Thistle Warden's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

Noon came without wind. The sun stood flat over the grove and the sawdust threw back a dry white light. Foreman Rusk and his crew waited along the fence with their saw teeth pointed at the dirt. The runner had not come back. Thistle had not moved from the oldest tree. Then boots she knew crossed the broken wire, and her sister stepped through the gap with a logger's glove in one hand. Briar knelt beside her in the sap-dark dirt. She laid the glove flat between them, palm up. The leather was stained with mud and old sap and the sawdust of these trees. Briar said she had found it caught on a stump on her way in. She said the Elder had sent her with a harder question than the one Thistle was holding. Not who deserves the axe. Who deserves to be spared. Thistle wanted the trees to rise. She could feel it under her palm, the green veins pulsing against the bark, waiting to be told. Linked hands, and Briar's power would wake every trunk still standing. The loggers would run or be broken. She looked at the row of men on the fence. The young one still had his saw on the ground. Rusk was watching them both, tired, one glove on and one glove off. Briar's fingers hovered near hers. "Name them," she said. "Every one you spare, I don't wake." Thistle looked at the glove. She looked at the young logger who would not lift his blade. She thought of the runner carrying her deed to a court that had already stamped against her. She said the young one. She said Rusk. She said any man who set his saw down when she named her family. Briar nodded once and took her hand. The ground moved. Behind them the oldest heartwood groaned and pulled a root free of the dirt. Down the line, trunks leaned and cracked their bark open along the green veins. Four woke. Then eight. Then more than she could count on the standing side of the grove. The loggers scrambled back through the fence. Two dropped their saws. The young one stood still with his hands open, and a waking tree passed him without touching him. Rusk did not run. He held up his one bare hand and stayed where he was, and the nearest trunk bent low over him and stopped. When the trees settled, the standing half of the grove was awake and the crew was gone down the road. Rusk was still there, alone at the fence, his glove in the dirt between the sisters. He said the court would send more men, and more papers, and a company that did not know the young one's name or his. He said he would carry that word back himself. Then he walked out through the broken wire, and Thistle was left with a waking grove and a warning she believed.