Nessa Fern's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Nessa Fern knelt in the wet pine needles and lifted her lantern toward the ruined fence. Splintered posts jutted up like broken teeth. Logs she had set last spring lay torn from the earth. Six years of quiet tending, and she would not lose the grove now. Not before the woodwarden ever learned her name. She set the brass lantern on a flat stone. Its warm light steadied her hands. From her medic kit she pulled binding cord, a small saw, and a jar of pine pitch. The scars on her knuckles ached in the cold. She worked fast, lashing the fallen logs back into place. A wet snuffle came from the dark. Nessa froze. A sleek otter padded into the lantern's glow, its bracken-rough snout twitching, pinecone whiskers wet with dew. It dragged another log behind it, tugging at her fence like a toy. She almost laughed. Her ruin had a face, and it was small. She did not hurt it. She lured it off with a strip of dried fish from her kit and watched it slip back through the dark toward the stream. Then she returned to the fence and worked until her fingers cracked. By the time gray light touched the bark archway at the grove's far path, the boundary held again. Pinecones swung gently above the entry. The grove was whole. Nessa snuffed the lantern. Her breath shook. She had saved the grove, but the otter would come back, and the fence she had patched was thinner than before. Soon she would need help. Soon she would need to knock on a door she had only ever stood beside.