Sapphire Crystalline's Arc

Chapter 11 of 12

Sapphire sat under the golden branches. Amber sap dripped from the bark and pooled at the roots. The dead flower stem lay in her clean hand. She had crossed three valleys and a whole night as a beast to reach this tree. Now she did not know what to do. The map showed the way here. It never said how the tree lifted a curse. Guess wrong, and she might waste this place forever. She pressed her palm to the trunk. Nothing. She dug a thumbnail into the wet sap and tasted it. It burned sweet on her tongue. Still nothing changed. Her hands shook. She had one fresh flower's worth of luck left, and she was spending it blind. A voice came from the creek. "You are doing it wrong." Cirrus Silverblade stepped from the tree line. She knew him. He was the shadowbeast elder who had paid for her blood, then saved her family by sending the hunters three valleys off. He owed no one softness and gave none. A skitterling was not with him. He came alone, hooves quiet on the bank, amber eyes fixed on the tree as if it hurt him to look at it. "You followed me," Sapphire said. "You still owe me a favor." He crouched by the roots. "I came to see the tree that heals all sickness. My daughter's blood is cursed like yours. If it works, it works for her too." She watched his hand hover over the sap and stop short. "You cannot touch it," she said. "No. The tree heals sickness. The curse is not sickness. It is blood." He looked at her. "Your father knew that. He hid a flower, not a cure. This tree was never the answer. It was the road to the answer." Sapphire's chest went cold. "Then I came here for nothing." "You came here alive and human at dawn. That is not nothing." He reached into his coat and drew out a folded page. Old paper. Ink faded brown. "A wizard keeps an archive. Aldric Whitestone. Something was stolen from his locked rooms. A method that once stopped a great collapse. He thinks a thief has it. I think your father copied it years ago, before he died." He pressed the page into her hand. It showed a diagram, half a machine, gears and a chair, and one line of your father's writing beneath it. Cursed blood, unmade at the source. "The source," Sapphire said. "You mean before the curse ever began." "I mean back," Cirrus said. "The wizard will want this returned. He may want you dead for holding it. But he knows the machine. And the machine reaches the past." Sapphire folded the page against her chest. The tree had shown her only that the tree was wrong. Her father's true trail led somewhere else now, to a locked archive and a man who would not want her there.