“What do I do?” she asked.
On the first day, she touched the garnet and felt the blood in her own body slow, then surge. She held it over her father’s sleeping hand—his arthritis-swollen knuckles, the fingers he could no longer close around a hammer. The garnet pulsed once, warm as a living thing. His fingers uncurled. He slept through it, but in the morning, he made coffee without wincing for the first time in six years. garnet
Lina ran.
“I held it for forty years,” the old woman said. “Forty years of nothing. Because I wanted nothing from it. I just sat with it. Listened. And do you know what it told me?” “What do I do
Lina sat with that for a long time. The stars came out. The Collector’s men lit a distant campfire below. The garnet pulsed once, warm as a living thing
“You’ve woken it,” the Collector said, not unkindly. “The Heartfire hasn’t spoken in three hundred years. The last person who held it became a queen. The one before that, a monster. It doesn’t care which.”
On the third day, the men came.