Beth Wonders's Arc

Chapter 9 of 29

Beth held the vase against her ribs and felt the cathedral pulse behind her. The obsidian shell flickered like a candle in a draft. Her half-built world was slipping. Without the mirror, nothing tied it to this ground. She had the star magic now. She had no door to pour it through. Elijah watched the trees where the merchant had run. "He'll come back with others." "I know." Beth pressed her palm to the cathedral wall. The stone felt thin, like paper stretched over water. "If I don't anchor this thing to my world in the next hour, both ends drift apart. I lose everything I built." "Then anchor it." "With what." She turned on him. "The mirror is ash. A conduit has to be living or growing. It has to reach both ways." Her boots crunched something. She looked down. A single white star fruit lay in the moss, pink at the stem. She had not seen it fall. She lifted her head. A tree stood ten paces from the cathedral door that had not been there a minute ago. Purple bark. Deep blue leaves. White and pink fruit hanging heavy through the canopy. Beth's throat tightened. She knew that tree. She had planted it in her cathedral courtyard three chapters of her life ago. "It came through," she whispered. "On its own." Beneath it a low bush pushed up next, gray-fruited, leaves black and pricked with tiny lights. Then a bright pink rabbit hopped out from behind the trunk, sat on its haunches, and showed her a mouth full of small sharp teeth. "Beth." Elijah's voice was flat. "What is that." "Mine. All of it." Her hands shook. Her world was reaching again, and this time it was sending pieces of itself to find her. Wanda stepped out of the smoke line, black fingers loose at her sides. She looked at the tree, the bush, the rabbit. "Living conduit," she said. "Roots go both ways. Feed it before it dies here." Beth uncorked the vase. Star magic climbed her wrist like slow water. She pressed her palm to the purple bark. The tree drank. Blue leaves brightened. The fruit swelled. A second root cracked out of the moss and drove into the doorstep of the cathedral. The obsidian steadied. Behind her eyes she felt the far shore of her world jerk, catch, and hold. She poured until the vase went cold in her hand. The rabbit bared its teeth at Elijah and bolted into the ferns. "Anchored," Wanda said. "For now." Beth sagged against the trunk. Her cathedral hummed under her shoulder blade. Her world was tethered again, not through glass but through a tree with roots in two places at once. Then Elizabeth Frostwyn stepped out of the trees in her blue dress, freckled and out of breath. She looked at the tree. She looked at Beth. "Something is following your roots back," she said. "I saw the frost on them a mile out."