Whisper Foxyluna's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Whisper wiped her hand on her skirt again. The sap would not come off. Her fingers hung heavy at her side, three of them dead to the touch. She stood over the fallen flower and listened to the woods. The kettle screamed on the stove behind her. Under that noise, she heard something else. Footsteps, slow and even, coming through the trees below the tree line. Not close yet. Close enough. She went back to the cabin at a run. The pink-haired fairy shot ahead and hovered at the doorframe, pointing at the latch. Whisper threw the bolt. She dragged the table against the door. She closed the shutters one by one and dropped the pins. The lantern on the porch still burned outside. She could not go back for it. Through the shutter slats she watched the light on the boards and waited for a shadow to cross it. The fairy tugged her sleeve and flew to the hearth. She landed on a log stacked by the stove, one of the ones Whisper had set out for the wind. White petals still clung to the bark. The fairy pressed both hands to the wood and looked at Whisper hard. Then she pointed up, at the rafters, at a small nest of twigs and dust she had built in the spring. Whisper climbed the ladder. In the nest lay a feather, pale blue and gold, bent at the quill. It gave off a faint light. She had never seen it before. The fairy hovered beside her and mimed blowing across her palm. Whisper understood. The wind spirits were gone, but one of them had left a feather in a fairy's nest before the silence came. A last gift, saved for a night like this. She climbed down. The footsteps outside had reached the yard. She could hear boots on frost. She laid the feather on the petaled log and blew across it, the way the fairy had shown her. The feather lifted. It circled the room once and settled against the door. Where it touched, the wood shone. The shine spread along the frame, up the shutters, across the floorboards. The cabin filled with a soft, steady light that did not flicker. Outside, the footsteps stopped. A voice came through the door. Short and flat, without heat. "Open it." A pause. "You cannot hold this long." Whisper pressed her back to the table and did not answer. She would not say his name. She would not give him her voice. The light on the walls held. The numb fingers on her right hand twitched once, on their own, and she looked down and saw a black thread moving under the skin toward her wrist. She had shut him out for the night. She had not shut him out of her. Somewhere past the yard, past the trees, an old gate stood in the deep woods with mushrooms crowded at its foot. She knew now she would have to reach it before the thread reached her heart.