Celestine Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Celestine walked back over the ridge before dawn, the grimoire under her arm and the wand at her hip. The cat kept pace at her boot. The owl flew ahead in short hops from branch to branch. She meant to reach the garden, check the seedling, and rest before the moon rose full. She smelled the blight before she saw it. Something sour, like wet metal, drifting up from the tree line at the garden's edge. She broke into a run. At the far border of her bed, the neighboring wood had gone wrong. Purple ooze slid down the trunks and pooled between the roots. It crept forward in slow waves, eating the grass black as it moved. Ten paces from the ooze, the seedling sparkled in its bed, small points of light on the young moss. If the ooze reached the roots, the bloom was finished, and so was any hope of a second witch in her blood ever finishing it with her. Celestine set the grimoire on the garden stone and opened it for the first time in four days. Her chest warmed. She turned to a page her mother had marked long ago, a cleansing draw that used still water as a mirror to pull poison out of soil. She needed a wide basin. She turned in place and saw the stone birdbath at the garden's north edge, its bowl full from last night's rain. She dragged it, scraping, to a spot between the ooze and the moss bed. The owl landed on the rim and dipped one silver wing into the water. The water brightened. She raised the wand, not to the moon this time, but low, toward the birdbath. She read the words from the page and held the wand steady. The water in the bowl began to turn. A thin purple thread lifted out of the soil at the ooze's front edge and drifted toward the basin. Another followed. The ooze slowed. It stopped. It began to pull back into the tree line, thread by thread, drawn into the water until the bowl went dark as wine. The grass at the border stayed black, but the line held. The seedling was safe. Celestine lowered the wand. Her hands shook. The birdbath sat full of poison now, and she could not empty it into her own ground, or the neighbor's, or the stream that fed the grove. The owl watched the surface without blinking. The cat would not go near it. She looked up. The moon was already climbing, thin and early, and the full face would rise tonight. She had saved the moss and bought herself one problem in trade. She would have to carry the bowl somewhere before the ritual, and she did not yet know where a witch could set down a basin of stolen blight without killing what grew beneath it.