Henry Perrin's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

Days later, Henry walked to the temple with the ring still warm in his memory. The summer festival was close. He had work to do, and work was a kind of prayer. He carried a broom and a fresh bundle of lavender for the stone bowl outside the doors. He swept the steps. He brushed dust from the pointed windows. He set the lavender into the carved sunshine bowl and pressed the stems down with steady hands. The wood of the old temple smelled of sun and pine. For a moment, he let himself breathe. Then he saw them. A patch of bright dandelions had pushed up through a crack near the steps, scraggly and stubborn and yellow. Henry's hand stopped on the broom. He remembered a small boy standing in that same spot, ten years ago. Dirty knees. Quiet mouth. A fistful of dandelions held out like an offering, because he had nothing else to give. Henry knelt beside the weeds. His throat ached. He had taken that boy in with no plan and only love, and love had not been enough to keep the dark out. But the boy who picked those flowers was still inside the young man wearing the burning ring. Henry was sure of it. He picked one dandelion and laid it in the offering bowl beside the lavender. "I will find the way," he said to Solastus, to the empty steps, to the child he could still see. He stood with new purpose. Tonight he would open his books again. There was a rite he had not yet tried.