Tamsin Reed's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The acorn-shelled tortoise on Tamsin's table had nerve damage in his back legs, and she could not fix it without the grove. She had known that before the farmer set him down. She took him anyway. She always did. The tortoise blinked up at her with fern-green eyes while she rubbed salve into the soft skin behind his shell. The salve would ease the pain. It would not make him walk again. Tamsin Reed had been the only healer in Juniperfall for six years, ever since the old woman who taught her died in the back room of this same cottage. The old healer had treated cracked shells and shell rot at the table. For the hard cases — the dead legs, the deep tissue rot that ate down to bone — she had carried the creatures up the slope to the grove. Tamsin had gone with her twice. She had not asked enough questions. She had thought there would be time. She set the tortoise in a straw box and walked up the slope with the glass vial in her pocket. Inside the vial: dried petals and a pinch of dark soil, all she had left of the grove's plants. The old healer had pressed it into her hand a week before she died. Tamsin had never opened it. She was afraid that once she broke the seal, the last of it would be gone. The grove sat in a bowl below the hollow oak, a tree so old its trunk could hide a grown woman. The ground under the oak was cracked clay. Nothing grew. Tamsin knelt and pulled the cork. She tipped the petals and soil into her palm and pressed them into the dry earth at the oak's roots. She waited. She watered the spot from her flask. The clay drank the water and stayed clay. No green came. No green would come. She had spent her last seed on bare dirt. She sat back on her heels and looked past the oak to the gully at the far edge of the bowl. Steep dirt walls. A sandy bed at the bottom. Two fallen logs laid across the top like a bridge someone had given up on. Water had run through that gully once. The old healer had told her so. The plants had lived because the water came. Tamsin stood up and walked toward the gully. The plants were gone and she could not bring them back from nothing. But the water was a different problem. Water she could follow. Water she could trace to wherever it had stopped.