Fenn Hallows's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Fenn stood at the edge of his stall with the folded paper in his hand. The copper coin sat warm in his palm beside it. Past the split arch by dusk. He had seen men come back from that road with skin gray as ash, coughing spores for a month. He had no mask, no salve, no charm strong enough. He would not last the walk. He closed the stall early. The luma squirrel rode his shoulder as he walked out past the last houses and into the treeline. He needed help, and he knew only one person who lived close to that road and did not fear it. Juno Brass kept a garden in a clearing beyond the town. She was a demigod, tall as two men, with mossy antlers and hooves for feet. People whispered her mother had been a forest spirit. People whispered her name had been struck from the old stories. Fenn had traded her seeds once for a jar of ink and she had not cheated him. That was all he had to go on. He found her kneeling among low green plants, pulling weeds with hands the size of shovels. She did not look up. "You're off your path, merchant." "I need to cross the fungal ridge," Fenn said. "By dusk. I'll be sick before I'm halfway." She kept weeding. "Then don't go." "I took the trade. I keep it." She sat back on her hooves and looked at him. Her eyes were brown and steady. "What are you offering?" Fenn set the copper coin on a flat stone between them. Then he lifted a small charm from his robe, one of the ones he never explained, and set it beside the coin. "This too. It wards against drowning. You live near water. It's honest work." She picked up the charm. She turned it over in her fingers. The luma squirrel chittered on his shoulder. "A god would take the coin and give you nothing," she said. "You know that." "You're not a god." Something shifted in her face. Not a smile. Close. She stood and walked to a shelf of dried bundles hung under a lean-to. She pulled down a wad of pale leaves and a stoppered clay jar. "Chew three leaves before you enter. Three more at the arch. Rub the paste on your nose and mouth. It won't stop everything. It will stop enough." She dropped them into his hands. "Walk fast. Don't sit down. If you sit down, you sleep, and if you sleep there, you don't wake." Fenn folded the leaves into his sleeve. "Thank you." "Bring me back word that you lived," she said. "That's the rest of the price." He nodded. He turned toward the low road with the paper in his fist and the squirrel tight against his neck. The sun was already halfway down.