Liri Dewglow of Quillwood's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Liri held the staff steady and did not step back. Behind her, the moss-inlaid table she had used to lay out the bone cord and the carved hound token still sat at the foot of the hammock trees, the trap's leavings scattered across its top. Ahead, the figure stood between two trunks on the dead path, perfectly still. "Liri," the figure said. Just her name. Spoken the way only someone taught it would speak it — short on the first part, soft on the last. She felt the cold of it move down her spine. No intruder should know her name. No stranger. She tightened her grip on Madrigal's staff and walked closer, counting paces. At the edge of the silent zone stood a small, bright structure she had never seen before — a fairy house with a leaf-thatched roof and a painted door, set down on the moss like a marker. Beside it grew a cluster of toadstools as tall as her shoulder, caps streaked in colors no Quillwood fungus wore. Cultivated. Carried in. Planted to claim the threshold. "Who sent you?" Liri asked. The figure lifted one hand and tapped the cap of the nearest toadstool. The colors pulsed once, like a held breath. "You know the mark," the figure said. "You taught it." From between the birches behind her, Madrigal's voice came thin and steady. "Those are her toadstools. The bark-reader's. She grew them in the temple light." A pause. "Someone has taken her, Liri. Or worse, she gave them up." Liri's chest went tight, then quiet. She drove the staff deeper into the earth. Whoever stood on the dead path knew her name because her own student had spoken it. The trap had worked. It had not caught a stranger. It had caught the proof that her circle was already broken — and that the path to the heart tree now ran through someone she had trained herself.