Joren Vael did not sleep.

He lay on the narrow cot in the watch lodge with his boots still on and his eyes fixed on a crack in the ceiling beam, and he listened to the valley wake around him. First the cocks. Then the clink of pails at the well. Then the long low groan of the pottery's bellows, and under it all the faint, endless sound of the river. He knew every one of those noises as well as he knew his own pulse. He had grown up inside them.

None of them could drown out the memory of a bud turning red under a stranger's hand.

His fingers still hurt. That was the absurd part. He had not touched the plant, had not even touched her, and yet the ends of his fingers ached all down the left hand, the way a limb aches when the weather is about to change. He flexed them against the blanket. The old seam across the back of his hand pulled tight and white. It had been doing that all night, ever since the gate.

*Red.*

Six years. Six winters and six springs, and every morning of every one of them he had walked out to that bed and knelt beside it and asked it, in the privacy of his own head, to do something, anything, to flush or to flower or to give some sign that it still meant to live. It had given him nothing. It had given him petals on the ground and brittle leaves and the slow brown creep of a thing deciding to stop. He had learned not to ask. He had learned to gather what fell and carry it to the compost and say nothing, because asking made the silence worse.

And then a woman with ink on her knuckles had walked into the garden and reached past his raised hand and closed her fingers around a bud as if it were no more than a bud.

He sat up.

The lodge was a single room built into the garden wall, stone below and timber above, with a stove, a table, a shelf of ledgers, and a second cot that had not been slept in for a very long time. He had made the room as plain as he could. It had not worked. There were still tools hanging on pegs that had been hung by other hands, and a cup on the shelf that he had never washed, and a green ribbon coiled in the bottom of a drawer that he did not open.

He dragged a hand down his face. His stubble rasped against his palm. He needed to shave. He needed to eat. He needed, most of all, to decide what to do about Aveline Rooke.

*A. Rooke.* He had read the name on the Circle's notice a fortnight ago and thought nothing of it, because the notice had said *a physician of the Academy*, and in his head that meant a gray-bearded man in a good coat who would sniff at the soil and call for expensive instruments. A man he could be rude to. A man who would leave within three days, disgusted by the cold and the food and the silence.

Instead, a woman. Young, or not so young. Chestnut hair coming loose from its pins, and a tired, set, stubborn face, and a mouth that went flat when she was hurt and sharp when she was angry. She had stood in front of him with her glove in her fist and told him, *That is not a reason, that is an instruction,* and her eyes had been so bright with fury that for a moment he had forgotten the garden entirely.

He did not forget the garden for anything. That should have told him something.

He stood and went to the washbasin and splashed his face with water so cold it made his teeth ache. He looked at himself in the scrap of mirror on the wall, which he used only for shaving. A tired man looked back. Thirty-two years old and already the gray was coming in at his temples. He looked like his father. He had always hated that.

"Send her away," he told the reflection.

It was simple. It was the only right course. The Circle had gone behind his back, and he would deal with the Circle in time. The woman herself had done nothing wrong. She had come in good faith, and the kindest thing he could do was to put her on the first cart down the valley before the village got hold of her and before the plant did whatever it was doing and before anyone said the word.

*Bearer.*

He closed his eyes. The word did not feel like a word. It felt like a hand laid flat against his chest.

Not her. Not again. He would not stand in that garden a fourth time with a spade in his hand and soil under his nails and a shawl folded over his arm because there was no one else to carry it. He would send her away in the way that did the least harm. He would be cold, and she would resent him, and she would go home and write a bitter paper about the savage warden of Crest Valley, and she would live.

He dried his face. He did not feel any better.

* * *

She was at the lodge door before the sun was fully up.

He heard her boots on the gravel before she knocked, a quick, determined tread, and by the time her fist struck the wood he was already standing with his hand on the latch. She did not wait to be asked. The door swung inward and she stood framed in it, with the pale morning behind her and a leather portfolio clutched against her chest.

She had slept, at least a little. There was color in her cheeks and her hair had been put back up in a tight, ruthless knot. She had changed into a clean blouse, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and a plain brown work apron tied at her waist with a small notebook thrust into the pocket. A pencil stub rode behind her ear. She looked like a person armed for war.

"Mr. Vael," she said. "I would like to discuss terms."

"You have until the frost."

"I'm aware. I was told." She stepped over the threshold without invitation, glanced once around the lodge, the stove, the table, the ledgers, and then fixed her eyes on his face. "I'd like it in writing. I'd like to know what I'm permitted to do in the garden between now and then, and what I'm not. Since you seem to have strong views about the second category, I think it would be efficient to hear them all at once."

"You're very sure of yourself."

"No," said Aveline Rooke. "I'm very certain I haven't got time."

It was exactly the answer he had least wanted. He felt something turn over in his chest and refused to name it.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand."

"Then stand." He went to the table and pulled one of the ledgers toward him, mostly to give his hands something to do. She watched. He could feel her watching, the sharp, clinical attention he had noticed yesterday, the same look she had turned on the plant. It was unnerving to be on the receiving end of it. "The Circle has given you access to the garden. I can't override that. But I'm the warden, and what happens inside that wall is my charge. If you work there, you work under my rules."

"Which are?"

"One." He did not look at her. "You do not enter the garden alone."

"I'm to be supervised."

"You're to be accompanied. Two. You do not touch the plant with your bare hands."

"Not the soil either?"

"Soil is permitted. Gloved." He turned a page that he was not reading. "Three. You do not work after dark. The garden is closed from sunset to dawn."

"The plant may be responding to night temperatures. I'd want to take readings at midnight."

"Three," he repeated, more firmly, "is not negotiable."

She said nothing. He heard the soft scratch of a pencil. When he glanced up she was writing something in her notebook, her head bent, one strand of hair already working loose against her cheek.

"Four," he said, and stopped.

He had been going to say, *You do not ask about those who tended it before.* It was the rule he had given every outsider for twenty years, handed down in his father's voice. It had never been difficult to say before. It had never been aimed at anyone who looked like this.

"Four," Aveline prompted. She had lifted her head. Her gray-green eyes, he saw now, were not gray at all. They were hazel, flecked with amber, very clear. "Mr. Vael?"

"You do not ask about the people who tended the plant before." He said it fast, the way you pull a splinter. Then, because that sounded like a command and some stupid, stubborn part of him disliked how it sounded, he added, "Please."

She blinked.

He had not meant to say the last word. It had slipped out, as the first *please* had slipped out yesterday in the garden, and he regretted it as keenly as he regretted anything. It sounded like asking. It sounded like a plea. He saw her take it in, saw her turn it over, and he knew she would remember it.

"Those are your rules," she said slowly.

"Yes."

"Then I have a few of my own."

He folded his arms. He realized he was doing it only after he had done it. "Go on."

"I direct the method. Every part of it. What I test, in what order, with what instruments. If I need to dig, I dig. If I need a sample, I take it." She counted off on her fingers as she spoke. "I keep a daily record, and you may read it at any time, because I have nothing to hide and you have every right to know what I'm doing to your plant. But if the Circle wants a report, they come to me, not to you. And if I ask you a question, you answer it, or you tell me plainly that you won't. You don't change the subject. You don't look out the window."

"I don't look out the window."

"You did it twice yesterday."

He opened his mouth, shut it again. He had, in fact, been looking at the window.

"One question," she said. "Each day. You can refuse. But I'd rather you refuse than lie."

It was a fair demand. It was more than fair. It was a clean, careful, honorable thing to ask, and he could not give it to her, because the first question she would ask was one he could not answer.

"Why did it turn red?" said Aveline.

There it was. He had known it was coming and still felt it like a fist under the ribs.

"Frost stress," he said.

She looked at him.

"The plant is dying," he went on, hearing his own voice go smooth and level, the voice he used on traders from the lowlands and children asking about the graves. "It does odd things in the last weeks. The cold can trigger a pigment response. A last flush, as it were. My father saw something like it once. It means nothing."

He stood very still. He did not shift his weight. He did not look at the window.

Aveline Rooke did not write anything down.

She watched him, with a stillness that was worse than anger. Then, quite deliberately, she shifted her portfolio from one arm to the other, and he saw something change in her posture. Not a retreat. A recalculation. It was the look of a woman who has counted the stairs in the dark and found one that wasn't there.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For telling me." Her voice was perfectly polite. "I've learned a great deal."

He understood, with a drop of the stomach, that she knew he was lying. She had not caught him in a contradiction. She had simply watched him say it, and she had known. He took one step back from the table without meaning to. It put an extra stride between them, and he saw her eyes follow the movement and note it.

"Rule four," she said, in the same pleasant tone. "The people who tended the plant before. Who were they?"

"Rooke."

"I'm only asking for the term. I won't ask for names, since those are forbidden. What did you call them? The Circle's letter used the word *keeper*. Are they keepers? Are they caretakers?"

"Caretakers," said Joren, too quickly. "They were caretak, the caretakers. Gardeners. The Circle's appointed hands."

*Bearers.* It was there in his mouth, the other word, his tongue already shaping it. He bit down on it so hard that his jaw ached. He saw her catch the stumble, saw her bright eyes sharpen, and he knew that she had understood that the correction was a correction.

"I see," she said softly.

She did not press. That was the worst of it. She simply tilted her head and regarded him as one might regard a lock, a complicated mechanism with a clear shape and no visible key. It occurred to him that he had never in his life been looked at with such concentrated, impersonal interest, and that some small, treacherous part of him did not hate it.

"You speak more precisely than anyone in this valley, you know," she said.

"I don't."

"You do. You say exactly what you mean, or you stop. It's a very unusual habit." She was almost smiling, though not at him. "It makes you extremely easy to read."

He had no reply to that. He had never been called easy to read. He had spent a decade building himself into something that could not be.

Heat climbed his neck. He turned his face toward the stove, away from her, and said, with all the coldness he could gather, "Sign the terms, Miss Rooke, or leave. The Circle will not hold your contract if you walk out. Anyone can walk out. The road is open."

"I know it is."

"Then you know that you can go."

"I've been going since I was nineteen." The words were light, almost careless, but he heard the shape of something under them. "I've been shown the door by cleverer men than you, in better houses, with sharper words. I'm still here, Mr. Vael. I'm very good at being asked to leave."

Her voice did not shake. He saw her hand tighten on the portfolio until the knuckles stood out.

He had been about to answer, something cutting, something to widen the distance between them. The words were already in his mouth. They died there.

*I've been shown the door by cleverer men.* She had not said it to wound him. She had said it, he thought, the way you press on a bruise to see whether it is still tender. It was the first honest thing either of them had said since the gate, and the sound of it settled somewhere low in his chest and stayed.

He knew who she was, of course.

He had read the Circle's dossier last week before he knew she was coming, in the dull hope of finding some reason to object. Three years of blight studies. A paper on resistant cultivars, published to some acclaim. And then a short, sour, official notice of retraction and reassignment, with a different name at the head of the work. He had read the story in the cool language of the Academy's records and felt nothing. He had not understood that it would have a face.

He should have said something kind. He did not know how to say anything kind.

What he said, after a silence that stretched too long, was, "I will keep you in my sight whenever you are in the garden. That is the arrangement."

Her brows drew together. "I thought that was rule one."

"It's rule one, restated."

She looked at him, and for the space of a breath he had the odd, disorienting impression that she was seeing right through him, down past the surly warden and the cold voice, to the tired and frightened man who had stayed awake all night because a bud had changed color.

He did not know what she saw. He only knew that she dropped her gaze first, and that something in him loosened a little when she did.

"Very well," said Aveline. "Where do I sign?"

"I don't sign. The word of the warden is binding."

"Then I'll sign for both of us." She set her portfolio on the table, pulled out a sheet already inked with her small, upright script, and added her name at the bottom with a flourish. He had not noticed her write the terms. He read them upside down. Every one was accurate. She had even recorded *Rule four, with amendment: please.*

He felt his mouth twitch. He crushed it flat.

"Tomorrow at dawn," he said. "Bring your own gloves."

"I've brought three pairs."

"Of course you have."

She gathered the paper, lifted her chin at him, and went out. At the threshold she paused. For a second he thought she would say something more, and he found, to his annoyance, that he was waiting for it. But she only glanced back at the lodge, at the plain walls and the cold stove and the two cots, one made and one bare, and her expression softened a fraction, as though a thought had crossed her mind that she was too tactful to speak.

Then she was gone, her quick footsteps going away down the gravel.

Joren stood very still in the center of the room.

The terms sheet lay on the table where she had left a copy, and he found that his eyes had gone to the margin. She had written something there, small and neat, in the margin beside rule four, as if to herself and not to him: *Warden answers one question a day.* And beneath it, in a smaller hand: *Today's answer was a lie. Note to self: ask better.*

He read it twice.

Then a short, harsh, entirely unwilling breath of laughter escaped him, and he put a hand over his mouth as if to catch it. It had been a long time. It felt like a stone dislodged from a landslide, and he waited, with his hand against his mouth, for the rest of the hillside to follow.

Nothing did. After a moment he lowered his hand. He looked at the paper. *Ask better.*

"Damn," he said, very softly, to the empty room.

* * *

Odalie Fenn came an hour later, as he had known she would.

She did not knock. She never had. She simply opened the lodge door with her hip, a basket of eggs on one arm and a jar of last summer's honey tucked under the other, and set both on his table with the air of a woman who has been delivering things to this room for thirty years and does not intend to stop now. She was small and broad and weathered, with a plait of iron-colored hair wound around her head and a pair of black eyes that missed nothing. The bees loved her. So, in a complicated way, did he.

"You look dreadful," said Odalie.

"Thank you."

"I mean it kindly." She took the stool by the stove without asking and began unpacking the basket. "Did you sleep?"

"No."

"Did you eat?"

"I will."

"You will not, you'll forget." She pushed a heel of bread and a wedge of cheese at him across the table. "Eat that. Then we'll discuss the thing you want to shout at me about."

He did not eat. He stood with his back to the stove and his arms folded and looked at her.

"You gave them her dossier," he said.

"The Circle gave you the notice, as was proper."

"The Circle gave me a notice that said *a physician of the Academy*. It did not say a woman. It did not say twenty-nine, or a ruined name, or a record so clean that no one in the valley could find a reason to refuse her." He heard his voice roughen. "You wrote that letter, Odalie. *We believe you are the one.* You wrote those words to a stranger."

"I did."

"Why?"

She took her time. She peeled the cloth off the honey jar and broke a corner of bread and held it out, and when he refused it, she ate it herself, chewing slowly, her black eyes steady on his.

"Because the plant is dying," she said at last. "Because we have tried every other way. Because we have sat in that hall for six years and argued and prayed and walked circles around each other, and I am seventy-one years old, Joren, and I would like to see it bloom before I go into the ground."

"At what price?"

"You know the price."

"I know it better than any of you." The words came out quieter than he intended. "I know it to the day. I know it to the hour."

Odalie said nothing. Her face softened, and he hated that, hated the pity in it, the long weariness. She had held his mother's hand at the end. She had stood at his shoulder in the burying ground three times. She had earned the right to look at him that way, and he still could not bear it.

"I did not choose her," said the old woman. "I want you to understand that. The valley chose her. We only read the signs."

"You read the file of a hurt woman and thought, *She will not leave.*"

"I thought, *She is the kind who stays when it is hard.* Is that so terrible?"

It was not. That was the bitterest part. He turned away and set both hands on the edge of the stove, feeling the heat sink into his palms, and said in a low voice, "She is not here to stay. She is here to save a plant. She does not know what it is."

"She will."

"Not from me."

"Joren."

"I will not do it, Odalie." He said it to the stove. "I will not stand beside another one. You may tell the Circle I said so. I will keep her until the frost and then I will send her home."

The old woman was silent for a time. When she spoke, there was no argument in her voice, only a kind of gentle, terrible patience. "The boy saw it."

He went still.

"Pip was on the wall. He saw the bud change, and he ran straight home to his mother, and she ran straight to me. By now, I'd wager, the baker knows, and the potters, and half the orchard." She clicked her tongue. "I came as soon as I could. I wanted you to hear it from someone who loves you. By tonight the whole valley will have it."

"Tell them to be quiet."

"I can't."

"Tell them it was a trick of the light."

"Joren." Odalie rose from the stool with a small grunt, dusting crumbs from her skirt, and laid her hand, brown and spotted and warm, flat against his back, between the shoulder blades, the way she used to when he was a boy who had fallen from the pear tree. "They have waited six years. Do you think I could take that from them with a word?"

He leaned, very slightly, into the pressure of her palm. Only a little. Only for a breath.

Then he straightened, and her hand fell away, and he turned and looked at her with a face that gave nothing back.

"Then we will have to be careful," he said. "All of us. She isn't to be told anything. She isn't to be crowded. She isn't to be looked at as if she were a, as if she were anything but a woman doing a job. If any of you put a flower in her hair, I swear I will tear down the Circle hall with my hands."

"You'd have to catch the children first."

"Odalie."

"I will do what I can." She picked up her empty basket. At the door she paused and looked back, small and square against the light. "She sat on your bench for a long time this morning, you know, after you'd gone. I walked by. She was writing on her hand like a schoolgirl, and talking to herself, and I thought, there is a woman who has been very much alone."

He did not answer.

"Eat the bread," said Odalie, and went out.

The door closed. The lodge was very quiet. Outside, faint through the stone, the sound of the garden gate opening and closing, and the crunch of a light, quick step going away along the lane.

Joren looked at the bread on the table.

Then he looked at the window, where the white morning was climbing the ridge, and where, beyond the wall, in a bed of dark soil, a single bud sat green and silent on a failing branch, as if it were listening. For the first time in six years he found that he did not want to look away.

He ate the bread.