Two days after the burying ground, the birds went quiet again.

Joren noticed it at dawn, standing at the garden gate with his tea going cold in his hand. It was not the silence of frost. That had a clean, glittering quality, an expectant hush. This was different. This was a thick, close, heavy stillness, as though the whole valley were being held under a hand. The air tasted of metal. The light was an odd bruised yellow, the color of an old apple, and it lay on the pear trees without warmth. High up, over the ridge, the clouds had begun to pile in slow dark towers.

He watched a flock of starlings come in low over the orchard, wheeling and tight, every one of them heading for the shelter of the barns. A hare crossed the lane at a dead run. Down in the village, a dog was barking, and barking, and would not stop.

He drained his tea and set the mug on the wall.

*Tonight,* he thought. *Perhaps by dusk.*

He had seen storms like it twice in his life. Once when he was a boy, and the river had risen over the mill. Once the winter after Maelis, when a gale had torn the roof off the pottery and flattened half the orchard, and he had stood in the garden through the whole of the night holding the oilcloth down with his bare hands, while the plant screamed, in its way, beneath him, and nobody came. He had been glad of it, then. He had wanted the wind. It had seemed the only honest thing left.

He did not want it now.

* * *

He sent Pip home first.

The boy came skipping up the lane at seven, whistling, with his cap pushed back on his head and a basket of bread under his arm. Joren stopped him at the gate.

"Go home."

"But I've brought the, the Doctor's second breakfast, Mum made."

"Leave it on the wall. Go home. Tell your mother to bring in the washing and bar the shutters. Tell the baker to bank her ovens. Tell everyone on the low road to move their stock to the high barns." He kept his voice flat and quick. "There will be wind by noon and rain by dark. The river will rise. Do not let any of the children near the mill."

Pip stared at him. Then he looked at the sky, and Joren watched him read it, as every child of the valley could, the flat yellow light, the piling towers, the gathering dark in the west. The boy's face went solemn.

"It's a bad one."

"It might be."

"Will it hurt the plant?"

"Not if I can help it." Joren put a hand briefly on the boy's shoulder. "Go on. You're the fastest runner in the valley. Be useful."

Pip went, tearing off down the lane in a flurry of boots, and Joren stood and watched until he was out of sight. Then he turned and went to the shed for the heavy canvas.

He had three hours. It was not enough.

* * *

She would not leave.

He had known she would not. He had known it with the part of him that already knew her, that had learned in a fortnight to predict the angle of her chin before she lifted it. But knowing was not the same as accepting. When she came through the gate at ten o'clock, her satchel on her shoulder and her sleeves already rolled, he said "No" before she had spoken, and she looked at him with an expression of such weary, forbearing contempt that he nearly laughed.

"I haven't said anything."

"You are going to say you are staying."

"I am going to say that the buds are at the critical stage and I cannot leave them." She set her satchel on the bench. "They have swollen by a third in four days. The seams are splitting. If the storm breaks while they are opening, I need to be here to, to observe."

"To observe."

"To record. To intervene, if necessary."

"There is nothing to intervene with. It is a wall of rain and a hurricane."

"Then I will intervene with a tarpaulin."

"Rooke."

"Joren." She had begun to bind the stakes with a length of cord, with swift, impatient knots, not looking at him. "I know what a storm is. I have worked through floods. I once spent three days in a ditch in the marshes of the east coast, in a gale, counting reeds. I will not be a nuisance to you. But if there is a chance that this plant is about to come into flower, and I am sitting in a bakery with a cup of tea, then I have no business calling myself a physician."

"The road will be cut."

"I know."

"By evening. The lane floods in two places. The bridge at the ford has gone under three times in my life." He heard his voice rise and made himself lower it. "You will be trapped. In the lodge. With me."

That stopped her hands.

It was a very small pause. A knot half-tied, a cord suspended in her fingers. She did not turn her head. He saw the color climb slowly from her collar to her ear, and he saw her lashes lower, and he thought, with a sudden savage clarity, *Why did I say that?*

"I am aware," said Aveline, with magnificent calm, "that the lodge has a roof."

"It has two cots."

"I am aware of that also."

"Aveline."

"I will not be a nuisance," she said again, to the knot. Her voice had gone quite quiet. "I have said that. I will sit in the corner. I will write in my book. I won't speak unless I am spoken to, and I will leave at dawn the minute the lane clears. But I am *not leaving.*"

He opened his mouth. He closed it. He stood in the yellow light with the wind beginning to stir the dead leaves at his feet and the wholly unreasonable certainty that if he argued she would stay out of spite, and if he did not she would stay out of conviction, and either way she would be here when the sky broke.

He thought of her out in the open, alone, in the storm.

"Fine," said Joren. "Hold this."

He put the rope in her hand.

* * *

By one o'clock the wind had arrived in earnest.

It came down off the ridge in great booming gusts that bent the pear trees to the ground and tore the last leaves from the branches in handfuls. The oilcloth snapped like sails. The lanterns swung. Overhead the sky had turned the color of slate, and the first fat drops were falling, big as coins, striking the gravel with a sound like thrown pebbles. They worked in silence. There was no breath to spare for speech. She held the canvas down while he drove the stakes, and then he held while she lashed, and between them the shelter gained a second skin, and a third, and a ring of heavy stones along its base.

Her hair had come loose. It blew about her face in dark wet ropes. She did not stop to push it away. She was shouting something at him, over the wind, a request for rope, and he threw it to her without looking and she caught it without looking. He had a moment of crazy exhilaration. They were *good* at this. They were a single hand working with a single purpose, moving round each other without thought, and he thought, *I have not felt like this in six years.*

The sky split.

It was not thunder. It was a white blinding crack that hit the ridge like a hammer, and the rain came down all at once, not in drops but in a solid sheet, roaring, so thick he could not see the wall. She cried out. He caught her by the arm.

"Inside!"

"The bed, the north side, the stake!"

"*Inside!*"

He did not wait. He took her wrist and ran. They crossed the gravel in the roaring dark, splashing through water that was already ankle-deep, and he hauled the lodge door open with his shoulder and shoved her through and followed, and slammed it behind them with all his strength. The latch dropped. The wind hit the wood like a fist.

They stood in the dark, dripping, panting, with the whole house shuddering around them.

* * *

It took her a moment to realize she was holding his sleeve.

She let go. She stood in the middle of the lodge floor in a spreading puddle, soaked to the skin, her wool jacket hanging off her like a wet sheep, her hair streaming, and listened to the storm batter the roof. Her heart was going like a hammer. Her teeth had begun to chatter, in a small, irrepressible, undignified way.

"Don't move," said Joren.

She heard him cross the room. A match flared, yellow and sudden, and then a lamp, and the lodge sprang out of the dark. It was smaller than she remembered. One room. A stove, a table, a shelf of ledgers. Two cots against opposite walls, one made with military neatness, one bare, a folded blanket at its foot. A high narrow window, black with rain.

He had knelt at the stove. He worked at it with quick efficient hands, stripping kindling, striking sparks, and within a minute a thin flame caught and leapt. The warmth was instant. It fell across her face like a blessing. She stood with her hands stretched toward it, shaking, and tried to remember how to breathe.

"Take that off," said Joren.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The jacket. You're wet through." He had not looked round. He was feeding sticks to the flame. "There's a blanket on the bed. The gray one. Wrap up in it. Everything else will have to dry."

"I, yes. Of course."

She peeled off the jacket with numb fingers. Beneath it, her blouse clung to her like a second skin, and she was suddenly, dreadfully aware of how much of her it showed. She crossed to the bare cot and seized the blanket and wound it round her shoulders, and drew it tight, and felt a rush of warm dry wool and the faint smell of cedar and smoke. She stood clutching it. She was shaking.

He had risen. He was standing by the stove with the firelight on his face. He had stripped off his own coat, and it hung dripping from a nail, and beneath it he wore a thin linen shirt soaked transparent against his chest and shoulders. The wet cloth outlined every line of him. She saw the long muscles of his back and the deep hollow of his collarbone, and the water dripping from the ends of his hair, and the pulse in his throat. She looked away so fast her neck cracked.

"Tea," said Joren. His voice was strained. "I'll make tea."

"Yes. Please."

"Sit."

"Yes."

She sat. The cot creaked. She kept her eyes on the floor, on the dark water pooling round her boots, and tried very hard to think of something dull. The exact chemical composition of loam. The Latin names of the grasses. Anything. The storm rattled the shutters. The fire hissed. Somewhere behind her, a man was moving about with a kettle and cups, and every sound he made, the clink of a spoon, the scrape of a chair, the soft huff of his breath, fell on her skin like a touch.

He brought her a cup. His fingers brushed hers as she took it. It was a small, accidental, scalding contact, and neither of them said anything.

* * *

She did not ask about the cup.

There was one, on the shelf above the table. She saw it as the lamplight swung, a plain brown mug, chipped at the rim, standing alone among the neat rows of ledgers. It was clean and dry. But it was dusty, a fine gray bloom of dust across the handle, as if it had not been touched in years. Beside it a small wooden drawer in the shelf's base was shut, its brass pull gone dull.

She looked at both for a long moment. She did not say a word.

She wanted to. It was an almost physical want, the old curiosity rising in her like a tide. She wanted to cross the room and open the drawer. She wanted to take down the cup and turn it in her hands and say, *Whose is this?* She wanted to ask what he kept in the dark.

*I won't push when you say you cannot.*

She closed her eyes. She drank her tea. It was hot, and smoky, and too sweet, and she held it in both hands and let it burn.

"You may look," said Joren, behind her.

She opened her eyes.

He was standing at the stove with his back to her, stirring a pot, and he had not turned. His shoulders were rigid. "At the cup. At the drawer. You're thinking of it. I can feel you thinking."

"I am not going to."

"I know."

"I said I would not."

"I know." He tapped the spoon on the rim of the pot. "I only wanted to say that you may. If you wished. It is not a, it is not a *forbidden* thing. It's only not a thing I can say yet."

Her throat tightened.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me."

"I will anyway."

He made a low sound, something between a breath and a laugh. Then, stiffly, in a tone of elaborate indifference: "There is soup. It is mostly turnip."

* * *

It was, in fact, entirely turnip.

He made it with the careful, deliberate economy of a man who had cooked for himself for twelve years and never once enjoyed it. She watched him from the cot, with the blanket pulled up to her chin, as he chopped an onion, and a carrot, and half a loaf of hard bread into a pot of bubbling water. He wore his sleeves rolled to the elbow. The firelight picked out the long scar across the back of his hand, and the fine dark hair on his forearms, and the cords of muscle that moved when he turned the spoon. He cooked the way he did everything else, with the minimum of motion and total concentration.

"Let me help," she said.

"Sit."

"I'm perfectly able."

"You are shaking."

"I am shaking *warmly.* It is entirely different." She threw off the blanket and crossed to the table. "Give me a knife."

He gave her a knife. She picked up a turnip. She held it for a moment in her bandaged hand, and then began, with great confidence, to cut it.

She cut it very badly.

She was aware of it at once. The pieces came out in lumps, in shards, in wedges of every possible size, and one of them skittered off the table and rolled across the floor. She tried to correct it. She made it worse. She was holding the knife in her fist like a pen, the way she had always held everything, and she felt Joren go very still beside her.

"Rooke."

"Yes?"

"You hold a knife like you're about to write on the turnip."

"I am an academic."

"You are a danger to yourself." He took the knife out of her hand, carefully, as one disarms a child. He turned it. He put it back in her grip, with the blade pointed down, and then, because her fingers still would not close right, he laid his own over them, and shifted her thumb a quarter inch up the spine. "There. Curl the fingers. Keep the tip on the board."

She could not have said what he said next. She was aware only of the warmth of his hand on hers, large and rough and perfectly steady, and the faint scent of wool and smoke and soap, and the sound of the rain on the roof. His breath stirred her hair. He had come to stand behind her, to guide the blade, and she realized with a little thrill of horror that he was very close, that his chest was a hand's breadth from her back, that if she leaned an inch she would feel it.

She did not lean. She held very still and cut the turnip.

"Better," said Joren, softly.

"I'm told I'm a quick study."

"You are." A pause. "You are the quickest study I have ever met."

It was not a flirtation. She knew that. He said it flatly, as a fact, in the same voice he used to report the temperature of the soil. But there was something under it, a low roughness, a note of restraint so hard-held that it hummed, and she felt it all the way down her spine.

He took his hand away. She stood with the knife in her fingers and the half-cut turnip before her and did not move for some time.

* * *

They ate on opposite sides of the table, with the lamp between them.

The soup was dreadful. It was thin and gray and aggressively mild. She finished two bowls. He finished three. The storm raged on outside, shaking the shutters and flinging great handfuls of rain at the roof, and the little room, with its single lamp and its glowing stove, felt like a small bright boat in the middle of an ocean.

They did not talk much. There was a good deal of quiet. But it had changed. It was no longer the silence of two people avoiding each other. It was something fuller, warmer, more peaceful. She noticed that when the wind howled, he glanced at the roof. She noticed that when she shivered, he got up and added a log to the stove without being asked. She noticed that he ate with a kind of reluctant relish, with his eyes down, as if it were a pleasure he had forgotten.

The thunder broke directly overhead.

It was a vast, rolling crack that shook the walls, and the lamp jumped on its hook, and the shutters rattled, and she flinched so hard that her spoon flew out of her hand and rang on the stone floor. She had her fingers pressed to her mouth. The sound rolled away over the ridge and came back, and came back, a long grumbling echo like a boulder bouncing down a mountain.

She became aware that he had moved.

He had risen from his chair and come round the table in a single swift movement, and was standing behind her. He did not touch her. He had put one hand flat against the wall, beside her shoulder, and the other on the back of her chair, so that she was caged on two sides by his arms, a wall at her left and the long warm line of his body at her back. He was bent a little, as if to shield her from something. His breath was rapid, close above her ear.

"It's only thunder," he said, roughly. "It's only the ridge."

"I know."

"It will pass."

"I know. I'm not frightened."

"No?"

"I, well. A little."

He did not move. She felt him stand over her, a great dark shape between her and the storm, with the firelight on the wall beside him, and she realized that it was not a gesture at all. It was an instinct. It had come up from somewhere deep, a reflex he could no more have stopped than the beating of his own heart. He had thrown himself between her and the sky.

*He would stand in front of the wind for me,* she thought, and the thought was so quiet, and so enormous, that she did not dare look at it.

The thunder faded. The rain slackened, and then redoubled.

"It's gone," said Aveline.

"Yes."

"You can let go."

"I haven't touched you."

"I know," she said. "That's rather what I meant."

There was a very long silence. Then, with a slow, shaken breath, he straightened. He took his hands from the wall and the chair. He stepped back, a pace, two, and she heard his boots on the floor and the creak of his weight settling against the table.

She did not turn around.

"The lamp's guttering," said Joren, in a voice that was not quite his own.

It was. The flame had begun to gutter, a little yellow tongue, wavering and sinking. The oil was low. In a few minutes it would die, and the room would be lit only by the stove.

She turned.

He stood by the table with the last of the light along one side of his face. He was looking, not at her, but at the opposite wall. At the two cots, one neat, one bare, standing in the shadows with a yard of cold floor between them, and the stove glowing beyond.

"You'll sleep in the bed," he said.

"I'll sleep in the *other* bed."

"It has not been slept in for."

"I'm aware." She heard her own voice, quiet and resolute. "Two beds, Joren. Two beds, and I'm in one, and you are in the other. That is how we will do it."

He did not answer. He was looking at the bare cot.

She followed his eyes. It was a narrow wooden frame with a straw mattress, and a gray blanket, and a pillow with no case. It was, she saw, very clean. It had been dusted. Someone had kept it, all these years, in perfect order. Someone had come in, month after month, and swept beneath it, and never once slept there.

*Whose?* she thought.

She did not ask.

The lamp flickered. Went out.

In the sudden dark the stove glowed red, and outside the storm roared on.