Willow Fenwick's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Willow Fenwick knelt in the black mud and pressed her palm to the tree's root. The bark should have warmed under her hand. It stayed cool. She had fed the Sleeping Grove Elder the same way for a thousand years, and this morning, for the first time, the tree did not answer. She looked young. She was not. The swamp knew the difference even if the few travelers who whispered about her did not. Her power came from this tree — the giant with the sleeping face carved into its trunk, the vines hanging like green hair, the veins of gold light that ran under its bark. Without it, she was a hippie girl in a mud-stained skirt with frog grease on her fingers. With it, she was the reason the swamp still breathed. She laid out her old ritual. Salt in a ring. Six candles in the wet moss. A bowl of rainwater with a curl of her hair. She sang the words her mother had taught her before language had a name. The candles guttered. The water did not stir. The carved face on the trunk kept sleeping, and its glow was thinner than last week. "That's not going to work, you know." The voice came from a stump behind her. A small frog person sat there in a denim jacket and boots, one leg crossed over the other. He picked mud from his boot heel with a twig. "Pippin," Willow said, without turning. "I didn't call you." "You didn't have to. He's dimming." Pippin tipped his big yellow eye toward the tree. "The old songs were built for a smaller hunger. He's grown. You haven't fed him grown-up food in a long time." Willow sat back on her heels. She had felt it for weeks and refused the word. Stalling. The tree was stalling. If its light thinned, the swamp thinned. If the swamp thinned, she thinned with it. "What food," she said. Pippin hopped down. "A living offering. Not a frog. Not a fish. Something with a story in it. Something that walked in on its own." Willow's jaw set. She had never taken a life to feed the tree. That was the line. She had kept it for a thousand years. A branch snapped, deeper in the trees. Small footsteps. Uneven breathing. Willow rose, slow, and turned toward the sound. A boy stumbled out of the ferns. Eight years old, maybe. Light brown hair stuck up in tufts. Rectangle glasses crooked on his nose. A scrape on one knee. He saw the giant tree first, then the witch, and stopped breathing. "I fell," he said. "There was a hole. In a tree. I fell through it." Behind Willow, the Sleeping Grove Elder's bark warmed. One vein of gold lit up under the sleeping face, brighter than anything she had drawn from it in a year. The tree had chosen its own answer. Willow had not.