Seren Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 6 of 26

Seren opened her mouth to speak the rite and stopped. Hank sat between her feet, warm and small, the words humming under his fur. Isaiah stood ten paces off in the roots. Belladonna waited on the other side, white hair loose down her back. Seren had to move the six lines from the cat to the god without letting them touch open air. If she just spoke them, the wind would take half and scatter them. She had no vessel. She had the willow, the dawn, and a problem. "I need a carrier," she said. "Something to hold the words between Hank and Isaiah. If I speak them cold, they break." Belladonna's mouth thinned. "Then find one. The sky is graying." Seren pulled her mother's book from her satchel and flipped to the back pages. One margin note, in a hand she didn't know: rite-speakers carry. She had heard the name once at a crossroads market. A wanderer in a red coat who kept old bindings closed. She pressed her hand to Hank's back and whistled a short call through her teeth, the kind her mother had used for help on the road. Footsteps came through the brush. Not one set. Two. The rite-speaker stepped into the clearing first, black and red hair loose, red coat torn at the cuff. Behind him came a girl with a blue-green mohawk and a twisted staff full of colored crystals. Seren had met the girl once, at a wake, and remembered her staring at empty chairs. "You called loud," the rite-speaker said. "I was close." "I brought her," the girl said, tipping the staff toward him. "Two souls in one body carry better than one. You want the words to move, you need both of us." Seren didn't have time to weigh it. "Can you do it before the sun clears the ridge?" "Yes," the rite-speaker said. "Burn something old. Smoke holds sound if the sage remembers hands." Seren pulled the sage bundle from her satchel, tied in twine gone soft with age. Her grandmother's. She lit it on a coal from Belladonna's palm. The smoke came up thick and gray. "Speak into the smoke," the rite-speaker said. "I'll shape it. She'll carry it." Seren lifted Hank and put her mouth close to his ear. She said the six lines low and even. The words left the cat as a shiver and rose into the smoke. The girl breathed the smoke in. Her eyes went white. She walked to Isaiah, took his face in both hands, and breathed out. Isaiah staggered. His mouth moved with borrowed words. Hank went limp in Seren's arm, empty and ordinary. The rite was out of him. It sat now in Isaiah, ready to seat her. But the girl swayed. Her second soul had followed the smoke. Only one soul came back.