Mara Kellison's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

Mara got the blue rose at dawn. She had crept to the forest edge while the wolf slept, cut the stem with her garden shears, and run back before the yellow eyes opened. Now the bloom lay in her hand, pale and glowing. She had done the hardest thing. But the moment she stood still, a new fear crawled up her neck. The petals had already started to droop. She carried the rose inside and set it in a glass of water. By noon the edges curled. The clear blue dulled to gray at the tips. A cut rose like this could die in a day, and the judges would not come for a week. She had risked the wolf for a flower that was already fading in her hands. Mara tried everything she knew. She trimmed the stem at an angle. She moved the glass out of the sun. She stirred sugar into the water. Nothing held it. By evening the lowest petals had gone soft and brown. She pressed her palms to the table and made herself think. Then she remembered her own garden. Her purple rose bushes stood thick and strong in the beds outside. Those roots drank water all day and the blooms never wilted. A cut flower starved. A rooted one did not. She did not need to keep the blue rose alive in a glass. She needed to keep it on a plant. She took a sharp knife and a healthy purple cane from the fullest bush. She had read how growers joined one plant to another. She split the purple stem, shaved the base of the blue rose stem thin, and pressed the two together. Her hands shook. She bound the joint tight with waxed thread and packed wet soil around the roots. Mara waited. She did not sleep. She watched the blue rose for any sign it had taken. At first light she leaned close. The curled petals had lifted. The gray tips had gone blue again. The graft had held. The purple roots were feeding the wild bloom, and it was drinking. She laughed out loud and pressed her hand to her mouth. She had solved it. The blue rose would live, rooted in her own bed, blue and purple on one proud plant. No judge in the valley had seen such a thing. A board creaked at the fence. Mara turned. The shy deer stood in the gap, ears high, nose pointed at the fresh soil and the tender grafted stem. Behind it, at the tree line, the wolf watched again. The deer took one soft step toward her beds. Her winning rose now lived in open ground, and hungry mouths had found it.