Elora Wilde's Arc

Chapter 3 of 9

They cleared the ridge above the trappers' camp before Elora let herself breathe. The butterfly still rode her glove, wings folding slow. Rowan walked at her shoulder without a word. She had come north to break wire and bloody a man, and now she was following a bug through the dark because it had told her to. She did not know where it was taking her. She only knew that if she lost sight of it, she would never find out what it wanted her to see. The butterfly lifted from her hand and drifted east, off the deer trail into thicker brush. Elora went after it. Twice it slipped behind a trunk and she almost lost the glow, and each time she pushed faster through the branches, breath ragged, until the pale blue light showed again. Rowan kept up in silence. A white rabbit with long ears crossed their path and sat watching, then hopped ahead as if leading too. Elora did not question it. She followed. The trees opened. She stopped at the edge of a small clearing and forgot the cold. Flowers grew thick from the moss, purple and gold and deep red, taller than any bloom had a right to be at this hour of the year. Ferns curled between them. More butterflies drifted above the petals, dozens of them, their wings the same pale blue as the one that had stopped her arrow. The one on her glove lifted and joined the others. It circled once and settled on a broad silver leaf, as if to point. Elora knelt. She knew these plants from her grandmother's book and from two years of trial. Yarrow for bleeding. Comfrey for torn skin. Woundwort. Marsh mallow root. All of them here, in one place, growing where no forester had ever mapped them. She drew her knife and cut what she needed, careful at each stem, thanking each plant under her breath. Rowan crouched beside her and held her satchel open. He did not ask what the plants were for. He had seen the fox on her counter that morning. He knew. "They brought us here," Elora said. Rowan looked at the butterflies, then at her. "They trust you," he said. "That's what this is." She tied the satchel shut. The fox at home needed the paste by morning, and now she had what would heal it. She had come out tonight to put an arrow in a man and had been turned aside for this instead. She stood, and the butterflies rose with her in a slow bright cloud, and she understood that the forest had chosen a side, and that side was hers.