Rowan Deeproot's Arc

Chapter 3 of 7

Rowan knelt in the gap and set the knife down in the dirt. The myconid still watched from the crack, ready to bolt into the dark. If it fled deeper, the last witness to the mist would be gone. Rowan pushed the blade away, slow, until it lay far past reach. Then Rowan showed the creature two empty wooden hands. The myconid did not come out. It stared at the fallen ferns, at the sap on the ground. Rowan needed to prove the cutting was over. But the small thing had watched everything die, and it did not trust a stranger who carved a road to its door. A cart wheel squeaked behind the ferns. A short man pushed through the gap Rowan had opened, pack towering over his head, jars and buckles rattling. He stopped when he saw the treant kneeling by a knife. "You're bleeding the green," the man said. Flat, like weather. "Cut things remember who cut them." He was Larry Bo'Jerry, a peddler who walked the roads with everything he found. He dug in his pack and pulled out a shallow crystal bowl, its facets catching the gold oak-light. "Found this by a shining pond. Fungi grow to it. Might grow to that." He tipped his chin at the myconid. Rowan took the bowl. It held still water and a smear of colored moss along the rim. "What do I owe you?" "Later," Larry said. "You'll pay later. Everybody does." He did not explain. He leaned on his cart and watched. Rowan set the bowl in the dirt between themself and the oak. Then Rowan reached to the split trunk, not with the blade, but with a bare hand, and pressed a fingertip until sap welled from their own bark. Rowan let a drop fall into the water. Treant sap, not fern sap. Rowan's own, given, not taken. The colored moss on the rim drank it. Faint threads of red rose through the water, then a thread of gold higher up. Where the two met, the color changed to something Rowan had no word for. The myconid's dark eyes fixed on it. It knew that color. It had seen it before, long ago, drifting across the whole land. The creature stepped from the crack. It crossed the sap-wet ground, past the abandoned knife, and touched the rim of the bowl with one thin hand. It looked up at Rowan. It was not afraid now. "Huh," Larry said. "It came out." Rowan kept both hands open and low. The witness stood within reach, willing, drawn by the color of the old mist. Rowan had traded the blade for trust, and it had worked. But the myconid pointed one finger past the oak, into the deeper dark, and made a low, worried sound. Whatever it remembered about the grove, it did not want to say it here.