The burying ground lay behind the garden, on a shelf of land that nobody could see from the road.
Aveline would not have found it alone. Odalie led her there in the blue hour before sunrise, by a path so narrow that it was hardly a path at all, a thread of trodden grass that ran along the outside of the garden wall and then climbed, steeply, through a stand of bare birches. The frost was thick. It crunched under their boots. Their breath rose in two separate clouds, and the sky overhead was the color of a pigeon's wing, pale and soft and promising nothing.
They did not speak. The old woman walked ahead with her shawl pulled tight and her hands tucked into her sleeves. She did not look back. Aveline followed, with her heart beating slowly and her bandaged hand curled inside her coat, and thought that she had never walked so quietly in her life.
They came out of the birches onto a small flat meadow.
It was very still. The grass was white and stiff. A low stone wall ran round it, waist-high, mossed and tilted with age, and in the wall there was a gate of rough oak, tied shut with a loop of faded twine. Beyond the wall, the land fell away in a long clean sweep toward the valley, so that from the height of the meadow she could see all of it spread out below, the roofs, the river, the orchards, the thin gray threads of smoke beginning to climb from the chimneys. It was a place chosen for its view. Someone had wanted the dead to be able to see the living.
"Here," said Odalie.
She untied the twine. She pushed the gate wide.
There were many stones. Aveline had expected that, an old valley, three hundred years of settlement, but she was not prepared for how many, or for how they stood. They were small and plain, mostly of gray slate, set in neat rows in the frozen grass, and each one wore a little cap of frost. Wooden wish-blooms had been tied to some of them, red and weathered. Dried flowers had been laid on others. A few were so old that the names had been worn smooth. Down the middle of the meadow ran a path of flat stones, scrubbed clean, and someone had swept every leaf from it.
"This is the ground of the village," said Odalie. "Everyone is here. Everyone who has gone, since the first. Their children come in spring, to weed." She walked down the path. "But the ones I wish to show you are not here. They are over there."
At the far end of the meadow, apart from the rest, set against the northern wall where the birches crowded closest, was a second, smaller enclosure.
It had been fenced with a low iron rail. Inside it, on a bed of clean white gravel, stood three stones.
They were not slate. They were pale and fine-grained, the same stone as the garden wall, polished smooth by the wind, and they stood a little taller than the others, each one a hand's breadth higher than the last. Someone had cut them with a steady, loving hand. The lettering was deep and clean. And on every one, above the name, a flower had been carved.
A five-petaled flower. A crimson bloom.
Aveline stopped at the rail. She did not realize she had stopped. Her feet simply declined to go on.
"Take your time," said Odalie, quietly.
She went in.
* * *
The first stone read *ALDRIC PELL.*
Beneath the name, two dates. She did the sum without wanting to. Sixty-one years. A long life, a full one, and under it, in smaller letters, a line: *Who kept the bloom thirty years, and was kept by it.*
She stood and looked at it for some time. It was a good stone. It had the look of something made by people who had loved him.
"He was the last of the old ones," said Odalie. "He swore at thirty-one, and the plant lived. Very long. Very well. When Joren was a small boy, he used to sit on Aldric's knee in the garden, and Aldric would tell him which of the buds was lying." She smiled faintly, without humor. "He died in the winter that Joren was nine. He was tired. He had given what he had."
"Thirty years."
"Yes."
The second stone read *YSOLDE MARNE.* Beneath her name, a pair of dates, and Aveline's mind did the arithmetic again, and this time the number was smaller. Her throat tightened. Thirty-four years. The line beneath read: *Who gave her years that the valley might have spring.*
"Eleven," said Odalie, before she could ask. "She bore it eleven years. She was young. She was a weaver. She had a daughter, who married a miller and went down to the lowlands. She was warm, and funny, and very tired at the end." Her voice remained level. It was the voice of a woman reciting a thing she had said many times to herself, in the dark. "She was the second. The plant took more of her than it took of Aldric. Each year it took more."
*Each year it took more.*
Aveline stood still. A faint cold wind lifted a strand of her hair and laid it across her mouth. She did not brush it away.
"And the third?" she said.
She did not need to ask. She was already looking at it.
It was the tallest. It stood at the end of the line, pale and slender in the early light, and there was a ribbon tied round its base. A strip of green silk, faded nearly to gray, knotted carefully in a bow and weighted at the ends with small stones. The wind had worried it. The edges were frayed. But someone had replaced the stones, again and again, so that it never blew away.
*MAELIS ORN.*
Beneath the name, the dates. Aveline read them, and read them again, and still they would not resolve themselves into a sum. Twenty-six. She had been twenty-six years old.
Beneath the dates, there was no line.
She looked for it. She looked all over the stone, in case it had been cut in some corner, in case it had weathered away. There was nothing. The space where the words should have been was bare, smooth, deliberately empty. Someone had stood in front of this stone with a chisel in hand and been unable to think what to write.
*The ledger,* she thought. *The blotted ink.*
"She bore it two years," said Odalie, very softly.
Aveline closed her eyes.
*Thirty. Eleven. Two.*
It was the clearest thing she had ever seen. It was written in the stones as plainly as in a column of figures, a descent so smooth and so merciless that she wanted to cry out against it. It was not the arithmetic of chance. It was a curve. It was the shape of something that took, and took, and took, and was never satisfied.
"The cost," she said, and her voice was a thread.
"Yes."
"The years."
"Yes." Odalie bowed her head. "That is the first part of it. There is more, but that is the first. A bearer gives her years to the plant. She does not know how many. The plant takes what it needs, and the valley lives, and the bearer burns down like a candle. The first lasted thirty. The second eleven. The third two."
"And the fourth?"
The old woman looked at her.
"I think you know," she said. "I think you have always known."
She did. That was the dreadful thing. She had known since the gate, since the first gray morning, since a man with scarred hands had said *please* as though the word cost him blood. She had known in the bakery, in the garden, in the red-lit dusk. She had known, and she had gone on touching the plant anyway, because she was a scientist, because she was stubborn, because she was lonely. Because a small bright secret voice in her chest had whispered, *It answers to you. It has chosen you.*
*It had chosen Maelis too.*
She sank down onto her heels in the white gravel in front of the third stone and put her good hand flat against the cold marble. She did not weep. She was past it. She only knelt there, in the cold and the silence, and read the carved name again and again, as if she could draw it into herself through the skin of her palm.
* * *
Joren came up the hill as the sun cleared the ridge.
She heard him before she saw him. A boot on the frozen path, a hand on the gate, a breath that stopped short. She did not turn. She heard Odalie rise from the bench by the wall, and the soft rustle of her skirts, and then the old woman's voice, low and without reproach.
"I brought her. I am sorry. It was mine to answer for."
"I know it was." His voice was hoarse. He sounded as though he had not slept in a week. "Go home, Odalie."
"Joren."
"I'll be all right."
A pause. Then the whisper of her shawl, and her small steps going away along the path, and the gate closing with a click. And then there was nothing but the wind in the birch tops, and the faint, high singing of a lark that had mistaken the frost for spring.
He did not come any nearer. She felt him standing at the iron rail, a few yards behind her, the way one feels a fire at one's back. She did not turn around. She kept her hand on the stone. She thought, with a sudden painful lucidity, *If I look at him, I will break.*
"You have been here some time," said Joren.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry."
"What for?"
"For not telling you." He drew a long uneven breath. "I was going to. I stood in the lodge last night and I told myself, tomorrow, I will tell her. And then it was tomorrow, and I was afraid. That is the whole of it. I am sorry."
She heard him cross the gravel. She heard him stop, and then, slowly, with a stiffness that spoke of long disuse, lower himself to the ground beside her. His shoulder was a hand's breadth from hers. He sat with his knees drawn up and his forearms resting on them, looking at the stone, not at her. She could feel the warmth coming off him in the cold, and the faint shiver that ran through him, once, and was suppressed.
"I will tell you," he said. "If you still want to hear it."
"I do."
"It will not be good to hear."
"I did not suppose it would."
"All right." A breath. "All right."
He looked at the third stone for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was low and level and utterly without color. It was the voice of a man reading a sentence aloud from a page that he had read so many times he no longer saw the words.
"The Vow is old. I do not know how old. It was already old when the valley was settled. The first people who came here found the plant, a wild thing, dying, in a dead soil, and one of them, a woman, put her hand on it and said, *Let it live.* And it did. That was the first bearer. That is all anyone knows." He rubbed his thumb along his knuckle. "It lives as long as someone carries it. The bearer takes the Vow in front of the plant, in front of the valley, and the plant answers, and for as long as she lives it blooms. When she dies, it fades. Then it waits, until another is chosen. The warden's task is to keep it alive in the waiting, and to keep the bearer alive as long as he can."
"As long as you can."
"Yes."
"And the cost?"
"The cost is what you have seen." He nodded at the stones. "Each one gave more than the last. Aldric Pell thirty years. Ysolde Marne eleven. And Maelis." He stopped. His throat moved. "Two."
"I know."
"Do you know why?"
"No."
"Neither do I." The words came out torn. "I have asked. I asked the ledger. I asked the Circle. I asked my own father, when I was fifteen, and he told me that some things are not for asking. The plant takes what it needs, and it needs more each time, and nobody knows why. It is simply how it is." He closed his hand into a fist on his knee. "I have spent half my life trying to find an answer. There is no answer. There is only the count."
She was silent. She could feel her own heart beating, loud and steady, in the quiet.
She wanted to say something comforting. She had nothing. Every word that came into her head was a small, meaningless, ordinary thing, *I'm sorry*, *it's not your fault*, *I understand*, and she would not insult him with them. She sat with him instead, in the frost and the thin gold light, and let the silence stand.
After a while, in a different voice, she said, "Did you love her?"
He did not move.
It was the cruelest question she could have asked. She knew it as it left her mouth. She knew also that it was the only one that mattered, that everything else, the arithmetic and the ledger and the dying plant, was only a ring of stones around it. She waited. She did not look at him. She kept her eyes on the green ribbon, fraying in the wind.
"Yes," said Joren.
It came very low, and very rough, as if scraped from the bottom of a well. It trembled at the end.
"Yes," he said again. "I did."
* * *
*I have said it,* thought Joren.
It was a strange thing to know. He sat on the cold gravel with his hands hanging between his knees and the sun on the back of his neck, and the word seemed to have no weight at all. He had thought it would be heavier. He had carried it unspoken for six years, and he had expected, when he finally set it down, to feel the earth shake.
The earth did not shake. The sun went on rising. The lark went on singing its foolish song. Beside him, a hand's breadth away, a woman with ink on her cuffs sat very still and did not say, *I'm sorry.*
He had waited for that. He had braced for it. He had prepared himself for pity, for the soft, sticky, helpless pity of the village, the hands on his arm, the lowered voices. He had been ready to walk away from it. He did not know what to do with its absence.
She did not touch him. She did not speak. She only breathed, steadily and quietly, the way one breathes beside a sleeper, and after a moment he realized that she had shifted, a very little, so that her shoulder was no longer a hand's breadth from his but an inch. She had not moved closer. She had simply, quietly, made the space between them smaller, so small that he could feel her warmth, and not so small that he had to acknowledge it.
*She knows,* he thought. *She knows exactly what I can bear.*
"She was a bookbinder's daughter," he heard himself say.
Aveline did not turn her head. "Tell me."
"She came to the valley the spring she was twenty. Her father had died. She had no one. The Circle took her in, and she worked in the garden." He found, to his surprise, that his voice had steadied. "She was clever. She was always, always asking. Why this, why that, why do we do it this way. Everyone found her tiresome. I found her," a breath, "I found her a great relief."
"Because she asked."
"Because she did not pretend." He turned his hand over and looked at the palm. "She would put her fingers in the soil and say, *This is wrong,* and then say, *I don't know why,* and then go and find out. She was never afraid of not knowing."
"She sounds like someone I would have liked."
"She would have liked you." He said it automatically, and then heard it, and felt something crack. It was what he had said of his mother. It was true of both. It was, he realized, true of everyone he had ever loved, that they would have liked her. "She was twenty-four when it answered her."
Silence.
"She did not have to do it." The words came quickly now, fast and cracked, as if they had been dammed. "That is the thing. No one asked her. No one pressured her. Odalie did not. The Circle did not. I did not. She came to me one night in the garden and said, *It is dying, Joren. I can feel it. I can't stand by.* And I said, *Don't.* And she said, *Why?* And I could not tell her. I could not tell her, because I loved her, and I knew what it would cost, and I could not make myself say it. I thought, if I say it she will do it for the wrong reason. I thought, if I say it, she will do it *for me.*"
"And so you said nothing."
"I said nothing." His voice broke. "I said nothing, and she took the Vow on a spring morning with the whole valley watching, and it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It bloomed. It bloomed *red.* I have never seen it so. And she looked at me across the garden, and she was so happy." He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. "She was so happy, Aveline."
It was the first time he had said her name without thought. He heard it fall from his mouth like a coin from a pocket. He did not take it back.
"And then?" she said, very gently.
"And then I watched her burn."
He lowered his hand. He looked at the stone, at the frayed green ribbon, at the blank space where the words should have been.
"I could not write it," he said. "The line. The mason came, and asked me, and I could not think of a single true thing. *Beloved* was a lie, because it was not enough. *Who gave her years* was a lie, because she gave all of them. I told him to leave it empty. I thought, I'll know it when I see it. I have looked at that stone every day for six years. I have never known it."
The sun rose a little higher. The frost began to smoke on the wall.
Beside him, Aveline Rooke was very quiet. And then, without turning her face, she reached out and laid her bandaged hand on the gravel, between them, palm down, with the fingers a little curled. She did not touch him. She placed it there, an inch from his own, as one sets down an offering and steps away.
He stared at it.
It was a small hand. It was stained with ink and bound in an ugly knot, his own, and it lay very still on the white stones, an inch from his scarred knuckles, asking for nothing. It was, he thought, the bravest thing he had ever seen.
He did not take it. He could not. But he did not move away, either, and the inch between them seemed to hum.
* * *
"I am not going to take it," said Aveline.
She said it after a long time, so quietly that he nearly missed it. She was still looking at the stones. The light was full on her face, and it was very pale, and very set, and there were no tears in it. There was only a fierce, steady, terrible resolve.
"The Vow," she said. "I won't take it. I know what you asked, in the garden. You said I would say no. I want you to hear me say it now. I will never take it. Not for the plant. Not for the Circle. Not for the valley. Not for anyone."
"Aveline."
"I am going to save it another way."
"There is no other way."
"There is always another way." She turned her head at last and met his eyes, and he saw in them something that stopped his breath, a light, hard, brilliant, unyielding. "I am a physician. A plant is a living thing, and every living thing has a mechanism. If this one needs a bearer, then I will find out *why.* I will find what it takes, and what it gives, and where the arithmetic goes wrong. I will find a way to feed it that does not burn a person down to the wick. I will do it in thirty days, or I will do it in thirty years. But I will not stand in this meadow and let there be a fourth stone."
"You can't promise that."
"I can promise to try." Her voice shook, then steadied. "And I need you to believe me. That is all I'm asking. I need you to believe that I will not go the way she went, and that I am not leaving, and that I am not afraid of you, or of this. I need one person in this valley to believe I can do it."
He did not answer. He could not. His chest had closed around something large and bright and painful, and his eyes burned, and he was suddenly certain that if he opened his mouth he would say a thing he could never take back.
*I believe you.*
He did not say it. He did something else. He reached out, slowly, as one reaches toward a bird, and took the end of the green ribbon between his fingers. The silk was cold and stiff with frost. It had come half untied in the night. He drew it taut, and made the knot again, carefully, deliberately, a double knot, tight and neat, the way he had made it a hundred times. And when it was done he laid the little weighting stones along its ends, one by one, and pressed them flat.
He did not look at her. He did not need to.
"Thank you," said Aveline, softly.
It was the only thing she said. She did not ask what the ribbon meant. She did not ask what he was promising. She only set her hand, for a moment, lightly, on the back of his, on the long old scar, and held it there, warm and firm and steady, in the thin cold sun.
They stayed there until the frost was gone.
And in the garden below the birches, in the dark under the oilcloth shelter, the buds on every branch of the Crimson Bloom had begun, very gently, to glow.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The burying ground lay behind the garden, on a shelf of land that nobody could see from the road.
Aveline would not have found it alone. Odalie led her there in the blue hour before sunrise, by a path so narrow that it was hardly a path at all, a thread of trodden grass that ran along the outside of the garden wall and then climbed, steeply, through a stand of bare birches. The frost was thick. It crunched under their boots. Their breath rose in two separate clouds, and the sky overhead was the color of a pigeon's wing, pale and soft and promising nothing.
They did not speak. The old woman walked ahead with her shawl pulled tight and her hands tucked into her sleeves. She did not look back. Aveline followed, with her heart beating slowly and her bandaged hand curled inside her coat, and thought that she had never walked so quietly in her life.
They came out of the birches onto a small flat meadow.
It was very still. The grass was white and stiff. A low stone wall ran round it, waist-high, mossed and tilted with age, and in the wall there was a gate of rough oak, tied shut with a loop of faded twine. Beyond the wall, the land fell away in a long clean sweep toward the valley, so that from the height of the meadow she could see all of it spread out below, the roofs, the river, the orchards, the thin gray threads of smoke beginning to climb from the chimneys. It was a place chosen for its view. Someone had wanted the dead to be able to see the living.
"Here," said Odalie.
She untied the twine. She pushed the gate wide.
There were many stones. Aveline had expected that, an old valley, three hundred years of settlement, but she was not prepared for how many, or for how they stood. They were small and plain, mostly of gray slate, set in neat rows in the frozen grass, and each one wore a little cap of frost. Wooden wish-blooms had been tied to some of them, red and weathered. Dried flowers had been laid on others. A few were so old that the names had been worn smooth. Down the middle of the meadow ran a path of flat stones, scrubbed clean, and someone had swept every leaf from it.
"This is the ground of the village," said Odalie. "Everyone is here. Everyone who has gone, since the first. Their children come in spring, to weed." She walked down the path. "But the ones I wish to show you are not here. They are over there."
At the far end of the meadow, apart from the rest, set against the northern wall where the birches crowded closest, was a second, smaller enclosure.
It had been fenced with a low iron rail. Inside it, on a bed of clean white gravel, stood three stones.
They were not slate. They were pale and fine-grained, the same stone as the garden wall, polished smooth by the wind, and they stood a little taller than the others, each one a hand's breadth higher than the last. Someone had cut them with a steady, loving hand. The lettering was deep and clean. And on every one, above the name, a flower had been carved.
A five-petaled flower. A crimson bloom.
Aveline stopped at the rail. She did not realize she had stopped. Her feet simply declined to go on.
"Take your time," said Odalie, quietly.
She went in.
* * *
The first stone read *ALDRIC PELL.*
Beneath the name, two dates. She did the sum without wanting to. Sixty-one years. A long life, a full one, and under it, in smaller letters, a line: *Who kept the bloom thirty years, and was kept by it.*
She stood and looked at it for some time. It was a good stone. It had the look of something made by people who had loved him.
"He was the last of the old ones," said Odalie. "He swore at thirty-one, and the plant lived. Very long. Very well. When Joren was a small boy, he used to sit on Aldric's knee in the garden, and Aldric would tell him which of the buds was lying." She smiled faintly, without humor. "He died in the winter that Joren was nine. He was tired. He had given what he had."
"Thirty years."
"Yes."
The second stone read *YSOLDE MARNE.* Beneath her name, a pair of dates, and Aveline's mind did the arithmetic again, and this time the number was smaller. Her throat tightened. Thirty-four years. The line beneath read: *Who gave her years that the valley might have spring.*
"Eleven," said Odalie, before she could ask. "She bore it eleven years. She was young. She was a weaver. She had a daughter, who married a miller and went down to the lowlands. She was warm, and funny, and very tired at the end." Her voice remained level. It was the voice of a woman reciting a thing she had said many times to herself, in the dark. "She was the second. The plant took more of her than it took of Aldric. Each year it took more."
*Each year it took more.*
Aveline stood still. A faint cold wind lifted a strand of her hair and laid it across her mouth. She did not brush it away.
"And the third?" she said.
She did not need to ask. She was already looking at it.
It was the tallest. It stood at the end of the line, pale and slender in the early light, and there was a ribbon tied round its base. A strip of green silk, faded nearly to gray, knotted carefully in a bow and weighted at the ends with small stones. The wind had worried it. The edges were frayed. But someone had replaced the stones, again and again, so that it never blew away.
*MAELIS ORN.*
Beneath the name, the dates. Aveline read them, and read them again, and still they would not resolve themselves into a sum. Twenty-six. She had been twenty-six years old.
Beneath the dates, there was no line.
She looked for it. She looked all over the stone, in case it had been cut in some corner, in case it had weathered away. There was nothing. The space where the words should have been was bare, smooth, deliberately empty. Someone had stood in front of this stone with a chisel in hand and been unable to think what to write.
*The ledger,* she thought. *The blotted ink.*
"She bore it two years," said Odalie, very softly.
Aveline closed her eyes.
*Thirty. Eleven. Two.*
It was the clearest thing she had ever seen. It was written in the stones as plainly as in a column of figures, a descent so smooth and so merciless that she wanted to cry out against it. It was not the arithmetic of chance. It was a curve. It was the shape of something that took, and took, and took, and was never satisfied.
"The cost," she said, and her voice was a thread.
"Yes."
"The years."
"Yes." Odalie bowed her head. "That is the first part of it. There is more, but that is the first. A bearer gives her years to the plant. She does not know how many. The plant takes what it needs, and the valley lives, and the bearer burns down like a candle. The first lasted thirty. The second eleven. The third two."
"And the fourth?"
The old woman looked at her.
"I think you know," she said. "I think you have always known."
She did. That was the dreadful thing. She had known since the gate, since the first gray morning, since a man with scarred hands had said *please* as though the word cost him blood. She had known in the bakery, in the garden, in the red-lit dusk. She had known, and she had gone on touching the plant anyway, because she was a scientist, because she was stubborn, because she was lonely. Because a small bright secret voice in her chest had whispered, *It answers to you. It has chosen you.*
*It had chosen Maelis too.*
She sank down onto her heels in the white gravel in front of the third stone and put her good hand flat against the cold marble. She did not weep. She was past it. She only knelt there, in the cold and the silence, and read the carved name again and again, as if she could draw it into herself through the skin of her palm.
* * *
Joren came up the hill as the sun cleared the ridge.
She heard him before she saw him. A boot on the frozen path, a hand on the gate, a breath that stopped short. She did not turn. She heard Odalie rise from the bench by the wall, and the soft rustle of her skirts, and then the old woman's voice, low and without reproach.
"I brought her. I am sorry. It was mine to answer for."
"I know it was." His voice was hoarse. He sounded as though he had not slept in a week. "Go home, Odalie."
"Joren."
"I'll be all right."
A pause. Then the whisper of her shawl, and her small steps going away along the path, and the gate closing with a click. And then there was nothing but the wind in the birch tops, and the faint, high singing of a lark that had mistaken the frost for spring.
He did not come any nearer. She felt him standing at the iron rail, a few yards behind her, the way one feels a fire at one's back. She did not turn around. She kept her hand on the stone. She thought, with a sudden painful lucidity, *If I look at him, I will break.*
"You have been here some time," said Joren.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry."
"What for?"
"For not telling you." He drew a long uneven breath. "I was going to. I stood in the lodge last night and I told myself, tomorrow, I will tell her. And then it was tomorrow, and I was afraid. That is the whole of it. I am sorry."
She heard him cross the gravel. She heard him stop, and then, slowly, with a stiffness that spoke of long disuse, lower himself to the ground beside her. His shoulder was a hand's breadth from hers. He sat with his knees drawn up and his forearms resting on them, looking at the stone, not at her. She could feel the warmth coming off him in the cold, and the faint shiver that ran through him, once, and was suppressed.
"I will tell you," he said. "If you still want to hear it."
"I do."
"It will not be good to hear."
"I did not suppose it would."
"All right." A breath. "All right."
He looked at the third stone for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was low and level and utterly without color. It was the voice of a man reading a sentence aloud from a page that he had read so many times he no longer saw the words.
"The Vow is old. I do not know how old. It was already old when the valley was settled. The first people who came here found the plant, a wild thing, dying, in a dead soil, and one of them, a woman, put her hand on it and said, *Let it live.* And it did. That was the first bearer. That is all anyone knows." He rubbed his thumb along his knuckle. "It lives as long as someone carries it. The bearer takes the Vow in front of the plant, in front of the valley, and the plant answers, and for as long as she lives it blooms. When she dies, it fades. Then it waits, until another is chosen. The warden's task is to keep it alive in the waiting, and to keep the bearer alive as long as he can."
"As long as you can."
"Yes."
"And the cost?"
"The cost is what you have seen." He nodded at the stones. "Each one gave more than the last. Aldric Pell thirty years. Ysolde Marne eleven. And Maelis." He stopped. His throat moved. "Two."
"I know."
"Do you know why?"
"No."
"Neither do I." The words came out torn. "I have asked. I asked the ledger. I asked the Circle. I asked my own father, when I was fifteen, and he told me that some things are not for asking. The plant takes what it needs, and it needs more each time, and nobody knows why. It is simply how it is." He closed his hand into a fist on his knee. "I have spent half my life trying to find an answer. There is no answer. There is only the count."
She was silent. She could feel her own heart beating, loud and steady, in the quiet.
She wanted to say something comforting. She had nothing. Every word that came into her head was a small, meaningless, ordinary thing, *I'm sorry*, *it's not your fault*, *I understand*, and she would not insult him with them. She sat with him instead, in the frost and the thin gold light, and let the silence stand.
After a while, in a different voice, she said, "Did you love her?"
He did not move.
It was the cruelest question she could have asked. She knew it as it left her mouth. She knew also that it was the only one that mattered, that everything else, the arithmetic and the ledger and the dying plant, was only a ring of stones around it. She waited. She did not look at him. She kept her eyes on the green ribbon, fraying in the wind.
"Yes," said Joren.
It came very low, and very rough, as if scraped from the bottom of a well. It trembled at the end.
"Yes," he said again. "I did."
* * *
*I have said it,* thought Joren.
It was a strange thing to know. He sat on the cold gravel with his hands hanging between his knees and the sun on the back of his neck, and the word seemed to have no weight at all. He had thought it would be heavier. He had carried it unspoken for six years, and he had expected, when he finally set it down, to feel the earth shake.
The earth did not shake. The sun went on rising. The lark went on singing its foolish song. Beside him, a hand's breadth away, a woman with ink on her cuffs sat very still and did not say, *I'm sorry.*
He had waited for that. He had braced for it. He had prepared himself for pity, for the soft, sticky, helpless pity of the village, the hands on his arm, the lowered voices. He had been ready to walk away from it. He did not know what to do with its absence.
She did not touch him. She did not speak. She only breathed, steadily and quietly, the way one breathes beside a sleeper, and after a moment he realized that she had shifted, a very little, so that her shoulder was no longer a hand's breadth from his but an inch. She had not moved closer. She had simply, quietly, made the space between them smaller, so small that he could feel her warmth, and not so small that he had to acknowledge it.
*She knows,* he thought. *She knows exactly what I can bear.*
"She was a bookbinder's daughter," he heard himself say.
Aveline did not turn her head. "Tell me."
"She came to the valley the spring she was twenty. Her father had died. She had no one. The Circle took her in, and she worked in the garden." He found, to his surprise, that his voice had steadied. "She was clever. She was always, always asking. Why this, why that, why do we do it this way. Everyone found her tiresome. I found her," a breath, "I found her a great relief."
"Because she asked."
"Because she did not pretend." He turned his hand over and looked at the palm. "She would put her fingers in the soil and say, *This is wrong,* and then say, *I don't know why,* and then go and find out. She was never afraid of not knowing."
"She sounds like someone I would have liked."
"She would have liked you." He said it automatically, and then heard it, and felt something crack. It was what he had said of his mother. It was true of both. It was, he realized, true of everyone he had ever loved, that they would have liked her. "She was twenty-four when it answered her."
Silence.
"She did not have to do it." The words came quickly now, fast and cracked, as if they had been dammed. "That is the thing. No one asked her. No one pressured her. Odalie did not. The Circle did not. I did not. She came to me one night in the garden and said, *It is dying, Joren. I can feel it. I can't stand by.* And I said, *Don't.* And she said, *Why?* And I could not tell her. I could not tell her, because I loved her, and I knew what it would cost, and I could not make myself say it. I thought, if I say it she will do it for the wrong reason. I thought, if I say it, she will do it *for me.*"
"And so you said nothing."
"I said nothing." His voice broke. "I said nothing, and she took the Vow on a spring morning with the whole valley watching, and it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It bloomed. It bloomed *red.* I have never seen it so. And she looked at me across the garden, and she was so happy." He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. "She was so happy, Aveline."
It was the first time he had said her name without thought. He heard it fall from his mouth like a coin from a pocket. He did not take it back.
"And then?" she said, very gently.
"And then I watched her burn."
He lowered his hand. He looked at the stone, at the frayed green ribbon, at the blank space where the words should have been.
"I could not write it," he said. "The line. The mason came, and asked me, and I could not think of a single true thing. *Beloved* was a lie, because it was not enough. *Who gave her years* was a lie, because she gave all of them. I told him to leave it empty. I thought, I'll know it when I see it. I have looked at that stone every day for six years. I have never known it."
The sun rose a little higher. The frost began to smoke on the wall.
Beside him, Aveline Rooke was very quiet. And then, without turning her face, she reached out and laid her bandaged hand on the gravel, between them, palm down, with the fingers a little curled. She did not touch him. She placed it there, an inch from his own, as one sets down an offering and steps away.
He stared at it.
It was a small hand. It was stained with ink and bound in an ugly knot, his own, and it lay very still on the white stones, an inch from his scarred knuckles, asking for nothing. It was, he thought, the bravest thing he had ever seen.
He did not take it. He could not. But he did not move away, either, and the inch between them seemed to hum.
* * *
"I am not going to take it," said Aveline.
She said it after a long time, so quietly that he nearly missed it. She was still looking at the stones. The light was full on her face, and it was very pale, and very set, and there were no tears in it. There was only a fierce, steady, terrible resolve.
"The Vow," she said. "I won't take it. I know what you asked, in the garden. You said I would say no. I want you to hear me say it now. I will never take it. Not for the plant. Not for the Circle. Not for the valley. Not for anyone."
"Aveline."
"I am going to save it another way."
"There is no other way."
"There is always another way." She turned her head at last and met his eyes, and he saw in them something that stopped his breath, a light, hard, brilliant, unyielding. "I am a physician. A plant is a living thing, and every living thing has a mechanism. If this one needs a bearer, then I will find out *why.* I will find what it takes, and what it gives, and where the arithmetic goes wrong. I will find a way to feed it that does not burn a person down to the wick. I will do it in thirty days, or I will do it in thirty years. But I will not stand in this meadow and let there be a fourth stone."
"You can't promise that."
"I can promise to try." Her voice shook, then steadied. "And I need you to believe me. That is all I'm asking. I need you to believe that I will not go the way she went, and that I am not leaving, and that I am not afraid of you, or of this. I need one person in this valley to believe I can do it."
He did not answer. He could not. His chest had closed around something large and bright and painful, and his eyes burned, and he was suddenly certain that if he opened his mouth he would say a thing he could never take back.
*I believe you.*
He did not say it. He did something else. He reached out, slowly, as one reaches toward a bird, and took the end of the green ribbon between his fingers. The silk was cold and stiff with frost. It had come half untied in the night. He drew it taut, and made the knot again, carefully, deliberately, a double knot, tight and neat, the way he had made it a hundred times. And when it was done he laid the little weighting stones along its ends, one by one, and pressed them flat.
He did not look at her. He did not need to.
"Thank you," said Aveline, softly.
It was the only thing she said. She did not ask what the ribbon meant. She did not ask what he was promising. She only set her hand, for a moment, lightly, on the back of his, on the long old scar, and held it there, warm and firm and steady, in the thin cold sun.
They stayed there until the frost was gone.
And in the garden below the birches, in the dark under the oilcloth shelter, the buds on every branch of the Crimson Bloom had begun, very gently, to glow.
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