Kaia Stormweaver's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

The vine lived, but it stood alone. Kaia looked at her garden and saw one green plant in a wide patch of pale sand. This was not the home she pictured. She wanted color, many kinds, spilling across the beach. So she loaded a sled she had woven from bamboo and reed, tied a braided vine rope to its front, and set out for the cove. Stan padded along beside her, quiet, watching the reeds. Kaia knelt in the cove and dug up bunches of tropical flowers, roots and all. Red, orange, blue, yellow. She laid each cluster on the sled. Her hands were black with mud. For the first time the garden in her head felt close enough to touch. A rustle stopped her. It came from a thick clump of flowers nearby, low to the ground. She set down her digging stick and pulled the leaves aside. Four small raccoons blinked up at her. Striped tails, round eyes, soft gray fur. They pressed together in a shallow nest of grass. One squeaked and climbed over another. Kaia turned. Stan stood very still. He would not look at her. "Stan." She sat back on her heels. "You have some explaining to do." "They're mine," Stan said. He walked over and nosed the nearest baby. "Theirs too. Their mother's in the reeds." Kaia stared. All those trips into the marsh. Stan always turning back, always looking east, always wanting to go the wrong way. "This is why you kept steering us here," she said. "You have a family." "Yeah." He said it plain, no shame in it. "Couldn't leave them long. But you needed the mud. So I stayed." Her chest tightened. He had walked her home through the marsh, shared her cold night, helped her save the vine. All while these babies waited here for him. "You should have told me." "You'd have made me go." He nudged a baby back into the nest. "Didn't want to yet." Kaia looked from the sled full of flowers to the small raccoons in the grass. She could not carry these plants home and leave a mother raccoon with four young in a cove she kept raiding. The flowers grew where they slept. She made her choice. She lifted three clusters off the sled and set them back in the holes she had dug. She pressed the soil around them. "I'll take a few," she said. "Not all. This is their home too." Stan watched her. "Fair." Kaia dragged the lighter sled back across the reef. Two flower clusters, not twelve. The garden would fill slowly now, one careful trip at a time. But a new thought took hold as she walked. If Stan had a family here, he would not travel with her forever. Soon she would cross the reef alone. And the beach she wanted to fill with beauty would need something more than borrowed blooms to make it a real home.