Tres Morass's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Three days passed before Tres tried to build a body himself. He dug clay from the water's edge and shaped it inside his mud hut. He packed mud onto sticks. He pressed river reeds into hands, a face, a chest. When he set the golden vessel beside the clay and unstoppered the lid, his wife's soul brightened, reached out, and slid off the dead mud like water off stone. The clay stayed clay. He tried straw next, then a scarecrow of bound roots. Each time the soul recoiled. He learned the hard truth. A soul needs living flesh. Mud will not hold it. He sat in the dark and wept. He had crossed the swamp. He had saved her from the crack. And now a wall of mud told him he could go no further. A shape blocked the low doorway. Pink, mud-stained, familiar. Scarlett Fontaine stooped and came inside without asking. She had found her way back. The crooked crown still sat in her tangled hair. "You never told me your wife's name," she said. She looked at the golden vessel, then at the ruined clay man. "I've been thinking about you since I left. I couldn't stop." Tres clutched the vessel to his chest and hissed. "Go. I told you the moss leads out." "I heard you," Scarlett said. "In the trees, three nights ago. You said you wanted a body no one owned." She knelt in front of him. Her voice stayed steady. "I'm giving you mine." Tres shook his head hard. "That kills you. You know that. Your soul goes out, hers comes in. That's murder." "It isn't, if I leave first." She reached into her dress and drew out a small vial of black glass. "My family gave me this the day I ran. Some choose the vial when there's nothing left to run to. There's no throne waiting for me. No home. Two days lost in the mud showed me that." She set the vial in the mud between them. "Drink after I'm gone. Pour her in while the body's still warm. It works. You know it works." Tres stared at her hand, at the black glass, at his wife glowing behind the gold. His whole body leaned toward it. One swallow of poison and the wall came down. His wife would breathe again, tonight, in this warm and living body. He grabbed the vial. He crushed it under his heel in the mud. "No," he said. "I don't save her by burying you. She would hate what I became. And I would look at her every day and see you dead." Scarlett went still. Then her shoulders shook, and she was crying, and she was laughing. "Nobody's ever told me no like that," she whispered. "Get up," Tres said. "You're not dying in my hut." He pulled her to her feet. The clay man lay broken behind them. He still had no body. But he would not make one from her.