Mirella Bogwhisper's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

Mirella did not sleep in the watchtower. A wet crack woke her before dawn — a branch breaking under weight too heavy for any bird. She climbed down the ladder with the vial knocking against her ribs and walked the south path toward the dandelion marker. Halfway there she found the first sign. A pile of bones lay heaped in the reeds, picked clean and wound through with torn grass and red roots. A deer skull sat on top. The kill was fresh. Something had dragged it onto her safe road. She knew what it meant. She had pulled the iron from this path, and the bog had felt the change. A hunter had come to fill the gap. If the guest stepped onto the path at dusk, the guest would not reach the tower. She followed the drag marks past the dandelion into the reeds. The beast stood in a stand of dead willows, taller than she was, its skin pale and wet under a hanging coat of moss. Branches grew from its shoulders like antlers. Two yellow eyes found her at once. It had a long mouth full of thin teeth, and it opened the mouth without sound. It took one webbed step toward the path. Mirella pulled the staff from the strap on her back. It was the only iron she had kept from the south path, reforged with a bone grip her grandmother had cut and carved. She set her feet in the mud and lowered the point at the beast's snout. "Not this road," she said. The beast lunged. She drove the iron tip up into the soft skin under its jaw. It screamed and jerked back, and the staff came free with a black smear on the metal. She stepped forward and pressed the point against its snout again, holding it there. The beast's eyes rolled. It backed into the willows on all fours and crashed away through the deep water until the sound was gone. She did not chase it. She wiped the staff on the reeds and walked back to the bone heap. She gathered every bone into her arms and carried the load off the path, dumping it in the sink where the bog took things down. She smoothed the reeds where the drag marks had cut through. By the time the sun was up, the south path looked clean again. But the willows where the beast had stood were close. A wounded animal would remember the one who hurt it, and the bog had taught the beast that her safe road was easy ground. She climbed back into the tower with the staff across her knees. The frog had not yet returned. Somewhere past the cattails, a guest she had never met was already walking toward her, and she would have to watch the path with both eyes now — one for the stranger, one for what waited in the trees.