Amanita Sporewell's Arc

Chapter 14 of 14

The first buyers came at dawn. A squirrel with a coin pouch. Two mice pulling a cart. A mole who wanted spores by weight. Amanita stood at the gate with her cutting knife and a basket, and she counted her stock the way her aunt had taught her. Forty caps in the ring. Nine sprites watching. One fern at the center, glowing under its layered fronds. She had all morning to fill orders that would take all day. She worked the outer edge first. She sliced cuttings from the smaller caps and left the mature ones whole. The sprites moved with her along the ring, tapping any buyer who stepped past the rope. Grizak took coin at the gate and wrote each order on a scrap of bark. By midmorning the basket was half full and the line still stretched down the path. At noon Amanita ran short. She had promised the shop twenty cuttings before sundown and she had eight. She knelt by the fern and pressed her palm to the loam. The fronds above her curled outward, soft light moving through the leaves. Water beaded on the underside of every frond and fell in slow drops. The mycelium under her hand was warm. It was working faster than she was. She changed her plan. She stopped cutting from the ring and started cutting from the mycelium itself. She lifted a thread from the loam, teased a bud off its tip, and set it in wet moss. Each bud held a small red cap already forming. She worked one thread, then another, then six. The sprites brought her moss and honey water. Grizak brought her more bark to write on. The buds firmed in the basket while she watched. By late afternoon she had forty cuttings and the ring still stood whole. She walked the path herself with the basket on her hip. The shop sat where it always had, petals on the eaves, vines around the sign. The shopkeeper met her at the door and counted every cutting twice. He paid her in coin and asked for double tomorrow. "I can do double," Amanita said. She meant it. She walked home in the last light. The ring glowed ahead of her, forty red-and-white caps and one fern lit from inside. The sprites lined the rope fence and watched her come. Grizak had a fresh scrap of bark in her hand and a worried face. "Another fairy came," Grizak said. "Not the willow one. She said the shop's owner wants to see the ring. Tomorrow. She said he wants to buy the whole garden." Amanita set the basket down. The coin inside was heavier than she expected. She looked at the ring she had promised to keep whole and at the coin that would feed nine mouths through winter. She had met the shop's demand. She had made the deal work. Now the shop wanted more than she had agreed to sell.