Zadie Rose's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

The pendant held for three more nights, then began to fail. Each morning Zadie found fresh scorch marks past the stone's reach. The worst appeared above her bed, burned deep into the wall. It was not a shape. It was words. She traced the char with one finger and did not know the language. Her own fury had written something she could not read. She copied the marks into her book by candlelight. If the caged self was speaking, Zadie needed to know what it demanded. She stared at the strange letters until dawn. She could not trust what her anger wanted while its message stayed locked. So she carried the book to Amara. The old Verse-Keeper met her at the cottage steps again, white braids damp, milk-pale eyes fixed on nothing. Zadie had learned to respect that gaze. Amara had buried three witches who failed to hold their power. Zadie set the book in the woman's hands and guided her fingers to the copied marks. "Read them with your hands," Zadie said. "I can't." Amara traced each line slow. Her mouth tightened. "This is old fire-speech. Your second self isn't raging. She's asking." The old woman's finger stopped. "She names a hunger. She wants a kin of flame near her. Something born to burn without shame." "I don't understand," Zadie said. "A dragon." Amara closed the book. "Your fury recognizes its own kind. Give her nothing to hate, and she will not fight the stone. There is an egg. I know where it sleeps, and I know the price of taking it." Zadie's chest went cold. "An egg won't calm her. It will feed her." "No." Amara found Zadie's wrist and held it. "A creature that burns and does not hate itself. That is what she has never seen. She learns from it, or she learns from nothing." The old woman spoke the way to the egg in a low, careful voice. A hollow in the black hills. A nest kept warm by its own heat. Zadie wrote the path beneath the copied words. That night she did not sleep. She read the marks again, and now they had meaning. The caged self was not only wrath. She was lonely. She wanted a mirror. Zadie could not read those words before. Now she could. The obstacle was gone, and a harder one stood in its place. She knew what her fury wanted. She had to decide whether to give it. At first light she packed her book, her cold pendant, and the moonpetal rose from her sill. She fixed the black hills in her mind. She would not wait for another night of burning. She would go and take the egg, or she would learn why she should not. She stepped off the cottage steps and did not look back.