Amanita Sporewell's Arc

Chapter 11 of 14

By morning, the mycelium threads had pushed further into the dead dirt beyond her patch. The fern's fronds drooped. The soil around its base looked pale and thirsty. Amanita pressed her fingers into the loam and felt it dry an inch down. One fern could not water a spreading garden. She needed real water, and the spring was still dead. She sat on the step and put her head in her hands. The sprites gathered near her boots and chirped. She had traded away the endless bottle. She had emptied the sprout bottle. She had no plan left. "You look like someone who has stopped looking up." Amanita lifted her head. An elf stood at her gate, silver hair loose over a green coat, a small pendant at his throat. She had met Lysander Moonwhisper twice on the forest paths. Both times he had answered a question before she finished asking it. He unlatched the gate without waiting. "My fern is dying," she said. "The mycelium wants more ground than I can water. I have no spring. I have no bottle." Lysander knelt at the edge of the loam. He touched one white thread where it crossed into the dead soil. He smiled like a person who already knew the answer. "You are watering the wrong thing," he said. "The fern does not need you to feed it. The mycelium does. Follow the threads." "Follow them where?" "To wherever they stop. That is where the water is hiding." He stood and brushed his knees. "Fern mycelium hunts water underground. It reaches until it finds a vein. Yours has stalled because you fenced it in with loam. Break the ring. Let it run." Amanita stared at the pale threads. "If I break the loam ring, the sprites lose their patch." "Then widen it. The loam will follow the mycelium once the mycelium finds what it wants." She fetched her trowel. She cut a narrow channel through the loam ring at the point where the threads pushed hardest. She scraped the dead dirt loose beyond it and laid a thin trail of loam along the cut. The sprites watched from the fern. The threads moved. Not fast, but she could see them creep, white against brown. She followed on her knees for six feet, then ten. At twelve feet the threads bunched and dove. The soil under her hand went cold and damp. She dug two inches down and hit wet clay. Water welled up around her fingers. A hidden vein. Right there, under the dead ground, the whole time. She looked up. Lysander was already at the gate. "The fern will find its own supply now," he said. "Your garden just doubled." He closed the gate behind him. Amanita pressed both palms to the wet soil. The fern's fronds lifted. The sprites ran to the new damp line and began to dance.