Tammi ward's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Morning showed Tammi the truth. The thorn seal held, but the rot had crept sideways. She pressed the boards along the side wall, and three sank under her thumb like rotten fruit. Soft. All soft. She dug out the worst with her knife until she had holes she could push her arm through. The little dragon perched on her shoulder and chirped, watching the pieces fall. "I have to cut it out," she told it. "Before the forest tries these tonight." She cut all morning. By noon three gaps yawned in the side wall, each the width of her body. Now she needed sound wood to fill them, and she had none. Her whole store was rotten through. She stacked the last dry planks and found them spongy at the core. The dragon breathed on one, hopeful. The rot only hissed and blackened, still soft. Fire cured green wood, not dead wood. She needed something living and strong. Tammi remembered the thorn stalks. The carnivorous flowers had grown where the rot spread, feeding on decay. If rot drew them, more would be waiting. She took her mother's hen-painted bow and went along the base of the walls. She found them there, six fat stalks rooted in the damp, mouths snapping at flies. She hacked each one down, wary of the teeth, and dragged the load back with her hands stinging. The cutting took the rest of the light. She wedged the green stalks into the first gap, thorns out, and packed them tight. The dragon crawled across and breathed. Flame licked the stems. They stiffened, blackened, went hard as iron under her palm. She moved to the second gap, then the third. The dragon's fire came slower now, thinner. Its wings drooped. "Almost," she said. "One more." It gave the last gap a weak ribbon of flame and slumped against her neck, spent. The third seal cured just as the sun dropped. Tammi stepped back and pressed each patch. All three held firm, cold and unbreakable. The wards on the doorframe brightened to blue. She had a whole wall again. Then she looked at her patchwork and understood the new problem. The seals held, but nothing marked them as warded. The barrier was raw iron-thorn, not the carved wood her mother had blessed. She dug through her mother's chest for something to hang, and her fingers closed on a cold curve of metal. An old iron horseshoe, worn smooth at the edges. Her mother had always kept iron at a threshold to turn the horrors back. Tammi hung the horseshoe over the middle patch, open end up. It was one charm for three bare gaps. In the trees something heavy shifted and began to circle the side wall, sniffing along the fresh seams. The old wood had been blessed. This new wall had not. She had bought tonight, but the forest was already learning the shape of her repairs.