Willow Vinewood's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The winged thing sat in the branches until the kit slept, and then it was gone. Willow found the first fresh snare at dawn, half a mile past the stump she had marked two summers ago. The wire was new. The bait chamber held a shard of crystal that threw color across the leaf litter. She had never seen a trap like it. She crouched, cut the wire with her knife, and pulled the crystal free. Two more snares waited within a hundred paces, all set on fox runs. She followed the line of them deeper than she usually went. The traps led her to a shelter built between two pines. Pale bone braced the wooden posts. Crystal lures hung from the eaves on short cords, turning in the air. A cot inside held a folded blanket and a leather roll of wire. On a stump by the door sat a ledger. Willow opened it. Rows of animals. Prices next to each. A buyer's name she did not know, in a city she had only heard of. The trapper hunted for pay, and he was coming back before dark. Willow did not have a spell for this. She sat on the packed dirt outside the shelter and made herself quiet the way she had learned under the oak. She listened. After a long time she heard wings, close, not a bird. The winged figure from her window settled on the ledger. It was small, the height of her hand, with hair the color of pond water and a face that watched her without blinking. It touched the page where the animals were listed. Then it touched Willow's wrist. Cold, then warm. The fairy showed her, without words, what to do. Willow gathered the crystal shards from every snare she had cut. She carried them back to the shelter and set them in a ring around the posts. The fairy hovered above the ring and hummed a note Willow felt in her teeth. Willow repeated it. The shards lit from inside. They rose a hand's width off the ground and joined, panel by panel, into a low dome of glowing stone that closed over the shelter and the ledger and the leather roll of wire. The dome hardened. Willow pressed her palm to it. It did not give. The fairy led her outward then, from tree to tree, and at each one Willow pressed a shard into the bark and hummed the note. A thin light ran between the trees behind her, low as a deer trail, marking a border she could feel more than see. When the ring closed on itself, the forest inside it went still in a new way. No snare inside that ring would spring again. Nothing hunting for coin would cross it. At dusk Willow walked home along the border. A man's voice shouted somewhere beyond the light, then shouted again, farther off, moving away. She did not turn. On her porch the fox kit was awake, standing on three legs, watching the trees. The fairy landed on the railing beside it. This time it stayed.