Morrigan Vex's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

The wisp beat against the cage bars while Morrigan stood in the middle of her cottage and looked at it the way a stranger would. The binding had taken. Somewhere, a man she had never met was turning toward her without knowing why. He would come. That was what the spell did. And when he arrived, he would step through her door and see this: a cauldron cooling on the work table, a trapped fairy screaming under scrap iron, dried roots hanging from every beam, and no chair that wasn't hers. A soulmate expects a home. She had built a workshop. She had until morning, maybe less. The pull worked on distance she couldn't measure. She started with the work table. She swept the pendant scraps into a drawer. She carried the cauldron to the hearth and set it out of sight. The cage she left where it stood; the wisp was still her problem, but it was tonight's problem, not his. She dragged the pantry cupboard out from the wall behind the herb rack. It was heavy black wood, carved with the same knots she used for warding, and the doors still hung true. She wiped the shelves and set the jars back in rows a guest could read: tea, salt, honey, dried apple. She pulled two stools from under the stairs and set them at the side table beside it. She put the mortar in the center where it looked like a thing people used for cooking. Then the bed. It stood in the alcove, black posts, moon carvings, curtains she had never bothered to close. She had slept in it alone for years and treated it like furniture. She shook out the pillows. She smoothed the green coverlet. She drew the purple curtains back and tied them so the bed looked open, not hidden. She stood at the foot of it and tried to see it through his eyes and could not. She left a lantern burning low on the post. She walked the single room once. Pantry. Table. Bed. Cage. The cottage itself hummed under her feet the way it always did before travel, wild magic pooling in the hull, the runes along the door frame warm to the touch. She had not asked it to move. It knew anyway. Wherever the man was, the cottage was already choosing a course. Morrigan sat down on one of the new stools and put her hands flat on the side table. Her palms left prints in the dust she had missed. She had made the room fit for a stranger. She had not made herself fit for one. She did not know his name. She did not know his face. She had bound him to a woman who kept a caged wisp three steps from the bed, and the cottage was already carrying her toward him.