Maple Jack's Arc

Chapter 7 of 14

The Yellowknife spark sat clean in his upper branches, and Maple Jack thought the worst was behind him. He was wrong. As the smoke from the stone house thinned inside his trunk, something slipped out through the open door. A small dark shape, no bigger than a squirrel, with torn wings and a black book pressed against its ribs. It had been driven out of the mitten story but not destroyed. It needed another story to feed on. It began to climb. Maple Jack felt it move from branch to branch. Where its claws scraped his bark, the wood went gray and brittle. One low limb on his north side cracked under its weight and hung dead, the bark peeling in long strips, the wood inside dry as ash. He could not grow that branch back today. He turned his attention upward and found his remaining sparks already reacting. The lighter, half-formed ones had drifted together into a single bright cluster near his crown, pressed close like chicks under a wing. One small spark-shape held a half-made book in its arms and watched the climbing imp with wide eyes. The cluster was bright, but it was not ripe. If the rot-imp reached them, none of them would survive to send. Maple Jack could not shake the imp off. He had tried that with the rot inside the mitten story and failed. What had worked was pairing. Kindness against rot. He searched himself for another pale spark from the waiting children and found only one left, smaller than the first, barely a glow. He hesitated. If he spent it here, he would have nothing to stabilize the next story that began to turn. Then he thought of the dead branch hanging off his side, and the cluster of young sparks pressed together at his crown, and he stopped hesitating. He pushed the pale spark down to meet the climbing imp on the scarred limb where the bark had gone gray. The two touched. The imp opened its black book to feed and found the page already lit from underneath. It shrieked once, a dry sound like a seed pod splitting, and folded into its own smoke. The book fell and crumbled before it reached the ground. The cluster at his crown loosened and drifted back to their separate branches, still unripe, still waiting. Maple Jack counted them. Sixteen lighter sparks. One heavy red one held ready for the next wind. The dead limb on his north side did not heal. It would stay, pale and bare, a mark of what the rot had cost him before he stopped it. He had one fewer pink spark now to spend on the next story that began to turn. He would have to send the Yellowknife mitten soon, before another story went the same way.