Will bush's Arc

Chapter 25 of 26

Will kept his hand on the stems and counted the closes. The pulse under his palm had gone thin again, but not the way it had before. This time the daisies felt wet. Not with rain. With something heavier. He looked up and saw a man standing at the far edge of the patch, thin as smoke, hands loose at his sides. The man was weeping without sound. Where his tears fell, the flowers bent and darkened at the edges. Will called the barefoot girl. She came through the broken wall and stopped a few steps in. "He has been here since the moon rose," she said. "He will not answer me." Will looked at the daisies nearest the weeping man. Their petals had gone gray. The pulse under Will's hand slowed. Kate's reach was still there, but it was muddled now, as if he were listening to her through water. He understood the danger fast. The flowers carried only what he put into them. If this stranger's grief soaked the roots, Kate would feel that grief instead of him. She would kneel in her yard and think she had reached a dead thing that did not want her. She would stop reaching. He could not leave the patch to move the spirit. He could not touch the man from where he stood. Will sent the girl for the old medicine woman. She came fast along the path, satchel bumping her hip, breath short. She stopped outside the stems and looked at the weeping man for a long moment. "He is holding a name he never said," she said. "That is what is leaking. Not sorrow. A name." "Take him off my patch," Will said. "Please." She did not move at once. She opened her satchel and took out a small clay dish. She scraped a pinch of dark powder into it, spat once, and stirred with her finger. Then she walked around the patch, not through it, and set the dish at the weeping man's feet. "Say it here," she told him. "Say it into the bowl. Then go." The man looked at her. He knelt. His mouth moved. No sound reached Will, but the dish went dim, as if it had swallowed something. The man stood up empty. He walked past the broken porch of the sagging house behind the patch and did not come back. Elara lifted the dish carefully and carried it away from the flowers. "I will bury this where nothing grows," she said. "Your stems will clear by morning." She looked at Will. "But he was the first. Others will smell what you are doing here. You are a bright place in a dark field." Will put both hands back on the stems. The gray was already fading from the nearest petals. The pulse steadied. Kate's reach came through clean again, one small pressure against his palm, and he pressed back.