Hazel Thornwick's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Hazel Thornwick opened her satchel on the tavern table and found the third dead cutting of the morning. The fern had gone black at the stem. The moss beside it was gray dust. She had pulled both from the poisoned grove less than an hour ago, alive and damp, and now they were nothing she could study. She smoothed her field journal open and wrote the time next to the failure. Three years chasing a footnote for shadowmoss. One season promising her mentor she would restore the grove at the heart of Grovebleed. She could not build a single spell from ash. The tavern was quiet at this hour. Pastel light came through the round windows. A skeleton dog lay under her bench, ribs faintly green in the sun, tail tapping the floorboards whenever her boot shifted. It had followed her in from the road and refused to leave. She did not mind. It was the only thing near her that was not dying. "That one was alive when I cut it," she said, mostly to the dog. "They're all alive when I cut them." "Grove kills what leaves it." Hazel looked up. The boy at the next table had green skin and sores on his cheek, black hair falling in his eyes. His hoodie was too big. His eyes were red and steady on her ruined samples. She knew him by reputation before she knew his face — Basil Greenleaf, the vegetarian dead boy nobody let stay anywhere. She had heard he had been taken by a coven scout. He looked thinner than the story. "How do you know that," she said. "Walked through it yesterday." He pushed a crust of bread toward the skeleton dog. "Ground hums wrong. Plants know they're gone the second you lift them." She stared at him. "They're severing themselves." "Something is." Hazel pulled the black fern out and set it between them. She pressed her thumb against the soil still clinging to its root. It was cold. Not damp-cold. Empty-cold. The kind of cold she had felt once around a dead zone her mentor had warned her about. The grove wasn't poisoning the cuttings. The grove was the only thing keeping them alive. Whatever sickness sat in that soil, it had rooted itself into every plant so deeply that separation was death. She closed the journal. "I can't take samples out," she said. "I have to work inside it." Basil chewed his bread. "Grove doesn't want visitors." "It's going to get one." She swept the ash into a twist of paper and pocketed it. The skeleton dog stood when she stood. "Do you know the way back in from the south side?" He watched her for a long moment. Nobody had asked him to come along in a while. "I'll walk you," he said.