Raina's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Raina followed the god's path, and the god's path was dying. The blue woads on her cheeks marked her as the one meant to wake the sleeping forest god. But the forest ahead had turned black. Trees stood peeled and gray. Their sap ran dark and stank like old meat. Something was poisoning the land between her and the god, and she could not reach him through poison. She carried a sword shaped from living willow. Green leaves grew along its wooden blade. Her grandmother had cut it for this, saying it would clean what sickness touched. Raina pressed the flat of the blade against a rotted trunk. The leaves curled and browned. The blade drank the poison in, then went still. She had cleansed one tree. Behind it stood a thousand more. At the edge of the dead ground sat a small cottage. Red mushrooms clustered on its roof like fat berries. Raina knew that place. She had left it three days ago, when the god's call first pulled her north. The poison had not been here then. It was following her home. A wolf stepped from the doorway. It was lean and gray, and antlers branched from its skull like a stag's. Its yellow eyes fixed on her sword. It did not growl. It lifted its nose and drew a long breath, tasting the air the way a person reads a page. It smelled the magic in the willowblade. It smelled the poison. Then it turned and looked north, into the black trees, and back at her. Raina lowered the blade an inch. "You know what's doing this." The wolf trotted to a peeled trunk near the cottage wall. It scraped the bark with one paw, again and again, until the wood split. Black sap welled out. But underneath the sap, something moved. Pale threads. Roots that were not roots. They pulsed and reached toward the untouched ground beyond. Raina understood then. The poison was not spilled or thrown. It grew. It spread through the earth on living tendrils, and cleansing one tree meant nothing while the source pushed new threads out below. She had been cutting leaves off a weed and calling it dead. She knelt and drove the willowblade into the split trunk, down into the pale roots. The leaves along the wood flared bright green. The threads writhed, blackened, and crumbled to ash. The ground under her knees shuddered. All around the cottage, dead bark cracked as the tendrils died back into the soil. But the blade had shown her more than the cure. The threads all ran one way. They came from the north, from deep under the god's forest, thick as a man's arm and old. The source was not out here. The source was wrapped around the sleeping god himself. The wolf met her eyes and started north. Raina pulled her sword free and followed.