Sapphire Crystalline's Arc

Chapter 8 of 12

Sapphire held the dried flower and the torn map all the way back to the shadowbeast elder's house. She had traded him her blood once. He had saved her family with a false sighting three valleys away. She still owed him a favor. Now she needed him again. If anyone knew the missing half of her father's map, it was Cirrus Silverblade. He met her at the door of a stone hall built for heat and hammering. An old forge sat cold behind him. He wiped soot from his hands and looked at the map without asking. "Torn," he said. "You need the rest." "Do you have it?" "No." He held out one clawed hand. She placed the flower and the map in it. He studied the flower's stiff purple petals. "Your father cut this fresh once. Dried it. It points. Half a map is enough if the flower still works." "It's withered." "Then it points weakly. Or not at all." He turned the bloom in the firelight. "There is one way to know." He led her inside. Drawings of birds covered one far wall. She had seen those before. His daughter's room. He did not look at it. He set the flower on a scarred anvil and told her to bleed onto it. Sapphire pressed her thumb to a nail and squeezed. A drop fell on the dried petals. The flower did not glow. It did not turn. She waited. Nothing. "Cursed blood should wake it," Cirrus said. "It stays dead. The bloom is too old." Her chest went tight. "Then it's useless. The map and the flower both." "The map is useless without a working bloom," he said. "The bloom is useless dried this long." He set it down. "You need a fresh one." "I gave the only fresh one away." She thought of the necromancer, of the flower burning her hand at the cursed keep. "There was one more field of them. At Dreadfall keep." Cirrus looked at her for a long moment. "Then that is where you go." She stared at the dead flower on the anvil. Lyra had told her the bloom was the key. Cirrus had just proved the key was broken. The torn map no longer mattered. A finished map would point nowhere without a living compass to read it. "You owe me a favor," Cirrus said. "I will not spend it stopping this. Go cut a fresh one. Bleed on it. It will pull toward the tree. Half a map or none." Sapphire folded the useless flower back into the cloth. Her third attempt did not need the missing map piece anymore. It needed her to return to the keep where the last flowers grew, and to do it before this moon's blood dried on her hands again. She left the cold forge with a clear path and a worse one ahead.