Halsin Silverbough's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The barrier held, but the forest behind it fell quiet. Halsin noticed it three days after he dug the trench. No birdsong at dawn. No deer tracks by the stream. He walked the Grove's edge and found a fox dead in the leaves, no wound on it. Then a hare. Then a nest of cold sparrows. The curse could not cross the roots, but its pull reached up through the soil and drank the life from anything that lingered near. Freya found him kneeling by the dead fox. She was the Grove's herbalist, and she read the land better than anyone. She crouched and turned the fox with two fingers. "It didn't starve," she said. "It just stopped. The ground took it." "The animals feed us," Halsin said. "They warn us too. When the birds go silent, we know danger's near." He stood. "If they all die, we're blind and hungry both." His old brown bear padded up behind him. The bear had kept close since the digging, slow and watchful, its shaggy head low. Halsin pressed a hand to its neck and felt the fur trembling. The pull was working on it too. He would lose his oldest companion if he did nothing. Freya opened her satchel and spread dried roots on the ground. "The carnivorous plants eat the curse at the trench," she said. "What if we spread them wider? Not a wall. A field." Halsin saw it at once. The barrier fed on the curse from one narrow line. But the pull rose everywhere under the ground near the edge. He needed hungry roots across the whole strip, not just along it. They worked until dark. Freya cut every carnivorous stem she had and split them into cuttings. Halsin dug them into the poisoned ground in rows, close as a garden bed. Then he knelt and poured his magic into all of them at once. Green light spread through the soil like water through cloth. The roots plunged and clenched. He felt the cold pull scatter, forced to feed a hundred hungry mouths instead of climbing free. The strain nearly broke him. Sweat ran down his scar. The bear pressed its side against his back and held him up. By morning, the field of snapping plants covered the whole dead strip. Halsin walked it and listened. A single wren called from the living trees. Then another. A squirrel crossed a branch. The animals were creeping back to the safe ground. Freya laughed, tired and glad. "They know it's clean now." Halsin scratched the bear's ears. The tremble was gone from its fur. He had saved the wildlife. But kneeling in the field, he had felt the source below pull harder than ever, straining against every root at once. The plants would not hold forever against that hunger. He looked toward the dark tower on the far ridge, where the curse ran deepest. The answer waited under it. He would have to go there.