Briar Warden's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Briar Warden knelt in six inches of black water and pressed her ear to the bark of a dead-looking willow. She had done this at forty-one trees since the ancestral grove north of Lacuna burned, and every one of them answered her the same way: a hum too soft to hold, syllables that fell apart before she could catch them. The swamp was her family's second inheritance and now its only one. If she could not wake the tree-spirits sleeping inside these trunks, the loggers already pushing south from the burned grove would reach her border by the next moon, and there would be nothing here to stop them. She pressed harder. The bark was cold. The voice inside it slipped past her again, like a name spoken through a wall. Thistle came wading up behind her with mud to the knees and the sprig of heartwood cutting still tucked in her collar. She did not speak. She knelt in the water on the opposite side of the willow, put her palm against the bark, and held her free hand out to Briar. Briar took it. The mark on Thistle's forehead warmed under Briar's thumb. They had felt the grove die together; they could feel this together too. Briar closed her eyes and listened through her sister's hand instead of her own ear. The hum sharpened. Then the syllables locked into words. The willow said its name. Briar said it back. The trunk shuddered under their palms, split a seam of green light along its length, and opened one slow eye in the wood above their heads. Around them, in the water, three other trunks began to hum in the same key, waiting. Briar let go of Thistle's hand to test it, and the voices smeared again into noise. She took her sister's hand back. The willow steadied. Briar understood then that she could wake the swamp, but only chained to Thistle, tree by tree, for as long as it took, and that whatever was marching down from the north was not going to wait for them to finish.