Vera Mossgrove's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Vera knelt beside the stone arch at the edge of the woods, adjusting her sapphire glasses. Through the lenses, the jagged quartz pulsed a slow violet — a heartbeat hidden inside the rock. She pressed her palm to the stone and counted the beats. Six weeks of unfinished notes sat in her bag, and a fae lord waited somewhere past the trees for an answer she had not yet given. She wanted him. She had not said so. A lynx stepped from behind the arch. Its coat was patched with pale green lichen, and its eyes caught the light like cut sapphire. Vera held still. The lynx blinked once and sat. "He sees the arch too, you know." The voice came from her left. A man stood in the open doorway of a small stone apothecary she had passed a hundred times without entering. Dried herbs swung from the beams behind him. He carried a wooden staff wrapped in moss at the base, its head carved with the same spirals that now pulsed under her hand. "Violet, isn't it," he said. "Through the lenses. I wondered who he'd given them to." Vera stood up slowly. Her glasses had been a private thing. A secret between her cool-handed lord and her unwritten pages. Now a stranger named the color, named the giver, named the fact of her seeing. The lynx watched her like it already knew her answer. The deadline she had set herself shrank by a season in a single breath. She would have to speak to the fae lord now — before this stranger did.