Aldric Wandermere's Arc

Chapter 8 of 9

The lark tree stood at the edge of a bog, taller than any tree Aldric had seen. Its trunk rose smooth and gray for thirty feet before the first branch. Thorns wrapped the higher wood in tangled ropes. Mushrooms clustered thick around its roots. Somewhere up there, in the split bark, the sap ran. Agatha wanted it, and without it she would not help them stop the curse. Aldric had promised her all three ingredients. This was the first. He circled the trunk twice. No handholds. No low limbs. "I can't climb this," he said. Mara crouched by the roots, reading the ground the way she read everything. She had tracked the sick elk's prints for weeks before Aldric ever met her. She trusted her eyes over any man's plan. "Bark's wet," she said. "You'd fall and break your neck. Then you're no use to anyone." Aldric pulled the rope from his pack. He tied a loop, weighted it with a stone, and threw it at the lowest branch. The loop slipped off. He threw again. Again it fell. On the fifth throw the rope caught, and he hauled himself up two feet before the wet bark tore his grip loose. He landed hard in the mushrooms. "No," he said, breathing rough. "Not like this." Jane knelt beside a cluster of mushrooms he'd crushed in the fall. She had walked into this forest alone and lived, guided by Agatha's teaching. Two years of herbcraft had taught her what the woods gave freely. She pressed a torn mushroom cap between her fingers. Thick sap oozed out, gold and sticky. "You don't climb it," she said. "The mushrooms feed on the tree. They pull the sap down themselves." Aldric stared. "That's the same sap?" "Same tree," Jane said. "Same blood." She named the direction of the light, low and gold through the branches, and chose the caps that grew where it fell warmest. "These are ripest. Squeeze them into your jar." They worked until the jar filled. Gold sap, clean and thick, no rope needed and no fall to fear. Aldric corked it and held it to the light. He thought of the boy who died from bad information, sent up a wall he had no business climbing. Jane had known the easy road because someone taught her. That was the whole point of the guildhall he meant to build. "You saved me a broken neck," he told her. Jane wiped her hands on her skirt. "Agatha taught me. Not you." But something in her face had shifted. Mara stood and looked east, toward the deeper woods. "One down," she said. "The next one grows on the elk's antlers. The one that nearly killed you." She turned, dry and final. "We can't ask it nicely."