Pure
Chapter 6: The Leaf

Maigred stared at the stone for a long moment before tucking it back into her pocket.

She scooped up the two other stones she had laid down beside her earlier. She raised the white stone and said a prayer for Sinead’s safety and welfare, then let it slip into the sacred waters. Next she raised the black stone and said a prayer for her brother and released it into the earth’s water as well.

Then Maigred leaned forward and dipped her hands into the spring water. “I give myself to you, earth sister.” She cupped her hands, raised them dripping out of the water and then brought them to her lips and drank. “I accept you into me. Fill me with your life and abundance, make me a source of nurture to my people. And…earth sister, please help me understand the meaning of my visions tonight.”

Instead of getting up and going back to town Maigred knelt there and thought over every word Caevah had said in her vision. Everything Maigred had been taught growing up told her that she and Finten were both used up, broken, no good for the gods to use as vessels anymore. Why would the earth sister give her a vision telling her to offer herself as a conduit for Finten’s powers?

She reached into her pocket and felt the stone there. For good measure she pulled it out and looked at it again. She frowned and shoved it back into her pocket.

Maigred got up and began walking back to the town.

Sometimes the earth sister’s visions were cryptic, or difficult to understand, but none of them had ever steered Maigred wrong.

Maigred paused. She crouched down and pulled a leaf off of a plant near the dirt path. She could smell the sharp green scent of the wound she had caused in the stem. She held her other hand close to the plant and began to reach for her hearth magic, but then stopped. She bit her lip.

Maigred hadn’t reached for her magic since the day that the wyrm had taken her virginity. She’d assumed her link to it was gone and she couldn’t bear the thought of reaching for it and not being able to feel it.

She crouched there, frozen for a few minutes, unsure if she could follow through with her experiment.

A memory from that afternoon suddenly rose up in her mind, the wyrm humiliating brave Soleil in front of the town, Sinead turning away from the scene with horror, burying her face in Maigred’s shoulder and sobbing.

Steely determination filled Maigred’s chest.

She was already planning on smuggling Sinead out of town before her sixteenth birthday, but they would be leaving behind a town full of young girls that wouldn’t be saved. Girls that would be handed over to the wyrm by their families and neighbors. Girls that would be told their salvation lay in being compliant and stifling their emotions while their body was used to feed the lust of a monster.

Didn’t they deserve someone to fight for them as well?

Maigred swallowed. She reached out to link herself to the land and the water.

There was nothing there.

But it wasn’t the kind of nothing she feared she would feel. It felt the way it had when she had first been learning to reach for hearth magic. Her efforts felt uncoordinated and clumsy, but the ability to reach was still there.

She calmed her frantic attempts the way Caevah had taught her. She focused on the earth under her feet, the scent of the plant she had torn, the tiny sizzle of life that was slowly draining out of the leaf in her hand.

Maigred gasped, and immediately lost her link to the leaf. Suddenly she was crying; sitting in the dirt, choking out great sobbing breaths. She kept hold of the leaf, buried her face in her other hand and rode the wave of grief and exhilaration.

She could still connect to her hearth magic, the wyrm hadn’t taken that from her, but she had wasted so much time believing she was powerless when she wasn’t.