Dahlia Bleu's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

By morning the graft had changed. The rose cutting still stood upright, but the leaves at its tip had gone soft, and a dark line ran along the wax seal where the two stems met. Dahlia lifted the glass and touched the union with the back of her finger. Warm. Too warm. The hybrid rootstock was rejecting the graft. She had one plant, one pigment line, and maybe a day before the tissue died and took the pathway with it. She pulled her notes down from the shelf and worked through every rejection remedy she knew. Cooler light. Weaker seal. A nutrient wash. None of them addressed the real problem, which was that the two stems did not recognize each other as kin. She needed something older than her own notes. She took the pot, wrapped it in cloth, and went back to the bell tower. Azura was not at the bush. She was inside a small cottage set behind it, one Dahlia had not noticed before. The porch boards were soft with dust. The door stood open. Azura sat at a table with a green book open in front of her, the cover worked with painted flowers. "It is failing," Dahlia said. She set the pot on the table. Azura looked at the dark line under the wax. "I know that seal. My grandmother lost three grafts to it." "Did she save any." "One." Azura turned the book toward Dahlia. A page showed a hand-drawn diagram of a graft union wrapped not in wax but in a paste. Below it, a list of ingredients in faded ink. "She called it a mother wash. It tells the stems they are the same plant. I have never made it. I only have the recipe." Dahlia read the list. Every ingredient was in her greenhouse. She carried the pot and the book home before noon. She mixed the paste on the bench, stripped the wax cloth from the union, and coated the split with the paste instead. She rewrapped it in clean linen and set it back under glass. Then she sat and waited. By dusk the dark line had stopped spreading. By full dark the tip leaves lifted. The union held. The pathway was alive inside a dahlia body for the first time. Dahlia Noir was at the greenhouse door when Dahlia turned around. She did not knock. She held a small seed packet in her gloved hand, printed with a blue dahlia she had never seen in life. "The king kept these in his desk," Noir said. "They were gone the night he was. Someone is selling them now, three villages over. Whoever grew the parent plant is alive." Dahlia looked at the packet. Her graft had just proved the pathway could live. Someone else had already finished the bloom.