Mirella Bogwhisper's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

The frog message would go out at dusk. Before then, Mirella had a harder problem to solve. The bog did not know the difference between a poacher and a guest. It had killed the lantern man four nights ago the same way it would kill anyone she invited in. If she brought a stranger down the south path, the barbed stakes would catch a leg, the mud would pull, and she would lose her helper before he ever saw the bloom. She had to carve a safe road in, and she had to give the bog a way to know a friend. She started at the south path because it was the firmest. She walked it slow, pulling the iron stakes out of the mud one by one and laying them in a bundle on dry ground. Where the path forked toward deep water, she planted a tall white dandelion she had grown for this purpose. Its seed head stood as high as her shoulder, pale and round above the reeds. Anyone on the path would see it from far off. Past the dandelion, the bog was hers and lethal. Before it, the ground would hold a stranger's weight. Then she built the post. She dragged stone up from the creek bed for two days and stacked it into a foundation at the mouth of the south path, just outside the dandelion marker. On top of the stone she raised a small wooden room with a roof and two windows, set high enough that a watcher could see the path and the cattails beyond. She fixed a ladder to the side. From the windows, a person could mark anyone stepping onto the path before they came near the bloom. She left a stool inside, and a horn cut from a river reed. The last piece was the smallest. She filled a glass vial with water from the patch of bog nearest the moonpetal, where her magic ran deepest. She plucked one feather from her own wing and dropped it in. She corked the vial and held it under the water of the south channel, whispering the shape of it into the mud until the channel went still around her hand. She lifted the vial out. The water inside had gone dark, the feather pale against it. She tied a cord around the neck. Whoever wore it would walk her bog as kin. The frog left at dusk with her message folded in its mouth. Mirella climbed into the new post to wait, the vial heavy in her pocket, the dandelion glowing white in the last light at the path's end.