Orin Wanderwood's Arc

Chapter 26 of 26

They walked until the village smoke was gone from the wind. Marrow found a track heading south along a low ridge. Orin kept his hand on the twig he had cut off a hazel branch. It was not the plum. It was something to hold. He needed the old woman's next words: south of the mill was a wide phrase. He needed the exact plot. And the old woman was two hours behind them, locked inside her own door. "We can't go back," Marrow said. "He'll be watching her stoop by now." "Then who else knew my mother." Marrow did not answer. The ghost girl drifted ahead through the grass. She stopped at the edge of a clearing where a broken church sat with its roof caved in. She pointed. Two figures waited on the church steps. One was a gray witch Orin had heard Kate speak of, an old ghost named Elspeth Moonwhisper who had helped Kate's group escape a house on the north slope. The other he had never seen. She was small, robed, holding a staff with a pale stone on top. Her jaw was set like she was biting down on something. "The dead sent word," Elspeth said. "This is Meridian. She finds graves." "I don't need a grave," Orin said. "You need the ground your mother is under," Elspeth said. "That is a grave." Meridian pressed her hand to her cheek. "Back teeth ache the closer I get. Give me something she touched." "I have nothing of hers." "You have her," Meridian said. "Blood counts. Hold my staff." Orin took the wood. Meridian shut her eyes. Her mouth tightened. She turned a slow circle and stopped facing south-southeast, off the ridge, down toward a stand of black pines. "Half a mile," she said. "Low ground. Two stones set close. Burned house above it. She's there." "You're sure." "I was wrong once," Meridian said. "A girl walked three years for it. I check twice now." She turned another circle and stopped in the same place. "There." Elspeth watched Orin. "Go before dark. The man from the village will pick up your track by evening." "Why help me," Orin said. "I owed a mother once," Elspeth said. "I failed her. This isn't that debt. It's the shape of it." Marrow was already moving. Orin followed her off the ridge, down through the pines, and the ache in his chest went ahead of him like a rope pulling. They came out at a burned foundation on low ground. Blackened stone. An orange tree stump by what had been a step. Behind it, in the soft earth, two flat stones set close. Orin knelt. He put his hand on the near stone. It was warm from the sun. "Mother," he said. A branch cracked in the pines behind him. Boots. Not Marrow's.