Mothette's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Mothette was still staring at The Lovers card when the tent flap moved. She looked up and Mothman ducked inside, wings folded tight against his back. He did not smile. He did not greet her. He set his hands on the edge of her small wooden table and stood there like something already spent. "There's a chest," he said. "Behind the falls. I've watched it three nights." He paused. Not for effect. For breath. "Something in it is calling animals to drown. Frogs. A heron this morning. I'm going to open it and end it." Mothette's wings fluttered. Dust drifted onto the cards. She knew what he meant by going to open it — she could hear it in the flatness of the words. He believed the chest might kill him. He had come anyway, and he had come here first. "Let me read for you," she said. "Before you go. Please." He nodded once and sat. She gathered the deck with hands she could not steady. She thought of every villager who had returned to thank her, and how she had never known if her words helped or if they had simply been lucky. If she told him to go and he died, that would be her voice in his ear at the end. If she told him to stay and the drownings continued, that would also be her. She shuffled anyway. She turned three cards. A tower falling. A cup overturned. And, last, a figure at the edge of water, back turned, holding a lantern. She stared at the spread. The honest reading was danger, loss, and a choice made alone. A month ago she would have softened it. She would have found the hopeful edge and pressed her thumb on it and scattered dust and sent him out smiling. She looked at Mothman's red eyes and understood that smiling him out the door was the thing she was most afraid of. "It's bad," she said. "The cards show a fall. They show something lost. The last card is you, going in alone with a small light. I won't tell you it means you'll be fine. I don't know that." He was quiet a long moment. "That's the first true thing anyone's said to me about it." He stood. "I'm still going." She had known he would. She caught his sleeve. "Then don't go alone. Wait until dusk. I'll come to the falls with you." He looked at her. Something in his face eased by a fraction. "Dusk," he agreed, and stepped out through the tent flap. Mothette sat with the three cards face up on the table. Her hands had stopped shaking. For the first time, she had told someone the truth of what she saw, and it had cost her the comfort of pretending. She did not know yet if that was skill. But it was closer.