Chapter 2
two
. . .
Solenne
I wake with the trees.
Not from sleep, exactly. More like rising from stillness, the way a vine stretches toward the morning light. My eyes open slowly to the quiet pre-dawn haze, the canopy above still shadowed in velvet greys and deep green silks.
The grove is breathing. So I breathe with it.
I press my palm to the damp earth beside my bed of moss and woven roots, whispering a soft invocation to the soil. My voice is slow from disuse, a low hum barely louder than the rustling leaves overhead.
“Another day,” I murmur. “Another rhythm.”
The forest answers in birdsong. A thin, warbling note from a creature nesting far above. The hush of wings. The creak of old limbs.
I sit up. Rising in silence, every motion deliberate and soundless.
The clearing I keep sacred is still wrapped in fog, the early light painting everything silver.
My cottage sits at the center, nestled between willow roots and ivy-woven stones.
The walls curve like something grown rather than built, draped in moss and trailing vines that shimmer faintly with morning dew.
The forest doesn’t reclaim it … it embraces it. And I let it.
The door is carved from pale wood, soft at the edges, etched with moonflowers and winding script.
Vines bloom lazily across the arch, their moonvine petals glowing where the sun hasn’t yet touched.
I brush my fingers over them as I step outside, barefoot and bare armed, my nightgown loose around my knees.
The dew clings to my skin, sparkling faintly. I drink it in.
I don’t need much.
My morning ritual takes time, but time is all I have.
First, I greet the oldest tree, the sentinel. I place my hand against its bark and bow my head. I can feel the heartbeat of the grove here, steady and deep, older than language. I press my forehead to the trunk.
Then I walk the boundary.
I move in silence, weaving between trunks and fallen logs, fingers trailing across branches, roots, stones. I whisper to them, small nothings. Gratitude. Promises. Names. Every being in the grove has a name, even the ones who don’t answer back.
I pause beside the glade, where the light is always softest. My fingers brush the tops of the herbs growing wild there. Sage. Mallow. Foxglove. A cluster of violets, their petals trembling in the breeze.
The balance is intact.
Until it isn’t.
I feel it before I see it … a tug in the earth, sharp and sudden, like something has shifted too quickly. The roots beneath my feet go tense. The leaves still. The moss shudders.
My breath catches.
It starts at the farthest edge of the grove, a whisper of movement where there should be stillness. The vines are restless. They twitch at the boundary, growing too fast, too far.
Something has entered.
Something wild.
I walk to the edge, cautious but unhurried. The mist thickens as I leave the heart of the grove, the trees pressed closer together here. The magic is thinner, rawer. The pact stretches across this border, but only just.
And then I see it.
A line of mushrooms. Small, white, and wrong. Too perfect. Too sudden. A cluster of petals where none should bloom. Thorns sprouting from nothing. The land is confused. Frightened.
So am I.
My heart begins to beat faster.
A witch.
Not just any human. A hedge witch, by the look of the magic. Emotional. Untrained. Dangerous.
The stories come back too easily. Circles scorched into soil. Sigils carved into living bark. Fire where roots once ran. Magic ripped from groves and twisted to fit mortal rituals.
Humans don’t belong here.
I should return to the center. To the circle. Raise the ward. Seal the border.
But something holds me in place.
Curiosity, maybe.
Or something older.
I move forward.
The fog parts around me like silk, the vines shifting to clear my path. The forest knows my steps. I walk like wind, like water, leaving no trace.
It has been decades since I crossed this line.
And yet … I go.
Because something is blooming where it shouldn’t. Because the roots are watching. Because my breath trembles and my skin hums with the memory of a name I do not yet know.
Because the forest is afraid.
And so am I.
I pause by the edge of a small, moss-ringed hollow, and crouch low. The magic here is brighter, warmer, but unruly, spilling like water from a cracked jug. I can feel the pulse of it in my fingertips.
The petals are wrong. The rhythm is wrong. But underneath it all, something calls to me.
A heartbeat that isn’t mine.
I close my eyes, stretch my senses toward the disruption. I expect sharpness, heat. But what greets me is softness. Hurt. Desperation.
The magic isn’t trying to destroy. It’s trying not to break.
I tilt my head, listening.
There’s a sob.
Faint. Human.
I step back, startled. The vines around me curl instinctively toward the sound.
She’s close.
A flicker of gold between the trees … the light of wild magic, not shaped or bound. I don’t go any farther, not yet. I crouch low again, steadying myself with one hand to the bark of a nearby birch.
I whisper to it.
It tells me what it knows.
A girl, breathing like she’s falling apart. A scent of thyme and old metal. Magic that smells like childhood dreams and shattered glass.
She is not safe.
And yet the grove has not rejected her. Not entirely.
I rise slowly.
The pact does not allow me to interfere. But it also does not forbid me to observe.
So I watch. And I listen.
And in the hush between one breath and the next, the forest shifts beneath her.
I feel it before I see it, a surrender.
The girl’s magic collapses into silence. A flicker, then a fade.
I don’t know her name.
But something in me curls toward the sound of her crying like a vine toward the sun.
I stay hidden in the trees.
And I do not walk away.