Lysander Brightwind's Arc

Chapter 2 of 11

By midday the second blight-wind pressed hard against the shed walls. Lysander Brightwind fed a fresh thread from his fingers to the moth's shoulder and watched the first bloom of silk spread across the hooks. It held. Then a thin gray seep came through the seam under the door, low and slow, like smoke that had forgotten how to rise. He smelled rot again. The blight itself was inside. Celestia Threadwhisper crouched by the seam and pulled back her hand fast. "It burns cold," she said. "Any fairy who breathes that inside the cocoon will sicken. We can't seal a shelter around poison." Lysander pressed a strip of silk to the gap. The silk yellowed and curled. He tried a second layer. The seep pushed through. Silk alone would not hold it out. He thought of the cliffside grotto where he slept. Pale stone. Cold air that never smelled of rot. The wind broke on the rocks above his door and slid past clean. Something in that stone turned the blight aside. He did not know what. He knew only that his own bed had never sickened him. "There are daisies growing at the mouth of my grotto," he said. "Pink and purple. They keep their color even in the wind off the cliff." Celestia looked up. "Living stems?" "Living. The wind there is clean." He flew out through the crack above the door and came back within the hour with a bundle of daisies pressed to his chest, roots and all, stems still wet. Celestia was already at her spindle. She took a stem, split it with her thumbnail, and drew out a green fiber thin as hair. "Feed it to me with the moth-silk," she said. He held the daisy fiber against the silk as she spun. The two threads twisted into one. She wound a short length off the spindle and pressed it to the seam under the door. The seep hit the composite thread and stopped. The thread did not yellow. It did not curl. Lysander breathed out. "It holds." "For a hand's width," Celestia said. She lifted the spindle. "We need enough to line every seam of a grove-wide cocoon. One spindle. Two weavers." He measured the shed with his eyes. Four seams at the door. Ten more at the roof. Beyond that, the whole outer wall of the cocoon they had not yet spun. "How long for one span?" he asked. "A month. If we don't sleep." The blight-wind had given him six weeks. He had spent one already. He knelt beside her at the spindle and took up a fresh stem. His mother's hands had been steadier. His would have to be enough. Outside, the seep kept coming. Inside, the first inch of clean seam held.