Wren Kovar's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

They locked Wren's bedroom door from the outside now. She sat on the quilt in her stiff white dress and listened to the housekeeper's chair creak in the hall. Two weeks ago, the villagers had found her alone in the abandoned house at the edge of the pines, humming to the floorboards. They'd sewn her into this new life like a patch on a coat. She had walked back to the house three times since. Each time, someone dragged her home before she reached the porch. The last time, the constable had said the word penitentiary out loud. Black button eyes cannot cry, but Wren felt the pressure behind them anyway. Something under the floor of that empty house was still waiting. She had promised she would come back and finish knocking. A soft tap at the window. Wren turned her stitched face toward the glass. A raven stood on the sill, soot-black with a white patch at its throat. It tapped again, deliberate, three times. Wren slid off the bed and lifted the latch. Behind the raven, on the frozen path below, stood the village elder in her heavy wool robes and flower crown. Elsa Crane. The woman who greeted every stranger at the Tidebark Hut with open arms and that wide, unblinking smile. The woman who had signed the papers placing Wren with this household. She was smiling now, up at the window, as if she had known which room Wren slept in all along. Elsa raised one plump hand and beckoned. In the other hand she held an iron ring of keys. "Come down, little bird," Elsa called, soft enough that the housekeeper in the hall would not hear. "You've been trying the front door. That was never the way." Wren's fingers tightened on the sill. Elsa had spoken at every meeting about keeping the village safe from what slept in the pines. Now she stood in the snow offering keys. "Why?" Wren whispered. Elsa's smile did not move. "Because it's tired of waiting. And so, I think, are you." Wren climbed out. Her stockinged feet touched snow and did not feel cold. Elsa took her hand and led her past the frozen iron fence at the property line, past the icy lantern post at the corner where the constable usually stood watch. The lantern was dark. The constable was gone. Elsa had cleared the road. At the bend, Elsa pressed the keys into Wren's palm and pointed toward the pines. The abandoned house waited at the end of the path, windows black. "Wake it gently," Elsa said. "We've all been so patient." The raven landed on Wren's shoulder. Behind her, lamps came on in the household she had just left. Voices rose. A door slammed. They knew. Wren ran toward the trees. There would be no going back to a locked bedroom now. Only the house, and whatever answered when she knocked on the floor.