Sienna Du’for's Arc

Chapter 9 of 19

The week Amelia warned about came and went. Sienna packed her bag twice and did not leave. She told herself she would go south after one more visit, and then after one more. Fall turned the mill road brown, then white. Snow banked against the grove wall. Spring drew pilgrims back with cups of water and small coins pressed into the roots. No black coat came. No search party, no man with a mustache, no rider at the gate. Months passed. Sienna kept her room at the mill and her seat at the bricks, and the world did not come for her. She stopped sleeping in the pine and slept in her bed. She stopped watching the road. She spent every free hour at the grove. The tree had grown, its dark canopy wider than last summer, the small blue blooms thick along the lower branches. Pilgrims began to know her. A woman with a baby asked if she was the keeper. A man left her a loaf because she looked thin. Sienna took the bread and did not correct him. She sat against the trunk and told Clementine about linen prices and a lamb born at the mill and the way the forewoman had stopped watching her hands. She was safe here. She had not said the word out loud in months. On a bright day near the end of spring, a girl from town stopped at the wall and stared. Sienna knew the look. She braced for the poster, the name, the pointing finger. The girl said, "You're the tree girl. My gran says you're her protector. She says the old blood came back to watch her." Sienna opened her mouth to deny it and did not. The girl left a ribbon at the roots and went. Sienna sat very still. Protector. Old blood. A story had grown around her while she was not looking, and the story was not her name. It was better than her name. She could live inside it. She almost laughed. Then she thought of the mill woman who used to ask questions, and the miller's son who now nodded to her in the yard, and the loaf, and the ribbon, and she understood she had not made a friend in any of it. She had made a shrine. She stood up and put her hand on the bark. "I've been hiding behind you," she said. The tree did not answer.