Nell Larkspur's Arc

Chapter 1 of 23

The frost came in the night. It glazed the path to Nell Larkspur’s door in a sheet of black ice. His stomach dropped when he saw it from his shack window at dawn. He didn’t want to admit why it made him so uncomfortable. The seamstress from the village would come today, but with the ice, she might not come at all. Nell had told her three times to stop climbing his hill. He barred the door once, and even left her offerings of thread and bread on the step untouched. Still she came, week after week, boots crunching the leaves, asking after her missing sister and the woods only he could read. He was half-fae and folk feared him for it — pointed green-tipped ears and forest eyes that caught too much light. But she feared none of it. And somewhere between her third visit and her seventh, he had started listening for her step. Without a thought, Nell pulled on his coat and took the axe from the wall. The fox followed him out, green tail flicking against the frost. It sat on a stump and watched him work. He swung the axe flat against the ice. Chips flew. He cleared a foot, then two, then ten. His palms split inside his gloves. Blood soaked the wool. Still, he kept swinging. The path ran a quarter mile down through the pines, and every yard of it wore the same black glass. "You'll ruin your hands," he mocked the fox. It blinked, unimpressed. They didn’t need to speak the same language to understand each other. By midmorning he had cleared half the slope. His shoulders shook. He could not feel his fingers. Flexing his hand, he looked up and saw a small figure picking her way down through the trees. The seamstress hadn’t taken her normal path, but climbed down the ridge above it. Blue hair. Brown apron. A basket clamped under one arm. In her stubborn desperation, Lena Marsh had climbed around the ice. Her blue-tinted nose was pink from the cold. Her fingers, needle-pricked and bare, gripped the white basket handle. She stopped ten feet from him and took in the axe, the blood, the raw trench of cleared stone. "You did all this," she said. Not a question. Nell dropped the axe. "Path was icing." "So you chopped it?” "I didn’t want you to fall." She looked at him a long moment. Then she stepped down onto the cleared stone and closed the distance. She took a bleeding hand into both of her. Her fingers were warm. She grabbed a clean linen from her basket, turned his palm up and pressed a strip against the worst of it. "I was coming to ask you again," she said, quiet. "About my sister." He worked his jaw as he watched her wrap his hand. "I know." "You were going to say no." She tied off the linen and gently let go of his hand. He met her gaze, then lowered them to her bluing lips. "Ask me inside," he said. "By the fire." And so she did, following him back up the path to his shack. He opened the door, and for the first time, Lena Marsh walked in.