Thalen Wicksong's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Thalen Wicksong had counted seventy-nine days since his sister last slept. He counted them again as he climbed the stairs to the shop above the wick-maker's yard, his sister's hand cold in his. Lyraeth walked where he pulled her. Her white nightdress dragged on the boards. Her eyes were open and saw nothing he could see. In his sack he carried candles to trade, and in his pocket a rumor he had paid a season's earnings to hear: that a candle poured from world tree resin could call a mind back from wherever hers had gone. The master of wicks sat behind a low table, sorting braided cord by weight. He looked at Lyraeth once, then at Thalen, and did not ask. Thalen sat her on a bench by the window and folded her hands in her lap. "Stay," he said. She did not answer. She never did. He turned to the old man and spoke the word he had crossed three valleys to speak. Elderwax. The master of wicks set down his cord. He said the resin bled from a single tree, and only in the year after a hard frost, and only for those the tree chose to bleed for. He began to draw a map on the back of a tally sheet. Behind Thalen, the bench creaked. He did not turn. The old man was naming rivers. Thalen leaned closer to watch the pencil. A wooden shutter tapped once against the sill. When Thalen finally looked, the bench was empty. The window stood open. Lyraeth's nightdress was caught on the latch, a torn strip of white cotton fluttering against the frame. Below, a garden path wound between flowerbeds toward the slope of a hillside cottage two doors down, and past that, the open woods. Thalen ran. He took the stairs three at a time and burst into the garden, calling her name into hedges that did not answer. He found the strip of nightdress caught again on a rose thorn at the edge of the yard, and past it, one bare footprint pressed into wet soil, pointing toward the trees. He stood with the torn cotton in his fist. The map was still on the table upstairs, half-drawn. His sister was gone into a wood he did not know, walking in the trance that took her every night now, and he could not chase the cure and chase her both. He folded the cotton into his vest and stepped onto the path she had taken.