Clover willow's Arc

Chapter 10 of 20

The one patch of mushrooms Clover healed did not hold. By morning the gray had crept back, and three more rings had slumped nearby. She knelt in the meadow and pressed her palms to the soil again. Warmth ran out of her hands. A cap or two lifted, then wilted. She had promised Thorne she would cure the blight. She had never healed a sickness this wide, and she could not find where it began. Thorne Wildroot stood at the meadow's edge, one wooden hand on a young oak. Gold lights blinked in his branchy hair. "You keep chasing the ends," he said. "The sickness has a mouth. Find where it eats." "I don't know where that is," Clover said. Her rabbit ears drooped. "I heal what I can see. This runs under the ground." Thorne watched her a long moment. "Then stop looking with your eyes." A glow crossed the grass. Flower the fairy landed on a mushroom cap, pink wings still. She was small, no taller than Clover's hand, with flowers in her hair. She had once doubted Clover belonged in the grove. Now she frowned at the gray rings, not at Clover. "The roots all drink from one place," Flower said. "Follow the sick ones down. They point home like a river points to a spring." Clover closed her eyes. She laid both hands flat on the earth and did not push. She only listened. Under her palms she felt the roots, thin and cold where the blight had touched them. She followed the cold. It thickened as it ran, all the threads bending one way, toward the far stump at the meadow's low end. She crossed the grass and knelt at the dead stump. The wood there was soft and black. This was the mouth. She dug her fingers into the rot until she reached the taproot below. It pulsed sick heat against her skin. Clover held on. She did not heal outward this time. She poured warmth straight down, into the one root that fed all the others. The heat fought her. Her arms shook. Sweat ran down her back. She pushed until the cold under her hands broke and turned warm. Behind her, Flower gasped. Across the whole meadow the gray rings shivered. New caps pushed up, pale and firm, spreading outward from the stump like a tide going the right way. The blight was gone at its source. Clover sat back, spent, her hands black with rot. Thorne pressed his palm to the young oak and felt no more sickness in it. "The debt is paid," he said. "The grove is clean." But when Clover looked at her stained hands, they trembled and would not stop. Healing something that large had cost her more than she knew she had. She had bought the grove its cure. Now she wondered if she had enough left in her hands to give the guardian anything at all.