Sienna Du’for's Arc

Chapter 2 of 19

Sienna finished her shift at the mill with flour on her sleeves and a headache behind her eyes. She had smiled all day at women who might sell her for two thousand gold. She had laughed at a joke about a runaway noble and not flinched once. When the sun dropped low she slipped past the water wheel and followed a footpath upriver, looking for somewhere no one could see her face. She found a grove ringed by old trees, with a cracked brick circle set into the ground and ferns growing over the roots. She sat on the bricks and let her shoulders drop for the first time in four days. A woman was already there. Sienna had missed her because she sat so still. She wore a white robe stitched with gold and held a pendant in both hands. Her hair was pale yellow and long. Sienna started to stand and mumble an apology. The woman looked up and studied her face for a long moment. "You're the girl on the poster," she said, flat as a stone dropped in water. "The nose is the same. So is the mole." Sienna's mouth opened. No lie came. She had a knife in her boot and she knew she would not use it. She sat back down on the bricks and waited to see what this stranger would do. "I won't turn you in," the woman said. "I'm Clementine. In three days I stop being a person. I become a tree. My mother has been the tree for thirty years and she is dying inside it. I asked to take her place early." She said it the way someone reads a list. Sienna stared. Then, because the woman had given her something true and heavy, Sienna gave one back. She said her real name. She said her sister had waited years for her to slip and would kill her clean if she was found. She said she was so tired of talking that her jaw hurt. She said she had no one. Clementine listened without moving. When Sienna finished she was shaking. "I shouldn't have told you," Sienna whispered. "You could say any of that to anyone." Clementine shook her head once. "In three days I won't have a mouth. Trees can't talk." They stayed in the grove until the stars came out. Clementine shared a flask of pear water. Sienna told her about a horse she had loved as a child and a tutor who cried when she got sums wrong. Clementine told her the names of the trees around them and which ones her mother had planted. Neither of them slept much. Near dawn Sienna understood that she had found what she came looking for, and that she would lose it by the end of the week. She walked back to the mill lighter than she had arrived, and more afraid.