Amber Honeywell's Arc

Chapter 6 of 14

Amber was checking the frames when a runner came up the path, breathless. Word had come from the clan gates. Durgan's niece had woken. She was speaking of things she could not have seen, and people were gathering at the hospital in the trees. The runner held out a folded note in a child's hand. Amber set down her smoker. She closed the hive. She went. The path to the healers' place was lit by floating yellow blooms that drifted up as she passed. She had never walked this way before. A crowd stood outside the vine-covered door — sprites, gnomes, two dwarves with their hoods down. They had made a ring in the grass with pale blue mushrooms, sitting around it like it was a hearth. Nobody spoke. They were waiting for her. Durgan met her at the door. His beard was unbraided. He did not thank her. He did not need to. "She woke at first light," he said. "She is describing a bridge that has not burned yet. She named the rider. She named the hour." He paused. "It works." Inside, the girl sat up in a bed of woven branches. A small chest lay open at her feet, clan marks worn smooth. She was not looking at it. She was looking past the wall. On the sill beside her, a row of the yellow blooms had bent toward her face, and inside each cup an image moved — a flash of water, a shape of a horse, a door Amber did not know. The flowers were holding what the girl saw. Amber stepped closer. The color inside the petals was the color from her vessel. The unnamed one. It had held. The girl turned her head. Her eyes found Amber without searching. "You are the one who made it," she said. "You should know. There is a woman at your gate by evening. She will ask for a jar. Do not give her the same one." Then the girl lay back, tired, and the lights in the flowers dimmed. Amber walked out past the ring of mushrooms. The crowd parted. Durgan followed her to the edge of the path and stopped. "What I took from you worked," he said. "I am not in your debt. I am in your record." He went back inside. Amber stood alone on the path with the news settling into her like a stone into still water. The recipe was real. It was no longer hers alone. And someone was already coming for it.