Chanterelle Sporewhisper's Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

Chanterelle sat in the ring of cut soil at dawn. Her spores felt ready, but ready for what? She had never seen another mushroom girl grow up. Her mother's cap had opened somewhere far in the forest, long before this grove, and the wider web that once carried those old memories was now shut behind the firebreak. She pressed her good hand to her stem and tried to feel a shape for what she was becoming. Nothing answered. She might grow tall and hollow. She might grow crooked. She might never bloom prophecies at all. She needed a record of how a Mother-Mushroom was made. Someone in the glade kept old recipes. The beekeeper kept every taste the forest had ever brewed, and she kept them written down. Chanterelle walked to the honey cellar and knocked. Honeycomb opened the door with a smear of comb on her sleeve. She looked at Chanterelle's blackened fingertip, then at her cap. "You've gone quiet," Honeycomb said. "Come down. Bring the hand." The cellar smelled of wax and slow fire. Jars lined the shelves in rows. Honeycomb pulled a low stool to a shelf marked with a spiral and lifted down a stack of birchbark sheets tied with waxed thread. A striped quill lay on top. "Grandmother's ledger," Honeycomb said. "She traded honey to a Mother-Mushroom once. Wrote down what she saw." Chanterelle untied the thread. The bark was thin and pale, marked in careful ink. She read slowly. A Mother-Mushroom does not grow alone. She is fed by the wider web. Spores from a hundred small caps travel the mycelium and settle in her stem. Without that gift, a mushroom girl grows into a common toadstool and her visions rot in the cap. Chanterelle set the sheet down. Her hands were cold. "The ring," she said. "I cut myself off." Honeycomb waited. "I can't become her. Not from inside the circle. The blight is still out there, and the web I need to feed me is on the other side of my own cut." Boots sounded on the cellar stairs. Aldric stepped down with a stoppered flask against his chest. The wolf stayed at the top step. "Three nights are done," he said. "She sat up on the second. She's eating." He set a small carved token on the shelf beside the ledger. "For you. Whatever you need." Chanterelle looked at the token, then at the birchbark sheet. "I need to cross my own firebreak," she said. "Before the rot eats what's left of the web I have to grow into." Honeycomb corked a jar of pale gold and pressed it into Chanterelle's good hand. "Then eat first. You're going out." Chanterelle climbed the stairs behind Aldric. The answer was clear now, and worse than not knowing.