Sage winterwood's Arc

Chapter 14 of 29

The finished garden should have brought Sage peace. Instead she woke to torn leaves. The silver buck stood among her rare seedlings, jaws working, stripping a blue-leafed sprout to its stem. The fox had chased this buck off weeks ago. Now it had come back wild, ribs showing, driven by hunger past any fence. Sage ran at it. The buck lifted its antlered head, watched her, and moved to the next row. It ate faster than she could ever replant. She waved her arms and shouted. The buck only stepped aside, then returned the moment she turned to check the damage. Three seedlings gone. A fourth half-eaten. She could not guard the whole garden all day and night. Chasing it would never end. The animal was starving. It would keep coming until nothing green remained. Sage stopped chasing. She knelt by the ruined row and looked at the buck's thin sides. It was not cruel. It was only hungry, and her garden held the only food for miles. She had planted for gods and mortals. She had planted nothing for the creature at her fence. She took up her mother's enchanted hoe and walked to the bare stretch beside the garden. Loose stones and gray cracks covered it. She could not wake dead stone herself, not without draining her glow again. But she did not need rich divine soil for grass. She cleared the largest rocks by hand, stacking them at the edge. Then she drove the hoe in and tilled what soil she could reach, breaking clods, cutting rows into the thin earth until it lay dark and turned. From her shed she brought a bundled sachet, grass seed mixed with forage her mother had left for feeding animals. Oats, clover, meadow grass, dried berry. Sage scattered handfuls across the fresh furrows. She pressed them down and carried water from her can, soaking the plot until the rows shone wet. The buck watched from the seedling beds, still chewing. "Not there," Sage said. "Here. This is yours." She led it by holding out a fistful of the feed. The buck's ears turned. It smelled the oats and stepped away from her rare rows, following her hand to the new plot. It lowered its head and ate from the scattered seed and forage. It stayed. By evening the grass plot was cropped low, and her seedlings stood untouched. Sage watched the buck settle in its own patch of turned earth. Its ribs still showed. This feed would last days, not forever, and grass sown today would take time to grow back. But the buck no longer fed on her rare plants. She had bought her garden's safety. Now she would have to keep the animal's plot growing too, alongside every other patch she watered. Her garden had gained a mouth to feed.