Elowyn's Arc

Chapter 11 of 12

Elowyn stared at the blank page where silphium belonged. Morrowyn had named every other flower's use, but this one stayed empty. No one alive had pressed the plant. No one alive could name its work. She closed the herbarium and pressed her hand flat on the cover. "There has to be one left somewhere," she said. "Everyone says it's gone. But everyone said Thessara was gone too." Morrowyn crouched by her cracked pot again, poking the green shoot upright. She didn't look up. "Silphium sleeps," she said. "The eaten one slept longest. Ate itself out of the world." She wiggled a finger at the soil. "But sleep is not death. I know the difference. It is my whole job." Elowyn knelt beside her. "You mean a seed still exists?" "A seed called once," Morrowyn said. "Faint. From the seam place. Where the light splits." She tilted her head toward Tavian, who leaned in the doorway with his compass still in his hand. "You went there. Sunlight on one side. Moonlight on the other. Something grows in the split." Tavian frowned. "We nearly didn't come back from that split." "You don't have to cross," Morrowyn said. She stood on her vine-wrapped feet and dug in the soil of her cracked pot. Her small fingers closed around something pale. She held it up. A single seed, translucent, glowing faintly like a drop of milk in moonlight. "I held this one. It called with the others. I couldn't wake it. Too big for me. Too old." Elowyn's breath caught. "That's silphium?" "The eaten one," Morrowyn said. She placed the seed in Elowyn's palm. It was warm. "A giving. For the debt you paid me kindly. Not owed. Given." She looked at the leaning shoot in her pot, then back at Elowyn. "You wake things. Your blooms wake things. Maybe you wake this. Maybe not." Elowyn curled her fingers around the seed. "If it grows, I can press its flower. I can name what it did." "Fed whole cities," Morrowyn said simply. "Before it slept. That was its work." There it was. The use, spoken aloud at last. Elowyn opened the herbarium and wrote in the empty space: silphium, food for many, driven to sleep by hunger. The page was no longer blank. But the pressed flower still wasn't there. She had the name of the work. She did not have the bloom. Elowyn looked at the seed glowing in her hand. "I have to grow it myself," she said. "That's the only bloom left to find." Morrowyn nodded and returned to her shoot. "Grow it where the boundary thins," she said. "Silphium won't wake anywhere else. It needs the split light." Tavian pushed off the doorframe. "So we're going back toward the seam," he said. "On purpose this time." Elowyn closed her hand around the warm seed. The catalog had a name now. It still needed a flower, and the flower waited where the two lights met.