Cherriese's Arc

Chapter 2 of 13

By dusk Cherriese had walked far enough from the iron-dust road to risk a small fire. She unrolled her map on a flat stone and stared at the three valleys she had circled. Each one had safe water. Each one had ridges she could defend. But she did not yet know which exiled fairies she could place inside the same borders without killing them. Some bloodlines burned through each other on contact. If she chose wrong, the grove would tear itself apart before the first winter. She needed proof, not guesses. She pulled the prism mirror from the bottom of her pack and set it upright against the stone. The crystal was cracked across its face in thin, branching lines. When she breathed on it, the cracks lit up in different colors. Blue veins ran one way. Gold ran the other. Where the two colors met, the glass had split clean through. She traced the fractures with her finger and started writing the pairings in the dirt. Blue and gold: no. Pink and gold: safe. Green and blue: safe only with distance. She worked until the fire burned low and her hand cramped. The mirror could only show her so much. To trust it, she needed to see the damage in the world. She remembered a place the traders had warned her about, half a day's walk north, where a tree had split itself apart for no reason anyone could name. At first light she went to find it. She found the tree in a clearing where nothing else grew. Its trunk was cracked from root to crown, and bright sap still leaked from the seam like a wound that would not close. Blue crystals studded one half of the bark. Gold crystals studded the other. She held the mirror up beside it. The fractures matched. She sat down in the dead grass and accepted what the tree told her. Two of her three valleys were lost. The northern one had blue-line families already sheltering near its springs. The eastern one was gold-line country. She could not invite both. The middle valley was the only one where she could start clean, because no bloodline had claimed it yet. It was also the smallest, and the hardest to reach. She marked the other two off her map with a charcoal stub. On the walk back she passed a long hedge of woody stalks hung with small bright fruits, the kind that grew only where the soil had been undisturbed for a hundred years. She stopped and pressed her palm against the branches. This was the edge of the middle valley. This was where the grove would have to begin, and where she would have to keep every bloodline she brought in carefully apart from the next. She had her place. Now she had to decide who arrived first, and who would have to wait longer than they could afford.