Sage winterwood's Arc

Chapter 27 of 29

The snow the fox brought sat in the corner of the greenhouse. Sage watched it go slick and shrink. Water pooled under the frostberry seeds. By noon the drift would be gone. A fox could fetch more, but the cold never held. She needed weather that stayed. She dried her hands and looked at the sky through the leafy window. Only one goddess could bend it. So she set out to find her. Sage climbed a hill where the clouds hung low and called up into them. A woman stepped down out of the mist. Her dress moved like the sky itself, blue in one moment, gray with storm the next. This was Nephele Stratosa, goddess of weather. Sage had never asked a favor of her before. "My frostberry seeds need cold ground," Sage said. "The snow melts before they wake. Can you hold the cold in place?" Nephele tilted her head. Wind stirred her hair. "I do not work for nothing, herb goddess." Her voice was light but firm. "Bring me a dye that glows. I want color no loom has ever seen." Sage thought of the prism bloom drying on her workbench, its petals shifting through every shade. "I have the flower for it," she said. "Wait one day." Sage hurried home to her bundled-stick workbench. She crushed the prism bloom petals and pressed them, straining the liquid through cloth. It ran into the bottle bright and jeweled, swirling teal and gold and rose. She corked it and held it to the window. Light broke through it in colors. No dye like it existed anywhere. She carried it back up the hill. Nephele took the bottle and turned it. Her eyes went wide. "This will color the clouds themselves," she breathed. She tucked it into her sleeve. "Now show me your greenhouse." Inside the leafy house, Nephele raised both hands. The air split into bands. She pushed cold into the frostberry corner until frost crept across the soil. She pulled damp heat toward the wall vines. She laid dry warmth over the lilac bloom's dirt. Each stretch of the greenhouse now held its own weather, warm and cold and everything between. "It will hold," Nephele said. "The sky obeys me here now." Then she stepped out and rose back into the clouds. Sage knelt by the frozen corner. She dug up a frostberry seed. It had swelled and cracked open. A pale root reached into the frozen dirt. She could grow any plant now, from any world, each in its own climate under one roof. But her eyes moved past the glass to the barren rows outside. How would she plant these plants in her garden.