Bonbon Sweetwing's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Bonbon Sweetwing held the seed up to the lamplight and saw the pink crystals had spread again. Yesterday they had only crowned the top. Now they climbed halfway down the sugary shell, hard and bright as cut quartz. Once the crystals reached the base, the seed would be stone. No wing could pollinate stone. She had carried this gumdrop seed for years, ever since an old fairy pressed it into her palm without explanation, and she had stopped asking why. What she could not stop was the clock inside it. She needed soil rich in sour-sugar mineral, a thing she had heard named only in rumor. She had asked at every market stall in the pink-towered castle at the heart of the kingdom. The bakers shrugged. The sugar-spinners laughed. A guard in a striped tunic and candy-bead belt finally stopped her at the gate and told her to try the cold country to the north, where the ground tasted wrong and nothing sweet would grow. He said his cousin had broken a tooth on a stone there. He said the stone had fizzed. Bonbon flew north for two days. The air thinned. Her candy wings stiffened in the cold, which was the first good news she'd had in a month, because stiff wings were not sticky wings. She passed frozen streams and fields of gray sugar-snow. Then she saw the arch. It rose alone from a field of broken rock, two curves of pale blue ice meeting in a jagged point. At its base, the gravel glittered with a sharper light than ice should give. Bonbon landed and licked one chip of stone. Her tongue went numb, then bright, then sour. She spat and laughed. This was the mineral. The arch was a marker, the way a tall tree marks a spring. She found the cave behind the arch within an hour. The walls were ice-blue and dim, veined with the same fizzing crystal. She scraped a handful of mineral grit into her satchel, then another. She did not pollinate the seed there. The cavern floor was solid stone, and the seed needed real soil to root in. She would carry the mineral home and mix it into a bed. Halfway back to the warmer country, her wings began to thaw. Sugar softened. The grit in her satchel pressed against the seam, and when she landed to rest, half of it had welded to the underside of her left wing in a sour, glittering crust. She tried to brush it off. It stuck harder. She turned her head and saw the seed in her pouch, crystals now three-quarters of the way down its shell, and understood she had maybe a day before it sealed. She had the mineral. She had no clean way to plant it. And she could not fly straight with one wing twice as heavy as the other.