Selene Moonshadow's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

The shape in the first bowl kept turning. Selene watched it and did not touch the wand. The coat was off. The thing beneath still had no name, and it was still on the porch. Then the porch went quiet in the wrong way. The wind stopped against the shutters. A line of frost crawled up the inside of the door. The wizard stepped back from it. "It's clawing the wards," he said. "The coat kept it civil. Without the coat, it just pushes." A blue thread of light around the doorframe snapped. Another popped near the window. Selene felt the cold reach her ankles. Her knees started to lock the way they always locked. "No," she said, out loud, to her own legs. "Not this time." Marcus was already digging in his knapsack. He pulled out a small vial of water that caught light like a piece of the moon. He set it on the table beside the bowl. "Truth water," he said. "For a thing with no name, you make it show you one. Pour it in. Ask." "Ask what?" "What it is under the skin it just lost." Selene uncorked the vial. Another ward snapped above the hearth. A shingle tore off the roof and slid past the window. She poured the moonlit water into the bowl over the turning shape. The shape stopped turning. It flattened. Silver spread across it like frost across glass, and letters pushed up through the surface, uneven, as if forced. Not a full word. A first mark. A curl. A break where the rest should be. Half a name. Not hers this time. Its own. She grabbed a blank nameplate from Marcus's pack, the small clean one he carried for labeling jars, and she pressed it flat against the water. The silver lifted onto the plate and stayed there. Half a name, written in a hand that wasn't hers. Outside, the pressure eased. Not gone. Pulled back, like a hand jerked off a hot stove. The frost on the door thinned. The wind found the shutters again. Marcus checked the doorframe. "Wards held. Barely." Selene looked at the plate. One curl of letters. A blank space beside it, waiting. "It knows we took a piece," the wizard said. "It won't come back to this door. It will run somewhere it thinks we can't follow, and it will try to grow the coat back before you find the rest." "Then we follow," Selene said. Her hand was steady on the plate. Her legs were steady under her. She had not frozen. She noted that and set it aside. Marcus shouldered his pack. "Raven's still on the ridge. It'll know which way." Selene wrapped the nameplate in cloth and put it in her coat. Half a true name. The other half was somewhere out there, running.