Jade Woodhart's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Jade Woodhart had three weeks to write a ballad worth singing, and nothing worth writing about. She sat on a stump at the edge of Walnutsnarl with her lute across her knees and a blank page pinned under a rock. Every autumn the forest festival picked one headliner from a stack of submissions. Every autumn Jade sent a song, and every autumn a runner tacked her name to the bottom of the opener list. She had rhymed moss with loss four times already this morning. Her problem was not the rhymes. Her problem was that nothing had ever happened to her. She had grown up in the same cottage, walked the same paths, and lost nothing bigger than a boot to the creek. The other hopefuls sang about drowned brothers and burned villages. Jade sang about walking to town. A small pink shape crashed through the ferns and landed in her lap. It was a puppy, no bigger than a loaf, with silver wings folded crooked against a purple robe. One wing was bent the wrong way. The puppy looked up at her and whined. Jade had never seen anything like it, and she was certain no one else in Walnutsnarl had either. She set her lute aside and lifted the animal carefully. Its heart beat fast against her thumb. Somewhere behind the ferns, a branch snapped, then another, closer. Whatever had chased the puppy was still coming. Jade tucked the puppy under her jacket, grabbed her lute, and ran for the cottage path. She had her story now. She only had to survive it long enough to write it down.