Ash and Amaranth
When the last amaranth tree in the kingdom is burned by soldiers who don’t know what it is, an apprentice gardener sets out to grow a new one from a single surviving seed — and learns that some things you save aren’t meant to be saved for what they were, but for what they can still become.
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Ash and Amaranth
Turn the page below to read Ash and Amaranth from the first line to the last — the complete book, chapter by chapter.
Chapter One: The Unfading Grove
The amaranth tree stood alone at the heart of the Sanctuary Garden, and Wren Calder had never once seen its blossoms brown. She was seventeen that spring, apprenticed four years into the Verdant Guild, and she had cut flowers from that tree a hundred times without the cuttings ever curling or fading in the vase, not after a week, not after a month. The guild called this the tree's first mercy. Old Master Perrin Sorrel called it something closer to a warning: that a thing which refuses to die quietly is a thing worth asking why.
1The Guild had kept this single tree under royal charter for three hundred years, ever since the groves of Queen Maren's day had dwindled to this one matriarch, silver-barked and broad as a barn, her canopy hung with blossoms the color of a coal's last heat. There had been whole amaranth forests once, in the high valleys before the old wars thinned them, and smaller stands after that before blight and frost took the rest. This was the last. Wren had grown up knowing that word the way other children knew their own surname — last, last, the last amaranth in the kingdom of Aldermere, and hers to help tend.
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