Thistle Warden's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

Thistle Warden knelt in the ruin her family called a garden and pressed her palm to the last living root. It was thin as a shoelace. Her bloodline had once tended a heartwood grove older than the city of Lacuna, and generations ago someone had dug it up and carried it away. The proof sat on the stone beside her: a brittle deed, a torn map with the grove's shape but no place, and the small green cutting she kept alive in a jar. She had promised her mother she would find the grove and bring it home. She had been promising for eleven years. This morning the root under her hand went cold, and she felt the cutting in the jar answer with a shiver. Somewhere, the parent trees were being cut again. Her sister found her still kneeling. Briar Warden stepped through the gap in the hedge, ivy climbing her legs, green tears already on her cheeks. "They're bleeding," Briar said. "I felt it at the well." Thistle showed her the jar. The cutting had turned its leaves toward the north wall, steady as a compass needle. Thistle had tried maps, archives, and paid whispers at the Pink Pony Club, and none of them had given her a place. The grove itself had. She lifted the jar and turned in a slow circle until the leaves pointed hardest, past the north wall, past the flooded district, toward the low hills beyond the city. Briar caught her wrist. "If we go, they'll know we're coming." "They're already cutting," Thistle said. She wrapped the deed around the jar and tied it with the cord from her hair. The root under her other hand crumbled to dust. She stood. She had a direction now, and a clock she could not stop.