The Rising Tide by Helen Brain

Author:Helen Brain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780798172295
Publisher: Human & Rousseau
Published: 2017-06-12T09:06:20+00:00

THE NEXT DAY is a Sunday – the only day the colony girls don’t come to work. The only day the farm isn’t overrun with nosy guards, running the place like a military camp. A perfect day for a wedding.

I wake up early and go outside to pick tendrils of ivy from the wall around the kitchen garden. Alexia finds me there and helps me wind them around the chains of the swing, weaving orange nasturtiums among them. It looks beautiful.

While Alexia helps Aunty Figgy bake a pecan wedding cake, I wander down to the river to look for flowers for a bouquet. I don’t want the nasturtiums that are growing everywhere, even though they’re pretty. I want something that symbolises Letti, something that reflects her loving, trusting heart.

The forest is quiet. The morning sun casts lacy shadows through the trees, lighting up the mauve sorrel flowers that peep between the ferns. Isi runs ahead, disappearing between the trees to hunt squirrels and then running back to me, tail wagging, her mouth open like she’s smiling. I rub behind her ear and she looks up at me and barks.

“Go on, girl,” I tell her, and she’s off again, running deep into a thicket.

I know how she feels. The forest brings me alive too – the smell of earth, the soft greens and browns that are restful to the eye, the sense that creation exists all around me, that trees and shrubs and animals and insects are growing and flourishing. Most of all, I love the feeling of someone holy and untameable holding us in Her hands like plants she’s grown and loves.

“Thank you, Theia,” I whisper. “Thank you.”

Lucas is right to hide away here, I think, as I gather an armful of white lilies from the river bank. The forest can heal you from the inside out.

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