Fladrif's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

The line held both grounds now, but the beast drank from it. Fladrif felt the pulse run under the sealed door and stop somewhere on the far side. He could not tell where. He knelt at the fallen ash trunk with his hands in the soil and listened. The pulse thinned faster than the young roots could feed it. If he did not find the feeding point, both grounds would drain dry. "I cannot sense where it feeds," Fladrif said. "The door blinds me. I would have to cross to the far side to hear it." "The door is shut," Elmwood said. "You will not cross." Last winter men cut his sapling while he slept. He did not trust a plan that waited. Bregalad stood over the trunk, red eyes fixed on the ground. "Then do not cross," he said. "Feel the empty place. Feel where the pulse stops. The beast sits there." Fladrif understood. He could not hear the beast. But he could hear where the roots went quiet. He pressed both palms flat and reached down the buried line, past the door, into the far ground. He counted the pulse the way he counted rings, one beat at a time. Here strong. Here weak. Here nothing. Raewyn crouched beside him. She had guarded one stretch of forest for two elf lifetimes. She knew how to read a silence. "There," she said, pointing at a spot on the trunk. "The dead patch. It drinks under that root." Fladrif felt it too. One thick root ran under the door and up into the far ground. The beast sat on the end of it and drank. Every other root gave freely. That one poured into nothing. "Cut the feeding root," Kjell said. He knelt with his rune-carved axe across his knees. He had hunted beasts that could not be killed, and he knew when to stop feeding one. "Starve it. The rest of the line lives." "That root joins the two grounds," Fladrif said. "If I close it, the far side loses this side." "The far side loses either way," Raewyn said. Fladrif set his hands on the buried root. He did not push. He did not pull. He held the one line and told it to close. The old ironwood answered slow. The root thickened, hardened, sealed itself against the beast. The pulse that fed the beast stopped. The beast's draw scraped at the dead root and found nothing. Fladrif felt it strain, then let go. The rest of the line steadied. Both grounds fed each other through the other roots, and the beast drank from none of them. "It holds," Fladrif said. His arms shook, but the pulse ran clean. Then the ground under the far side shifted. The beast rose. It had lost the pulse beneath it. Now it moved, hunting the source, and it walked toward the young roots on the far side that Fladrif could no longer reach.