Rosalie Bloom's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Rosalie Bloom knelt in her ring of roses and counted the sick petals before breakfast. Seven, this morning. Yesterday it had been three. The blight was walking out of the heartwood grove, and her garden stood in its path. She had spent her whole life growing this place into a shelter for every wilting flower in Alaria, and she meant to be the queen who kept that promise. She could not keep it if her own beds turned black by nightfall. She stood and looked east. The grove's edge showed a gray seam through the trees, closer than yesterday. A pink dragon-winged creature no larger than her hand landed on her shoulder and pressed its head against her ear. It had lived in her willow-and-petal house since it hatched, and it always knew when she was afraid. "I need a wall," she told it. "A living one. Before noon." She went to the apothecary basket at the center of the garden and pulled what she needed: lavender for calm roots, sage for boundary, chamomile for knitting sick tissue, and the six red roses that ringed the herbs. She carried the bundle to the fairy pond and knelt on the stones. She crushed the herbs into the water and dipped each rose stem until the water turned rust-brown. The koi scattered. Good. The pond had taken the bitterness into itself. She worked fast. She planted the treated roses in a curved line between her beds and the grove, one every ten paces, and pressed a pinch of pond silt against each root. Then she walked the line and sang the low, steady note her grandmother taught her, the one that told a plant to grow toward a threat instead of away from it. The stems thickened while she watched. Thorns lengthened. By the time the sun cleared the butterfly-leafed tree at the garden's edge, a hedge of armed roses stood between her flowers and the gray seam. The blight reached the hedge at midmorning. Rosalie watched from the step of her pink butterfly-cage cottage, the small dragon-winged creature tight on her wrist. The gray crept up to the first rose, touched a thorn, and stopped. It curled back on itself. It tried the second rose and stopped again. Along the whole line, the blight pulled away from her beds and sank into the soil at the hedge's foot. Her flowers were safe. She let out the breath she had been holding since dawn. Then she saw the hedge. The six roses she had planted were already darkening at the tips. They had drunk the blight to save the others, and they were dying for it. Rosalie stepped down from the cottage and walked toward them. If she was going to be the queen of a garden that sheltered every wilting flower in Alaria, she would have to learn, today, how to save the ones that had saved her.