Omenfern

Overview

Omenfern is a small fern of cool, shaded places, the stone throats of wells and the north faces of walls and banks, that unrolls its fronds in spring in a pattern no two plants share. Workers of Augury Magic read the year in the uncurling, and village wise-women read it too, with less training and more confidence.

Appearance

A clump of narrow, bright green fronds as long as a hand to a forearm, each divided into many small paired leaflets, soft and slightly glossy. In spring each new frond rises as a tight coil covered in rust-brown scales, like a crozier, and unrolls over a week or two. Some coils open straight, some twist as they open, some open part-way and stop. The undersides of grown fronds carry neat double rows of brown spore-dots. It smells green and cool, like a wet stone well.

Habitat and Range

It grows wherever shade and damp last through the summer: in the masonry of wells and cisterns, on north faces of walls and bridges, in shaded stream banks and the mouths of caves, from the basin villages to the forest edge and the Headwater valleys. Old wells have the largest clumps.

Life Cycle

The clump lives for many years and sends up a new set of fronds each spring, which wither brown in autumn and stand through the winter. It spreads by spores, slowly, and is seldom planted, though many villages would not clear one from a well.

Uses and Dangers

Its use is reading. Augurs watch the coils through the spring, note which open first, which twist and which way, and which stop, and read from them the shape of the coming year: a good harvest, a hard winter, a death in a household. A fern-reading is a rite, kept with its own words and, in some villages, a small payment at the well. The young fronds are bitter and not eaten. It harms no one.

Lore and Belief

Village folk read a well's fern for themselves, and the commonest reading is the simplest: a well whose fern opens straight and early will run sweet through the summer, and one whose fern stops part-way will fail. That much is often true, since the fern follows the damp. Augurs hold that the fern only shows what the reader is ready to see, and disagree among themselves about everything else. A household that moves takes a frond of its well's fern in its bundle, and Wood Elves say the fern listens to the water and repeats it slowly.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi