Free The Legend Begins by Isobelle Carmody

humans bringing roaring road beasts with long claws and great metal teeth to break everything to pieces. Maybe humans will building more high houses here. Or maybe this being new road-beast feeding place.”
    Little Fur had seen too much to disbelieve this. Crow must have smelled the sinking of her heart, for he added, “After this being grass plain. Then we coming to burying ground.”
    So Little Fur squeezed through the gate, but she had taken only a single step when she staggered back, pale and horrified. “The ground is dying!”
    â€œMust crossing quickly then,” Crow urged.
    â€œYou don’t understand. It’s dying because the earth spirit has just left it! You must find another way!”

    Little Fur was pacing up and down the cobbles willing Crow to hurry when a thought struck her. She sat down and emptied the contents of the seed pouch onto her cloak. At the very bottom were several small seeds with dagger-tip points. They belonged to a greedy plant that would happily and swiftly strangle anything growing nearby. She gathered them only for their juice, which healed various forms of claw rot. But if she could bear to plant the voracious things in the ravished ground, they might just take hold swiftly and vigorously enough to summon the flow of earth magic.
    She set pouch and bottle and cloak aside and went back along the street to get some moss. Then she squeezed back through the gate and pressed the moss onto the bare earth, knowing that the good earth adhering to its roots would help shield the seeds so they might have a chance to germinate. Touching the moss protected her from the worst of the dying earth’s pain, but she could easily tell that the ground had not only been savagely stripped of life, it had been deliberately poisoned.

    That was what had driven the earth spirit away.
    Little Fur got shakily to her feet and squeezed through the gate again. There was only a slim hope that the seeds would survive, but she had done her best. She went to the step of the stone dwelling where Ginger had curled up to sleep and sat by him, staring across the street at the ravaged earth. Then she lay against his soft flank and gave herself up to the soothing beat of his blood.

CHAPTER 12
    The Wasteland
    She woke to darkness and the scent of humans.
    Ginger was already mantling himself in cat shadow when Little Fur peeped out of the doorway to see three humans standing at the open gate in the metal web. They were staring at the ground. A cold wind seemed to blow through Little Fur, for they were looking at the patches of moss where she had planted the seeds.
    The biggest of the humans, a gross creature stinking of greed, pointed savagely at the moss. Its companions cringed, giving off the hot, acrid scent of their fear. Little Fur wished that she could slip away, but the humans were too close, and one of them carried a small square box spilling bright false light in all directions that swallowed the shadows which might have hidden her.
    The smaller humans were speaking to the big one now, their voices full of pleading. Then, just as Brownie said sometimes happened when he listened to humans, a picture came from their words into Little Fur’s mind of the two smaller humans spilling a milky liquid onto the ground and looking nervously about them every few steps. Little Fur understood immediately that it was they who had poisoned the wasteland. The bigger, dominant human had ordered them to do it and, seeing the moss, thought they had disobeyed.
    Without any warning, the big human lashed out at one of the smaller ones, and it fell to the ground with a cry of pain. Little Fur thought the bigger human would kick it then. She smelled that it wanted to, but the one on the ground seemed to be holding something up. Then she saw what it was.
    Her precious cloak!
    The dominant human ground its heel into the moss, shaking the cloak as if it wanted to strangle it. Little Fur’s hair stood on end