Antheia Botanis's Arc

Chapter 2 of 15

Antheia rode north for four days before her crown pulled her off the road. The petals bent hard to the left, toward a slope where the pines gave way to a hollow of black trunks. She dismounted and walked in. The bark was not burned. It was the color of wet ash, and it flaked when the wind touched it. The ground crunched under her boots. Nothing sang. She needed a living cutting to take back and study. If she could name the sickness, she could fight it. If she could not, more groves would fall. She found one branch at the edge of the hollow that still held green at its tip. She drew her small knife and cut. The green leaves shivered black before the branch left the tree. She dropped it. She tried a sapling further in, wrapping her hand in linen first. The linen turned gray. The sapling folded in on itself and crumbled. She stepped back and counted her failures. Four cuttings. Four deaths in her palm. The blight was not in the trees. It was in the touch that took them. She sat on a stone and pressed her hands flat against her knees. Her crown had lost another petal. She could feel the gap above her ear. She thought of her greenhouse, of the forty-two seedlings she had left with the animal fairy, and of the throne under the potted trees where she used to sit and plan the garden that would hold every myth in one bloom. She could not build that garden if she carried this sickness home in her hands. A rustle came from the ridge. A man landed lightly on the black soil. Silver hair, rose crown, wings that trailed a thin green line behind him as he walked. Roots pushed up through the ash where his feet had passed. Small white roots, curling toward the light. Roswell Petalion. She had heard of him. She had never asked him for help. "Your crown called," he said. "I came." "I can't take a cutting. Everything I touch dies faster." He knelt by the green-tipped branch she had dropped. He set his palm on the soil beside it. A root pushed up through the ash and wound around the base of the branch. The root drew the branch into itself, wrapping it in living wood. He lifted the whole bundle and held it out. The green tip was still green. "My roots hold what your hands can't," he said. "They will carry it as long as you need." Antheia took the root-wrapped cutting. The green tip did not blacken. She had her sample. She also had a debt to a prince she did not know, and a new question pressing under her ribs — why his roots held where hers killed, and what that meant for the garden she still meant to build.