Rowan Switched's Arc

Chapter 3 of 25

By morning the folk had taken the cutting. The notch in the crib sat empty. Rowan should have felt lighter. Instead they saw the smoke from three chimneys where two had been the day before. Neighbors were up early. The baker's boy stood at the gate with a basket of nothing much and watched the door. When Rowan stepped onto the porch, a woman across the lane straightened from her weeds and did not pretend otherwise. The cottage had become a lantern. Everyone in the village could see the shape of Rowan inside it. Word had moved fast after the hawthorn darkened. The little folk had trampled the wilted heads in the memorial plot on their way out, and the whole lane had heard the six thin voices laughing. Now the village wanted to know what Rowan had done. Twelve nights remained. Rowan needed salt, iron nails, and a clean cloth for the tooth. Rowan needed to walk the path up the hill once before the dark moon so their feet would know it. None of that was possible with eyes on the door. Rowan tried the back way at noon. They crossed the garden, ducked the fence, and made it as far as the lane behind the mill before the baker's boy stepped out of a doorway and asked where they were going. Rowan said the woods for kindling. The boy said he would come. Rowan turned back. Inside, the rocker was moving again. The old woman's shape sat in it, thinner than yesterday, the bone of her face showing through. "They set the watch on you," she said. "Not the village. The one on the hill. The village only does what she wants." "Then tell me how to walk out." "Give them something to watch that is not you." Her hollow eyes fixed on the crib. "The cutting is gone. The notch is empty. Put a thing in it that looks like a choice. Let them come inside to see." Rowan understood. They took a whittled peg from the kitchen drawer, wrapped it in a scrap of red cloth, and set it in the headboard notch where the hawthorn had been. They opened the shutters wide so the crib showed from the lane. Then they lit a candle beside it and left by the front door in plain sight, empty-handed, walking toward the well. By dusk half the village had drifted past the window to look. The baker's boy went inside. A woman with a crown of black thorns stood at the garden edge, watching the cottage watch itself, her small folk lifting lanterns among the dead heads. She smiled once at Rowan across the lane and turned away. The watch had shifted from the doorway to the bait. Rowan slipped down the back path with the tooth under their tongue and the milk of the moon still twelve nights off. The path to the hill lay open. The lie in the crib would only hold one night.