Astrea's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Astrea had missed two trials already, and the third summons sat pinned to the bakery door with a baker's nail. The parchment said the realm would strike her name from the protector's roll if she failed to appear by the next full moon. She read it twice, then went back to kneading dough because the village ovens would not light themselves and the widow two doors down had paid in advance for six loaves. Her name on that list was the closest a village girl could come to a crown, and she wanted it the way she wanted quiet mornings: fiercely, and without having to choose. But the trials were held three days' ride away, and she was the only one in the village who knew how to keep the starter alive, mend the mill belt, and read the tax notices the riders left nailed to fences. Caspian Hawthorne found her at the flour bin near dusk, sleeves rolled, apron white to the elbow. He was fourteen, wiry, and had been underfoot since his mother died last winter. He said he had been watching her work the ovens for a year and could do the morning bake if she wrote the measures down. Astrea almost laughed him out the door. Then she looked at the summons, and at the boy, and at her own cracked hands. She sat him at the table and wrote the measures on the back of a flour sack: water, salt, the pinch of yeast, the count for the second rise. She showed him the mill belt trick twice. At the door, she told the widow next door that Caspian would bake for a fortnight and to send for her only if the ovens went cold. Then she saddled the pony before she could talk herself out of it and rode for the trial grounds with the summons folded in her shirt. The village was behind her for the first time in her life.