Will bush's Arc

Chapter 27 of 41

The daisies steadied under Will's palms, but Elspeth's warning stayed with him. Fewer memories than he thought. He tried to count what he had left and found the edges soft. He remembered Kate at the stove, but not what she wore. He remembered a swallow in the chimney, but not which winter. If he traded blind, he might hand over the one thing that let him find her again. He called the barefoot girl. She came at once and squatted at the edge of the stems. "Fetch the scout," Will said. "The one with the green hood. Marrow." "She is not dead," the girl said. "I know. Tell her Will asks. She will come." The girl ran. Will kept his hands down and waited. He watched the road for another cold shape and saw none yet. A crow called twice. The petals opened another notch. Marrow came up the path within the hour, satchel across her chest, boots wet. She stopped outside the patch and looked at his hands on the flowers without asking why. "You called," she said. "I need you to sort me," Will said. "I have to trade memories to send spirits off this patch. I cannot see which ones are safe to spend. If I lose the wrong one, I lose Kate." Marrow set the satchel down. "I am not a witch." "You read ground. Read me." She thought a moment. She pulled out a small square of cloth, the one she used to wrap her uncle's flasks, and laid it flat on the boards of the porch step behind him. "Say a memory," she said. "Small one first. I will tell you if it pulls toward Kate or away." Will spoke. The taste of a pear his father cut for him at the kitchen table. Marrow watched the cloth. It did not move. "Away," she said. "Safe to trade." He tried another. Kate laughing at a song on the radio, both of them in the car before the crash. The cloth lifted at one corner as if a breath had caught under it. "Toward," Marrow said. "Keep." They worked through the morning. The pear. A teacher's name. A boot he had lost in a river. The cloth stayed flat. Then Kate's two sugars in the coffee cup. The cloth lifted hard. Kate in the yard with the collie. It lifted hard. He learned the shape of what he could not give. Marrow folded the cloth and wrote on a strip of bark with a pencil stub. Safe. Not safe. Two short lists. She wedged the bark under a stone at the edge of the patch where Will could read it without moving his hands. "Next one comes," Marrow said, "you spend from the top of the safe list. Down the line. Do not skip." "Thank you," Will said. Marrow shouldered her satchel. "The safe list is short," she said. "Twelve things. That is all I could find." She walked back down the path. Will looked at the bark under the stone and counted twelve. Then he pressed his hands into the stems and waited for the next cold shape to arrive.