Will bush's Arc

Chapter 19 of 26

The line to Kate held, but it was only a line. Will could feel her at the end of it and nothing else. He could not reach her hand. He could not reach the collie. Five years would pass this way if he did not learn how the void gave way to the living side. He pushed back toward Elara, but her thread was thin and busy. He caught one word from her before she slipped: Elspeth. He felt for the shape of that name. Something answered. Not warm. Steady. A woman was standing in a small wooden house set in a tree, its windows lit from inside. He knew the house at once, though he had never seen it. Herbs hung from the eaves. A pale owl sat on the rail and watched him with round yellow eyes. The owl saw him. Its head turned as he drifted closer. "You are the one Elara tied off," Elspeth said. She did not look surprised. "Come in. You cannot, but come in anyway." Will pressed against the wall of the tree house and found he could pass the door. Elspeth stood barefoot on the boards, gray hair loose. She was solid. He was not. He asked her, without words, what broke the wall between the void and the living. He asked because Elara had said her name, and because the owl had seen him, and because he had nothing else. "Nothing breaks it," Elspeth said. "You do not push through. You are pulled through. A living person has to hold the other end and mean it. Blood is strongest. A promise works too, if it is not kept." She lifted her own hand and turned it in the lamplight. "I am here because of a promise. It holds me the way your sister will hold you, if she keeps holding." She met his eyes. "I will not tell you the words. There are none. She has to reach for you on a night you reach for her, and the reach has to match. That is the door." He asked when. He asked how he would know. Elspeth shook her head once. "That I will not say. You will feel it or you will miss it. Most miss it." She walked to the window. Below the tree, a patch of pale flowers glowed against the dark ground, and further out a small orchard stood with fruit that gave off its own light. "Watch the garden," she said. "When the blooms turn toward your line, she is reaching. You have that much warning. No more." The owl lifted from the rail and passed through Will as if he were smoke. He felt the shape of the answer settle in him. Not a key. A signal. A night, sometime in the five years, when Kate would reach and he had to reach back at the same breath. Miss it, and the line would go slack for good. Will turned back toward the thread and waited for the flowers to move.