Ninka Evertrue's Arc

Chapter 14 of 29

By full morning Ninka stood at the grandmother's cabinet with the door open. Two loaves. A jar of stew. A sack of oats half gone. She counted twelve mouths and did her math twice. Three days, maybe four if she cut the bread thin. Her father was pinned on the ridge, her gift was gone, and the children would be hungry by the weekend. She closed the cabinet and went out to find Kaia. The girl sat on a stump near the well with her sketchbook open on her knees. A patched sleeve hung over her wrist. She was drawing a bean, careful lines, one leaf at a time. "I need to ask you something," Ninka said. She sat on the grass. "The food from my grandmother runs out in three days. I have twelve kids. I don't know how to feed them past that." Kaia did not look up. "Ask." "Can you draw food? Not one meal. A place that keeps making it. Trees. Rows. Water." Kaia turned a page. "Once it's on paper it stays. I can't undo it." "I'm not asking you to undo it." Kaia looked at her then. "You want it near the well?" "Wherever it will grow." Kaia nodded once and got up. She walked to the flat ground between the cabin and the well and knelt in the grass. She opened the book to a clean page and uncapped her pen. She did not ask what Ninka wanted it to look like. She just began. Ninka watched a stream draw itself down the page in one steady line. Then apple trees, small and round. Rows of carrots, cabbage, tomatoes on the vine. A pumpkin heavy on its stem. Herbs in a bank. At the top of the page Kaia drew a small mountain of clear crystal with a waterfall spilling out of it, and around the base she scattered mushrooms and low flowers. She closed the book. The ground answered. Ninka felt it first through her boots, a soft push, like something turning over in sleep. Then the grass in front of them split. A shoot came up. Another. A trunk pushed out of the dirt and thickened. Apples formed on branches that were still growing. A stream cut itself into the meadow and ran clean. At the far end, crystal rose out of the earth, veined with moss, and water poured down its face into a pool. The children came out of the cabins one by one. A small boy walked to the nearest tree and touched an apple. He looked back at Ninka like he needed her to say it was allowed. "Eat," she said. He picked it. He bit. Juice ran down his chin. Kaia was already packing her pen away. "It'll keep making food," she said. "As long as the water runs." Ninka sat down in the grass. Her hands would not stop shaking. The children could stay now. Which meant they would stay. Which meant she had a commune, and she had no idea how to run one.