Willow Vinewood's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

Willow Vinewood walked her usual path through the Kondra woods and stopped at a smear of red on the moss. The blood was not spread like a kill. It ran in a curling line, bright as cut garnet, catching the light where it should not have. A snare wire glinted at the end of the trail. Something small was still breathing at the other end of it. Willow had been coming to these woods for two years, waiting for the wild goddess to name her witch-oracle the way the last one had never lived long enough to name a successor. Three people before her had tried and gone home. She had told herself she would not go home. She knelt. The creature was a fox kit, back leg pinched to the bone by the wire. It watched her without moving. She thought of the grown fox that had lain beside her under the oak last summer, and her hands went cold. She knew this was a test. She also knew a test was still a wounded animal. She worked the wire loose with her belt knife. The kit screamed once and then went quiet. From her satchel she pulled a roll of bandage her grandmother had left her, laced with pale threads that shimmered green and rose when they touched blood. She wrapped the leg tight. The kit's ribs shook against her palm. It would not walk out of the woods on its own. She carried it. Her cabin sat at the forest edge, a log building she had turned room by room into a place for hurt animals. Glass panels along the front let her watch the trees while she worked. Shelf fungi she had gathered glowed soft on the beams. Inside, she laid the kit on the metal bed near the window, the one already tangled with the vines she had never bothered to cut back. She cleaned the wound. She splinted the leg. She set water in a shallow dish and sat with the kit until its breathing evened out. At dusk something tapped the glass. Willow looked up. A figure the size of her hand hovered outside, wings the color of shallow water, hair dark as wet bark. It watched the kit on the bed, then it watched Willow. It did not speak. It pressed one palm flat against the pane and held it there. Then it flew back into the trees. Willow stayed at the window a long time. She had asked the forest to notice her for two years. Something had noticed. She did not know yet whether the visit was a summons, a warning, or the beginning of a longer test, and she understood that the answer would come from whatever walked out of the trees next.