Rosalind Meadowbrook's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Rosalind Meadowbrook had been carrying dried apples to the garden gate every Thursday for eleven weeks, and the enchanter had never once come out to take them. She left the basket on the flat stone by the hinge and waited until the leaves inside the wall began to murmur her name back to her. That was the closest she had gotten. The village said the enchanter had not spoken to anyone in six years, not since he sealed himself behind the whispering hedges to tend whatever grew there. Rosalind did not care what the village said. She had seen him once, kneeling in the moss with his sleeves pushed up, and she had decided then that she would find a way through his gate before winter. This Thursday the basket slipped from her hand. A grey rot ran along the base of the outer hedge, thick as her wrist, and the leaves above it had gone quiet. She knelt and touched it. The moss underneath came away in wet black clumps. A slender deer stepped from the tree line and watched her, white-tipped ears twitching, a pale scar down its flank. It did not run. It lowered its head toward the blight, then lifted it toward the gate, then back again. Rosalind understood. If the rot reached the inner beds, the enchanter would lock the gate to keep it contained, and every Thursday after would be a walk to a wall. She pulled her knife and cut the sickened stems out at the root, working down the line until her hands were black to the wrists. She burned the pile on the flat stone where the basket used to sit. When she looked up, the deer was gone and the hedge above her had begun whispering again, low and uneven, testing her name. The gate stayed shut. But a folded square of paper had appeared on the stone beside the ash, weighted with a green pebble, and it had her name on the outside in a hand she had never seen before.