Leanna AppleBlossom's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By the time Leanna reached the second stream, the creature in her hands had gone quiet. Its gills fanned slow. The crystal points along its back looked dull, like glass left in a warm room. She stopped on the bank and knelt. The blue fur was damp where her palm had pressed. It was warming, and warming was killing it. She set it down on a flat stone in the shade. It did not stand. One paw twitched. She understood then that if it died, the frost that killed her blossoms died with it, and so did every question she had about how to undo the damage. No creature, no clue. No clue, no grove. She needed cold. Fast. The stream ran cold, but water would drown it. She scooped a handful of wet clay from the bank and packed it around the sprite's belly. It gave a small, grateful shiver. Not enough. The clay would warm within the hour. She pulled out her map and looked at the marks she trusted. A tinker sold odd things from a cart near the mushroom houses. She had passed him once and seen a small stove wrapped in blue crystal, humming cold instead of heat. She had thought it foolish then. She wrapped the sprite in the hem of her flower dress, tucked the bundle against her ribs where her skin was coolest, and ran. The tinker was folding his cloth when she arrived. She held out every copper she had. He looked at the shivering bundle, then at her coins, and pushed half of them back. He gave her the small stove and a folded packet of what he called sprite-salt. "Burns cold," he said. "Don't touch the coils." She carried it all back to the stream at a walk, afraid of jostling. She set the stove on the stone. The coils lit pale gold behind their frosted glass, and the air around them dropped. Frost webbed across the rock. She laid the sprite in front of the vents. It breathed in. The dull crystals along its spine brightened. Its gills flared. It lifted its head and looked at her with both eyes clear. Leanna sat back in the moss. She had saved it. She watched the stove work and saw the second problem arrive with the first breath of relief. The stove was small. The salt packet was thin. The sprite could not leave it, and she could not carry a stone and a stove and a living thing through the woods forever. It needed a house. A cold house, built where cold could stay. She unfolded her map again and marked a new spot upstream, where the bank held shade all day. The grove would have to wait one more turn. Before she could plant a first bloom for lost things, she had to build a roof for this one.