Chapter 23 of 23

Three days after Theren rode out, Mercedes still could not sleep through a watch. She sat at the post with the hide of thirty-seven lines across her knees and listened for the seam. Fern spoke the rite by the fence, small and careful, and the elk grazed inside the deadfall logs. Between the lines she had learned and the one she would never learn, there was a gap she could feel like a draft under a door. She did not know where the spell would tear first. That was the part that kept her awake. She walked the fence at midmorning to find it. She spoke the lines herself as she went, counting the elk, watching for the bull to turn his head wrong or a cow to drift toward the alders. Everything held. Nothing told her where the weakness lived. She checked an old snare she had set near the creek for the cub's meat, a rough cage of sticks and rope, empty and untripped. She stood with her hand on the trigger loop and understood she was doing the same thing to the binding — feeling the wire for a tremor she could not see. The old elf came up the creek path on foot. She had never seen him before. He wore a blue robe marked with pale signs and carried a staff with a chip of ice-colored stone at its head. Fern stopped speaking. The bull lifted his head at the fence and did not bolt. Mercedes stood between the stranger and the herd with her hand near her bow. "Put it down," he said. His voice was thin and dry. "I heard your rite from the ridge. You are missing the last line." "It's lost," Mercedes said. "It is not lost. It was mine to keep." He looked past her at the elk as if counting them himself. "I am Aelindor Lastwhisper. I held the closing line when your grandmother's mother held the others. I have been walking a long time to give it back." Mercedes did not lower the bow at once. She had trusted a stranger by the creek before and been right. She looked at Fern. Fern nodded, small. "Speak it," Mercedes said. "Slow. I will write it as you say it." She pulled the hide flat on the top log and took out the charcoal stub. Aelindor spoke the line. It was seven words. She wrote each one and read it back, and he corrected the middle word once. Then Fern spoke all thirty-eight together at the post, and Mercedes spoke them after her, and the draft under the door was gone. The bull lowered his head to the hay. Mercedes sat down against the fence. The binding was whole. Theren was still two and a half weeks out, and now she had a rite worth teaching when he came back with hands.