Rowan Switched's Arc

Chapter 9 of 25

Rowan walked home from the graveyard with dirt under their nails and nine nights left. The deed was safe, but safe was not enough. On the back of the folded skin, under their written name, there were more marks. Folk-script. Rowan had seen them by lantern light in the hollow tree and again on the path down. Small hooked letters, wet-looking, in a line. Selene's cracked record had warned of this. The deed had a second half. At the dark moon, Rowan had to speak the sound written on the back. Wrong sound, the deed voided. Right sound, the name held. Inside the cottage, Rowan lit one candle and sat by the crib. The old wood smelled of dust and milk. Rowan did not open the deed; the deed stayed buried. Rowan had copied the script on a scrap of butcher paper before hiding it. The scrap sat now on their knee. The hooks meant nothing. Rowan tried them with a human tongue and got only air. Speaking a guess at the dark moon would kill the deed. Rowan needed a reader, and Rowan could not ask the village, and could not ask Thorn without owing her more. The old woman's ghost had spoken once of a place above the tree line. A broken keep the folk avoided because iron beams held the roof. Gloamkeep, she had called it. She said a pool sat in the courtyard that showed true shapes. Rowan wrapped the scrap in the linen from their wrist, took a pinch of graveyard salt, and left before the candle guttered. The climb took most of the night. The ruins rose from the ridge like a broken jaw, towers cracked, ivy in the arrow slits. Rowan stepped through a gap in the wall. In the courtyard, a stone basin stood on a low plinth, its water flat and pale. A patch of white flowers grew at the base, small wisps drifting above the petals. The ghost garden. Rowan knelt by the basin and laid the scrap on the water. The paper did not sink. The surface changed. A woman's face rose in the water, tall and cold, hair moving in no wind, a full moon behind her head. Lady Moon. Rowan had spoken her name during the ritual with the salt and the nail. She looked at the scrap, then at Rowan. "One reading," she said. "One price." Rowan asked the price. "A night of your sleep, the night after the dark moon. You will not wake for anything." Rowan thought of what could happen while they slept. Rowan agreed anyway. There was no other reader. Lady Moon spoke the sound. It was three notes, not a word, a low hum sliding up and breaking. Rowan repeated it. She nodded once and said, "Say it only at the dark moon, over the deed, under open sky." The scrap burned to ash on the water. The face sank. The pool went flat. Rowan came down the ridge at first light with the sound held behind their teeth. The deed had a voice now. But Rowan had sold a night, and the night after the dark moon was when the folk would learn the name had held, and Rowan would be asleep and blind while they answered.