Iris Thornwell's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Myrtle worked the trowel around the white flower's roots while Iris watched the two blooms she was leaving behind. The red bell still hung over the black water. The pale blue was crushed flat under the painted turtle's shell. Iris had chosen, but choosing wasn't enough. If she planted the white flower in her grove and fed it wrong, the loam would sour. Nine years of waiting would rot in a season. She needed to know what the white one drank and what it starved on, and the only clues were the two flowers she was walking away from. She pulled out her notebook. "Nessa. Come here." Nessa squelched over, arms still crossed. Iris pointed at the red bell. "The heron passed it. Struck a frog right beside it and never touched the stem. Why." Nessa squinted. The slate heron was still there, one leg up, yellow eye fixed on the shallows. "Bitter, maybe," Nessa said. "Or poison. Birds know." Iris wrote it down. Then she pointed at the log. The turtle had not moved. Its cracked olive shell sat squarely on the blue blossom, and the log beneath was dark and wet with rot. "And that one grows on rotten wood. Wants acid. The turtle sits on it and nothing happens to either." She wrote that down too. "Why do you care about the ones you're not taking," Nessa said. "Because they grew here. Same water. Same air." Iris tapped the page. "If the red one is poison and nothing eats it, the soil here runs bitter. If the blue one wants rot, the soil runs sour. The white one grew between them and touched neither." She looked up. "So the white one wants the middle. Not sour. Not bitter. Clean loam. No rotted wood. No standing water." Buzzford came out from under the alders. The hood turned toward the moss where Myrtle was lifting the white flower free, roots trailing threads of pale soil. "Sniff the dirt," Buzzford said. Iris took a pinch from the root ball and held it under her nose. It smelled like nothing. Same as the flower. She almost laughed. Her grove was clean high ground, hauled loam, no rot, no seep. She had built the right bed by accident four years ago. A grey shape watched from across the water, ears forward, gold eyes steady. It did not cross. Myrtle had said the fox would not cross a patch of these. Iris marked that too. Clean ground. No predators near. She had it. Myrtle wrapped the roots in wet moss and pressed the bundle into Iris's hands. "Plant it before dark," she said. "And remember what you owe me." Iris nodded. She had the flower and she had its rules. What she did not have anymore was time, or a second bloom of her own.