Lena Birch's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Lena Birch buried a blade in this forest twelve years ago, and now she could not find the tree that marked it. She stood where the tall oak should have been. Instead a burned stump crumbled under her boot. The whole village of Birchrot knew her as the woman who sharpened their knives and split their logs. None of them knew she once carried a weapon worth killing for. She meant to keep it that way. First she had to dig it up before someone else did. She had chosen this spot for a reason. A stream once curled past the oak's roots. She followed the old channel now, but the water had shifted. The land had grown wilder. Ferns swallowed the paths. She could dig a hundred holes and still miss the blade by three feet. Worse, loose earth would draw questions. A woodcutter had no reason to turn soil this deep in the trees. Then she remembered the marsh. The stream fed a wet hollow downhill, and she had lined up the burial with the tallest reed she could see from the oak. She pushed through the brush until the ground turned soft. Reeds stood in the shallow water, slender and green, their hollow stems swaying. One rose higher than the rest, exactly as she remembered. She turned her back to it and paced out her old count. Twenty steps. Her boot struck a flat rock she had set herself. Lena knelt and dug with her hands. The soil came away black and cold. Her fingers found cloth, then the hard line of a hilt beneath it. Her heart steadied. She had it. As she pulled, something moved in the pit. A centipede as long as her forearm poured out of the loosened dirt. Its shell shone dark red. Rows of legs rippled along its body, each tipped for venom. It reared toward her wrist. Lena did not flinch. She had faced worse than this in her old life. She grabbed a stone and crushed the head in one strike. The body coiled and went still. She wiped her hand and lifted the bundle free. The wrapping had rotted, but the steel inside had not. She peeled back the cloth. The blade caught the gray light without a spot of rust. Even now it looked wrong in a woodcutter's hands. Lena wrapped it fast and pressed the soil back down. She smoothed ferns over the hole. When she stood, she heard boots on the wet ground behind her. A voice called out, young and curious, asking what she was doing so far from the village. She had the blade. Now someone had seen her carry it.