Marina Dewspring's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Marina Dewspring had three days to prove her magic, or the elders would name someone else guardian of the sacred spring. She knelt on the mossy bank and cupped her hands over the water. A thin ribbon rose between her palms, wobbled, and fell back with a wet slap. Every fairy in Timberfrost drew their magic from this spring. If no guardian shielded it before the frost season, the water would freeze at its heart, and every fairy would weaken with it. She tried again. She pictured a dome, the way her mother used to shape one from a single drop. The ribbon climbed higher this time. Then it burst and soaked her dress. "You're squeezing it," said a voice behind her. Lilya, the tree sprite who lived in the old birch above the spring, dropped down from a low branch. Leaves and small twigs tangled in their hair, and a yellow flower sat crooked over one ear. Marina had known them since they were both saplings, more or less. Lilya was the only one who still watched her practice without pity. "I'm trying everything," Marina said. "That's the squeezing part." Lilya crouched beside her and tapped the surface of the spring. Rings spread out. "Water doesn't like a fist. Ask it." "I've asked. It ignores me." "Then stop asking like a fairy. Ask like the water." Marina almost snapped at them. Instead she looked at the rings still moving outward. She dipped one finger in and held it there. She thought about the current under her skin, the slow pull toward the low stones, the way the spring breathed without lungs. She lifted her hand. A bead of water followed her finger up. Then another. They joined. The bead widened into a small, trembling disc above her palm. Marina held her breath. The disc flattened, thinned, and stretched into a curved sheet the size of a dinner plate. It held. "Push it out," Lilya whispered. Marina pushed. The sheet ballooned into a dome the width of her arms and settled over a patch of moss. A dropped pinecone from Lilya bounced off it and rolled away. "That," Lilya said, "is a shield." Marina laughed once, shaky. The dome collapsed a second later and drenched her knees. But she had made it. She had felt how. She stood, wet and shivering, and looked toward the ridge where the elders' hall sat above the treeline. A dinner-plate shield would not cover the spring. The spring was wider than a cottage. She needed a dome ten times the size, and she needed it steady, and she had two days left. "I can hold one now," she said. "You can hold a small one," Lilya said. "They'll want to see it hold the whole spring." Marina wrung out her sleeve. "Then I need somewhere bigger to practice. And someone who's seen it done."