Mirella Bogwhisper's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

By midday Mirella knew she could not hold both ends of the bog alone. The wounded beast circled the willows. The moonpetal needed water from the deep sink before its bud could split. Every hour she spent at the tower was an hour the flower went dry, and every hour she spent at the flower was an hour the south path lay open. She climbed down from the tower with a flat slab of birch under her arm and a stub of charcoal in her teeth. She set the slab against a fat cream-capped mushroom at the mouth of the south path, where any fairy flying the reed line would see it. She wrote in plain marks: GUARD NEEDED. MOONPETAL CLOSE. SAFE PATH MARKED WHITE. COME. She pinned the vial's twin charm beside the sign so a reader could lift it and walk in as kin. Then she carried out a hollow gourd cabin from her stores and set it in the dry moss past the dandelion, with a straw bed inside and a clay cup at the door. A place to sleep. A reason to stay. She built the meeting post last. She lashed four willow poles into a peaked frame and hung a small bell under the roof, the clapper carved from a snail shell so it would ring soft and not call the beast. She tied vines around the posts to hide the wood. Any fairy who came would ring once. She would come and assign them. She waited two days. The bell did not ring. On the third morning she heard it, three short pulls, then a flurry. She ran the path with the staff across her back. Under the bell stood not one fairy but a knot of them, eleven by her count, wings still wet from the reed mist. They had brought the sign with them, charcoal smudged on their hands. Behind them sat a small grey dog with thin pink wings folded along its back, watching the willows with yellow eyes. Mirella did not waste the moment. She split them by twos. Two for the north path, two for the east, two for the west, two to walk the moonpetal in a slow ring, two to sleep in the gourd and trade off. The last one she kept at the tower with her. The winged dog she pointed at the willows. "That ground," she said. "Bark if it moves." The dog trotted off without a sound and lay down in the reeds with its nose on its paws. By dusk every path had eyes on it. The moonpetal stood watered, its bud thicker than the day before. Mirella climbed the tower and let her shoulders drop for the first time in a week. Then a horn note came from the west path, sharp and wrong, and one of the fairies she had posted there did not answer the second call.