Briar Willowshade's Arc

Chapter 6 of 9

Briar knew the moss could feed the spring forever. But she couldn't regrow it yet. Three months ago its color had drained overnight, and she still didn't know why. If she seeded new moss into the same soil, the same sickness would kill it again. She needed the cause before she planted a single spore. She knelt where the moss had died first, near the old altar. She dug her fingers into the soil and pulled up a handful. It smelled wrong. Sour, like rot under water. She traced the dead patch to its edge and found a seam in the ground, a low mouth of stone wrapped in old moss. A cave. She had never gone inside. The winged cat slipped past her ankles into the dark. The hound followed, wings folded. Briar crawled after them. Inside, water dripped down the walls. Her fingers touched something slick. She lifted a strand of dead root to the cave's faint light and saw a black film clinging to it. She scraped it. The film smeared, oily and cold. The same rot she'd smelled in the soil above. "It runs under everything." Oberon stood at the cave mouth, blocking the daylight. The fae king who had taught her every hard rule of the spring. He did not offer to help. He watched her hands. "The blight is in the water, not the moss." Briar sat back. "The spring's water?" "When it slept, its water went stagnant." He crouched at the edge of the dark. "Stagnant water breeds rot. The rot rose through the roots. It killed your moss from below. Three months ago the spring went quiet enough to poison itself." Briar's breath caught. She had blamed the moss. She had blamed the air, the season, herself. The killer was the very thing she was trying to save. "Then the spring did this." "Its sleep did." He stood. "You woke it. The water moves now. Feel it." She pressed her palm to the cave floor. Faint, cold, a pulse under the stone. Living water again, not stagnant. The blight had started when the spring stalled. Now the spring ran, and the rot had nothing to feed it. She scraped the last black film from the root and let it fall. Then she reached into her pouch and drew out a cutting of dense, resilient moss she had saved from the healthiest patch. She pressed it into the wet soil at the cave's edge, above the moving water. By morning it had not curled. It had not paled. The film did not return. Small green fronds had pushed up beside it, soft and unafraid. Briar sat back on her heels. She knew now. The rot was gone with the stagnant water. She could regrow the moss without losing it again. But the spring's water ran because she kept it running, on borrowed fruit, weeks from empty. The moss would take longer than that to spread grove-wide. She was racing her own dwindling supply.