Sage winterwood's Arc

Chapter 13 of 29

By the next morning the greenhouse pots had grown too small. The rare seedlings pushed their leaves against the glass. Sage lifted one from its shelf and turned it over. Roots wound around and around inside the pot, choking each other, hunting for room they could not find. She counted the shelves. Dozens more strained the same way. If she left them another day, the strongest would strangle the rest. She carried a seedling outside and stopped cold. The plot she meant to fill was still bare. A wide stretch of dead ground lay past her worked soil, gray and cracked, studded with loose stones. She had planted every patch already awakened. The seedlings needed earth she did not have. She set the pot down and stared at the barren stretch, her hands shaking. A weight moved through the ground under her feet. Terros Deeproot came across the rocks, the earth god, stern as ever, the one who made her earn each patch of soil. He looked at the seedling in the pot, then at the bound roots pressing the glass. "They're dying in there," he said. It was not a question. "I have no place to put them." Sage held up the pot. "I ran out of ground." He knelt and pressed his palm to the dead stone. For a long moment nothing happened. Then the cracks closed. The gray softened to brown. Stones sank and dissolved. Fresh soil spread out under his hand, dark and damp, until the whole stretch lay ready. He stood and brushed off his knees. "You healed my buck," he said. "I don't forget a debt. But this is the last I break for free." He walked off the way he came. Sage did not waste the gift. She took up the enchanted hoe her mother had left and cut long rows into the new earth. The blade sang through the soil, turning it neat and even. The fox trotted along beside her, sniffing each furrow, its tail brushing the dirt. It settled at the row's end to watch her work. One by one she freed the seedlings from their pots. She loosened the strangled roots with her fingers and spread them wide in the ground. She sorted as she planted, keeping the silver ones apart from the blue, the black seeds in their own bed. Beside each row she pressed a small wooden marker, its name carved in her own hand. Basil. Then names no mortal garden held. By dusk the greenhouse stood empty. Every rare seedling grew in open soil, sorted and labeled, roots free at last. Sage wiped her hands and looked over the rows. The garden she had chased across all this work finally covered the ground.