Thistle Warden's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

Thistle rode two days without stopping longer than the horse needed. The hills flattened, then rose again, and the air went green and bitter, the way sap smells when a saw is still warm. She crested the last ridge and pulled the reins. Below her stood the grove. Half of it. The heartwood trees rose in a dark red wall, veins of pale green light running under their bark, family marks carved deep into the trunks by hands three generations dead. The other half was stumps. Sawdust lay in drifts around iron tags nailed into what was left. A wire fence circled the whole grove, new posts sunk in fresh dirt. She left the horse and walked to the fence. Her hands shook when she untied the bundle at her belt. The dead cutting rolled out onto the deed, its stem brown now, its work spent. She pressed the paper flat against the wire and read her family's name in the old script, the signatures of her grandmother's grandmother, the boundary lines drawn by a careful pen. Then she turned and read the notice nailed to the oldest trunk. A company name she had never heard. A permit number. A court seal. A date from last spring. The paper looked new. The ink looked wet. Someone had filed a claim on her blood and won it while her family slept. She walked the fence until she found the tool shed. She broke the lock with a rock and took a hand axe and a claw hammer. She went back to the oldest tree and pulled the notice down, nail by nail. She folded it into the deed bundle with the dead cutting. Then she cut the wire on three sides of the fence and let it fall. She did not touch the standing trees. She did not touch the stumps. She sat down in the sawdust with her back against the old trunk and waited, because someone had paid men to cut here, and men who cut on a schedule come back. She would be sitting there when they did. She had the deed. She had the notice in her pocket. She had no magic left and no sister's hand to hold. She had her name, and the trees still knew it. The green veins under the bark pulsed once against her spine, slow, like something waking up to listen.