Rowan Switched's Arc

Chapter 4 of 25

The back path took Rowan past the mill and up through the alders. The tooth sat under their tongue like a pebble. They walked fast because the lie in the crib would only hold one night. Halfway up the slope, the wind changed and carried a smell of green water. Rowan stopped. They had heard the crowned woman speak only once, in the garden, and afterward could not remember the shape of her demand for a full day. Whatever she said next, they would lose. They had no salt. No iron. No cloth. They had a tooth and a memory that would not hold. Rowan turned back. Not to the cottage front, watched from every window, but to the small graveyard at the edge of the lane where the village kept its children. Little stones stood in rows. Lanterns burned low between them. Rowan knelt at the plot the folk had trampled leaving the cutting. The wilted heads lay flat. Under one, a nail. Under another, a strip of clean linen someone had tied around a stem. Rowan took both. At the corner stone, a small dish of salt had been set out for a child's name day. Rowan poured half into their palm and half back. Inside the cottage the rocker moved on its own. The old woman's shape was thinner tonight, the skull showing through the jaw. Rowan set the nail, the cloth, and the salt on the floor beside the crib. "It is not enough to carry," the ghost said. "You need it in you. Her voice goes past skin." Rowan asked how. The ghost told them to swallow a grain of salt with the tooth, to prick a finger on the nail and mark the cloth, and to bind the cloth around their wrist so the iron rode against the pulse. She told them to say a name while they did it. Not their own. A name the folk feared. She said the name once, low, and Rowan repeated it. Lady Moon. The rocker slowed. The ghost's mouth stayed open a moment after the word. Rowan did each thing. The salt burned the cut in their gum. The nail bit. The cloth reddened where the finger pressed. When Rowan spoke the name aloud, the candle beside the crib bent sideways though no window was open. A shape crossed the yard outside: long ears, human shoulders, no face. It passed the fence and did not look in. Rowan stood. The wrist throbbed against the iron. They said the crowned woman's demand in their own head and it stayed there, clear, ugly, remembered. The glamour would still come. It would not stick. Eleven nights remained. The path up the hill was open, and now Rowan could walk it without losing what they went there to refuse.