Nell Larkspur's Arc

Chapter 7 of 23

They walked down out of the ridge with her hand still in his. The fox scouted ahead, weaving between frost-bright pines. Nell watched the ground more than the trees. Boot prints would be gone under the new snow, but other things stayed. The fox stopped in a small clearing and sniffed at a black patch in the snow. Nell knelt. Old ash. A fire, days cold. He brushed the crust aside and found a charred stick end and a scrap of wool. Not his weave. Village wool. He stood up too fast. Behind the ash the snow was wrong. Kicked up. A long drag mark ran toward the trees and stopped. There was a dark stain the melt had not washed clean. A torn strip of blue cloth lay half-buried near a root. Lena was three steps behind him, breath fogging. "What is it?" He stepped over the drag mark to block her view. "Someone camped here. Long gone." "Whose fire?" "Hunters. From the far side." The lie came easy and sat wrong. Her sister had worn blue. Half the village had worn blue. He did not know. He would not hand her a body she could not see. "Keep walking," he said. "There's nothing here for us." She looked at his face a long moment. She did not ask again. She let him steer her past the ash and toward the fox. Something small darted across the path. The fox snapped low, ears flat, a growl in her throat. A chipmunk froze in the snow between them. Pale fur, dusted white. Pink tail. Pink flower-shaped ears. It shivered so hard its whole body shook. "Oh," Lena said, and her voice softened for the first time all morning. She crouched and cupped her hands. The chipmunk climbed into them without hesitating. The fox barked once. Nell put a hand on her back. "Leave it." "It's freezing," Lena said. She held the animal against her coat. Then she lifted one hand and stared at her own fingers as if she had just remembered them. She pinched the air. Thread came out of nothing. Pale gray, fine as spider silk. Her mouth opened a little. She watched her own hands work as if they belonged to someone else. The thread twisted and looped and knotted itself into a tiny sleeved jacket in her palm. "I didn't know I could still do that," she said, flat, and slipped the jacket over the chipmunk's head. It stopped shivering. It sat up in her hand and looked at her with round, wet eyes. Nell watched her, not the chipmunk. She was smiling. He had lied to her a few minutes ago and she was smiling in his woods with magic on her fingers. She set the chipmunk down. It did not run. It trotted after them when they started walking, small boots of snow kicking up behind it. The fox refused to look at it. Nell kept the ash and the blue cloth behind him and said nothing. But what sat heavy on his mind more than that was how she was more like him than he thought. Maybe there was hope for him…for them.