Winter Flint's Arc

Chapter 17 of 18

Winter walked from the heart oak to the stone slab where the council waited. Morgatha sat bound against a pillar. She lifted her head when he came in. "I will tell you what I saw," she said. "Cut these ropes before dawn and you'll know everything." The slab room felt smaller than it was. A starry-antlered deer stood at the broken doorway, watching, its call low in its throat like a held bell. Amber set a lantern on the stone. "She's lying or she isn't," she said. "We won't know until after." Liri landed on the slab's edge. Madrigal's ghost stood beside Morgatha and counted her breaths the way she counted cracks. "Six hours to dawn," Madrigal said. "The cage holds for one day. Maybe two. You do the math." Morgatha smiled, tired. From inside her coat she drew a pressed pink blossom, dry and perfect, and laid it on her knee. "I found this growing down there," she said. "Where nothing should grow. It tells you what the seal eats and what wakes it. Cut the ropes." Winter looked at the blossom. He thought of a village he had walked through once, cobblestone and chimneys and children, the kind of place that ends without anyone noticing. He knelt close. "No," he said. "You stay bound. You tell us anyway, or you tell us nothing." Morgatha's smile thinned. "Then you'll guess wrong by dusk." "Then I'll guess wrong," Winter said. He stood. "Amber. Madrigal. Search her. Take what she brought up with her." Amber found two more dried blossoms in the lining of Morgatha's coat and a scrap of carved bark. She laid them on the slab in a careful row. "This is something," she said, plain. "Not everything. Something." Madrigal bent over the bark and read it once, twice. "It names what feeds it," she said. "It doesn't name how to stop it. She kept the rest behind her teeth." Morgatha laughed once, short. "You chose pride over knowing, Winter. Again." Winter did not answer. He gathered the blossoms and the bark and walked out to where the clans waited under the braided cage. The deer followed him to the threshold and stopped. He had refused her. He had less than he needed. But the council was still his to lead, and dawn was coming whether he was ready or not.