Matilda's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Matilda had wanted control over the summer thermometer since she was a girl, and tonight she meant to start her journey to take it. She spread a blank sheet of parchment paper on the kitchen table of her bramble-wrapped cottage and set her cracked raven feather beside it. The potion she wanted would cause the thermometer to plummet into the hottest temperatures anyone had ever experienced. It would affect every living thing in the woods. Deer, wolves, the raven that had slipped her snares for three months, even Summer Sun, the one who controls the thermometer now. She had told herself the recipe for years like a prayer. Tonight she would write it down and begin. She closed her eyes and reached for the first line. Nothing came. She reached for the second. Nothing came there either. She had heard the potion named in her grandmother's kitchen, in a traveling peddler's song, in the margin of a burned book. She had never seen it whole. She opened the cupboard where she kept her mother's notes and turned every page. Herbs. Curses. A recipe for boiled turnips. No potion. She checked the shelf behind the salt. She checked the loose brick under the hearth. She found a dead moth and three copper coins. A knock came at the door. Matilda shoved the parchment under a dish and opened it a crack. Summer Sun stood on the step in her striped dress, holding a teacake wrapped in cloth. "Brought you something." She held it out. "You look tired." Matilda took the cake without answering. Summer Sun glanced past her at the empty parchment, at the open cupboard, at the mess. "Looking for something?" Matilda said she was not. Summer Sun nodded once. "Granny Weatherby keeps old recipes. All of them. She showed me a book once. Big one. Locked." She said it flat, the way she said everything, and did not press. Then she turned and walked back down the path. Matilda shut the door and leaned against it. She had spent years pretending she remembered the recipe. She did not. Not a single line. The truth sat in her chest like a swallowed stone. Somewhere in the barn where Granny Weatherby kept her things, there was a book that might hold what Matilda needed. Granny Weatherby had chased Matilda out of that barn once already. She would not be welcome twice. Matilda picked up the teacake, set it on the table beside the empty parchment, and looked at the dark window. The brewing could not begin without the recipe. The recipe was not hers. She would have to go and take it, and she would have to do it without Summer Sun learning why she had asked.