Tink Cogsworth's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

The headless chicken still marched on the workbench when Tink made up their mind. One shard ran a chicken. A thinking friend would need six, maybe more. Every shard grew inside the living wood of the great tree-city outside the window. Tink packed a chisel, a padded sack, and the goggles with the spinning lenses. "Just the low branches," Tink said. "Where nobody's home." Tink climbed at dusk. The tree-city rose in layers of homes and shops, windows glowing, ladders creaking under strangers' feet. Tink slipped onto a bare branch below a shuttered storefront. A vein of crystal glowed under the bark. Tink pressed the chisel in and pried. The shard cracked loose. Above, a window rattled. Tink froze, then pried a second shard, then a third. The sack grew heavy and bright. Then the branch shuddered. Not from Tink. Something big climbed up from below. She came over the edge slow, a squat green shape with wide frog eyes that burned yellow in the dark. Her wet hands gripped the bark like she owned every inch of it. A frogre, part frog and part ogre, and she looked at Tink the way a cat looks at a mouse in its own kitchen. "Thief," Griselda Croakmire said. Her voice was a low croak. "You cut my tree." "I—it was a dead branch," Tink stammered. "Mostly." "Nothing here is dead." She pointed one clawed finger at the raw white scar where the shards had been. "That wood feeds the spring. The spring feeds the seed. You steal from all of it." She lunged. Tink ducked under her arm and scrambled up the trunk. Griselda was fast for her size. She swung and the branch split where Tink had stood. Sap wept from the wound. Tink climbed past a terrace and saw it then, cupped in the tree's high crown: a spring of shimmering water arching over a single glowing seed. The frogre guarded it. Every shard Tink stole came from the same wood that fed that water. Griselda seized Tink's ankle. Tink kicked free, spun, and threw the only thing at hand. Not a shard. A shard would break. Tink hurled the headless chicken from the sack's side pocket, the one they'd carried for luck. It clattered against Griselda's chest, legs still marching, red eye blazing. She flinched. She stared at the crawling metal bird in horror. In that one breath, Tink slid down the trunk and dropped into the dark below. Tink ran home clutching the sack. Three shards. Enough for the friend, maybe. But the frogre had seen Tink's face. She knew what powered that chicken now. And she knew the tree bled where Tink had cut it. Tink set the three shards on the bench beside the clockwork body. Enough to try. Not enough to finish. And going back for more meant going through her.