Waverly's Arc

Chapter 8 of 13

Waverly walked back to the inn with mud on her boots and questions she couldn't answer. The vendors would talk—they always did—and whoever those riders were, they'd already seen enough. She needed to know what her grandmother had known about this place, if anything at all. She turned away from the road and headed for the old tool shed at the edge of the valley where her grandmother had lived alone for twenty years. Waverly hadn't been inside since the funeral. The door stuck when she pulled it, swollen from rain, but gave way with a crack that echoed across the empty ground. Inside, dust covered everything—a narrow bed, a table, shelves lined with jars and folded cloth. Waverly searched the drawers and found nothing but old receipts and dried herbs. She was about to leave when she noticed the floorboard near the bed sat higher than the others. She knelt and pried it up with her fingers. Beneath it lay a single envelope, sealed with wax and marked with her grandmother's handwriting: "For Waverly. Open only if they dig." Waverly broke the seal and unfolded the letter. The words were brief and direct. Her grandmother had known about the buried settlement—had been paid to keep quiet about it years before Waverly was born. The foundations belonged to a town that had tried to grow roses in soil they shouldn't have touched. When people started dying, authorities cleared the site, buried everything, and forbade anyone from digging it up again. The letter ended with a single warning: "Never let anyone dig beneath the market site. What they planted there should stay buried." Waverly folded the letter and looked out the shed door toward the market, where vendors were still uncovering stones. She'd failed the one thing her grandmother had asked of her. But now she understood why someone had stripped her waypoints and why those riders were watching. They weren't trying to control the rose trade—they were trying to stop anyone from learning what the soil really was. She walked to the small stone statue covered in carved roses that marked her grandmother's grave and placed the letter on top of it. The warning had come too late, but it gave her something she hadn't had before: proof that the danger Lovelock faced wasn't just about flowers anymore.