Railiana Monroe's Arc

Chapter 3 of 10

Railiana carried the healing water to her rows in wooden buckets. She poured it careful and slow. Levi walked the fence line each morning to make sure she took only her share. She thanked him with bread. For three days the sprouts drank deep, and she let herself hope. Then the plot turned strange. A bean stalk shot up to her waist by dawn, then wilted by noon. A flower bloomed blue, closed, and opened again gold. Vines knotted themselves into tight coils that no plant should make. Where she'd sowed corn, half-formed stalks twisted sideways. Her first crop was mutating before it could feed anyone. Tibble climbed the fence and stared. His green face pinched under the wide brown hat. "That water's too strong," he said. "You're drowning them in magic." He tapped his staff on a coiled vine. It shivered and grew a second bud. "Cut it before the whole plot goes wild." Railiana knelt in the dirt. She thought of the pond. The water healed a tired body slowly. It never poured its whole strength at once. She had been giving her sprouts pure magic, undiluted. "I don't need to stop the water," she said. "I need to weaken it." She ran to the well behind her cottage and hauled up plain water. Then she mixed one bucket of pond water with four buckets of ordinary water. She poured the thin mixture along a single test row. Tibble watched, doubtful, his staff glowing faint against the critters in the brush. By the next morning the test row stood calm. The sprouts grew straight and green. No wild bursts. No twisting stalks. Just steady, healthy leaves reaching for the sun. Railiana laughed and pressed her hands to her mouth. But the rest of the plot was already lost. The knotted vines and half-formed stalks had gone too far. She walked the rows with a blade and cut them all down. It hurt to tear out her first crop. She loaded the ruined plants into a pile and left the soil bare. Levi appeared at the fence while she worked. He looked at the empty rows, then at her muddy hands. "You're not stopping," he said. It wasn't a question. "I found the trick," she said. She held up a bucket of the weak mixture. "One part your water, four parts mine. It grows them right." She met his red eyes. "But I lost the whole first planting to learn it." Levi was quiet. Then he nodded toward the pond. "Take what you need," he said. "I've got no use for a whole planting." Railiana looked at her bare plot. The season was moving. Her seed store was thin now, half of it spent on the crop she'd just buried. She had the method. She did not have enough seed to fill the rows again. Tomorrow she would have to find more, and she had no coin to buy it.