Morgana DeVille's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

The man with the knife stood in her clearing, and behind him the grinning alligator waited in the shallows. Two more shapes crouched in the reeds. Morgana counted them and counted her one standing wall. She had called these people. Now they hovered at the edge of her camp like deer, ready to bolt the moment the serpent shifted or the alligator turned. She had no room to hold them, no roof to point them under, nothing that said stay. If they scattered back into the swamp tonight, the ones behind them would hear it and never come. She told the man to sit by the ashes. She stepped past him to the wet ground at the clearing's edge and cut her thumb. Two drops. She had eight left after. She pressed the blood into the mud and spoke plain, the way she had spoken to the small winged thing. She asked for shelter. She asked for walls that would grow faster than she could cut them. Then she waited. The serpent lifted its head from the ashes and watched. The alligator watched. The man in the mud watched her thumb bleed. For a long minute nothing came. Then the ground near her hand shifted, and a pale root pushed up through the muck. Another followed. Roots braided into a trunk, and the trunk swelled and split and hollowed. Moss ran up the sides in sheets. Vines dropped like curtains from a crown of small branches. In an hour it stood taller than her wall, a round living hut with one wide mouth for a door and a floor of packed root above the water. Big enough for six to sleep dry. She had not asked for a shape. The swamp had chosen one. And as the last vine settled, a woman stepped out of the doorway who had not been there before, horned and winged, hair in every color the swamp did not have, watching Morgana the way the serpent had watched her the first night. Full. Calm. Waiting. Morgana did not ask who she was. She turned to the man and pointed at the door. She called to the reeds and said the same word twice. Come in. The two shapes rose slowly and waded across. The alligator settled at the threshold like a dog. The man ducked through the mouth of the hut and touched the wall and did not come back out. The others followed. Morgana stood in her clearing with six drops of blood left and a house she had not built and a stranger in the doorway who seemed to belong to the place already. She had her gathering room. She had also brought something older than her craft into the middle of her camp, and she did not yet know what it would ask for the shelter it had given.