By the fourth day, Aveline had run out of bandages, ink, and patience, and she decided to go down to the village.

It was a practical decision. The garden had given her everything it was going to give for the moment. Her second round of soil tests had come back as clean as the first. Her sketches of the twin roots filled eleven pages. The three buds on the lowest branch had held their thin crimson seams for two days without opening any further, and she had taken to visiting them morning and evening with her notebook and her magnifying glass, like a woman visiting a sickroom. What she needed now was supplies, a bottle of ink, a good length of twine, a bag of lime, and, though she would never have said it aloud, a few hours in a place where nobody was watching her with their jaw clenched.

"I'll come," said Pip.

He had appeared at her elbow at the garden gate, as he did most mornings now, as silently as a cat. He was dressed in a coat three sizes too large, with the sleeves rolled to the wrist and a knitted cap pulled down over his ears, and he carried a basket nearly as big as he was.

"Does your mother know you're here?" asked Aveline.

"She sent me." Pip fell into step beside her. "She said, go and show the lady where things are, and don't talk her head off."

"And will you?"

"I'll try." He considered. "Probably not."

She laughed. It surprised her. It was a small laugh, quickly stifled, but it felt good in her chest, like a window opened in a stale room. She hitched her satchel higher on her shoulder and they set off down the lane, and the boy began to talk.

He talked about everything. He told her which of the farmers kept dogs and which of the dogs bit. He told her that the baker's wife made the best honey buns in the valley and the baker's brother made the worst, and that she should never, whatever happened, accept a pie from the baker's brother. He told her that the river was called the Sennet and that it froze solid in the deep winters, so that the children skated on it from the pottery to the mill. He told her that his father had gone to the lowlands to find work, three winters ago, and that he sent letters at midsummer, and that his mother kept them in a tin.

"And the garden?" said Aveline. "How long have you worked there?"

"Since I was seven. The warden lets me carry the tools." He scuffed a stone down the lane. "He says I'm the only one who doesn't sing at the plants."

"Does anyone sing at them?"

"Old Odalie does. And the bees." He said this as though it were perfectly ordinary. "The bees sit on the wall in spring and hum. That's how you know it's spring. It's not the weather, it's the humming."

She did not write that down. She wanted to.

* * *

Crest Valley by daylight was a place of small and deliberate beauty.

She had seen it from above on the first morning, a bowl of slate roofs and smoke. Walking through it was another thing entirely. The village was built along the river in a long sweep, with three crooked lanes climbing the slope behind it and a square at its heart where a stone well stood under an ancient chestnut tree. The houses were gray stone, steep-roofed and deep-eaved, with window boxes frosted white and doors painted in faded blues and greens and ochres. Smoke rose from every chimney. Strings of dried apples hung from the eaves. Everywhere, in every dooryard, on every sill and gatepost, she saw small things carved of wood or knotted of straw, tiny charms in the shape of flowers.

Crimson flowers. Five-petaled. Each one daubed carefully with red.

"What are those?" she asked.

"Wish-blooms." Pip shifted his basket. "For luck. We put them up every autumn."

"For the garden?"

"For everyone." He kept his eyes on the road. "It's tradition."

She was not entirely sure she believed him.

The potter's yard was the first they passed, a wide cobbled space heaped with stacks of unfired jugs and bowls, a squat kiln breathing a lazy gray plume into the cold air. A broad-shouldered man in a leather apron was lifting a rack of cups. He looked up as they passed, and his hands stopped moving.

Then he nodded to her. It was a small, slow, deliberate nod, almost a bow, the kind of nod one gives a visiting dignitary or a doctor at a bedside.

"Good morning," said Aveline.

"Morning, miss." His voice was gruff, a little unsteady. "A good morning to you."

She walked on. She felt the man's eyes on her back. She did not turn.

In the next yard, a woman in a shawl was shaking out a rug. She stopped. She stared. She put a hand over her mouth. Beside the well, two old men in caps fell silent in the middle of a sentence and watched her pass. A girl of fifteen or so, carrying a pail, stood frozen in the road with water slopping over the rim onto her boots, and when Aveline smiled at her she turned scarlet and fled down an alley.

"They're being friendly," said Pip, in the tone of a boy who has repeated it often.

"Are they?"

"Mm."

"It feels," said Aveline carefully, "as though everyone I pass is attending a funeral and I'm the one being buried."

Pip did not answer. He was looking very hard at the end of his nose.

The bakery stood at the bottom of the square, a squat, golden-windowed building that breathed warmth and yeast into the frozen morning. The bell on the door jingled as she pushed it open. She had one clear moment of ordinary pleasure, the smell of cinnamon, the sight of loaves in wire racks, a fat orange cat asleep on a flour sack, and then the whole room went quiet.

It was not the silence of surprise. She knew that kind. This was heavier. There were perhaps a dozen people inside, women in aprons and men in work coats and a few children with their noses pressed to the sugar cakes, and every head had turned toward her. Every conversation had stopped. Nobody smiled. They stared at her with a kind of ravenous, painful tenderness, as if she were a lamp carried into a cellar after a very long dark.

"Good morning," said Aveline, and her voice sounded thin in her own ears.

"Good morning, Doctor." A stout woman behind the counter had found her voice. She was perhaps fifty, flour to the elbow, with a round, kind face and eyes that were suspiciously bright. "Mistress Rooke. You're very welcome."

"Thank you. I'd like some bread, if I may. And I need ink, I was told you might know where."

"Ink. Of course. Of course, I'll, Tilda!" The woman turned and shouted into the back. "Fetch the ink from the dresser! The good bottle!" She turned back, wiping her hands on her apron with unnecessary violence. "Here, take a loaf. No, take two. Take this. Mind, it's still warm."

She was pressing something into Aveline's hands, a round brown loaf, a paper twist of something sweet, a second loaf wrapped in a cloth. Aveline protested, tried to pay, was waved away so fiercely that she gave up.

"For your strength," said the baker, clasping her hands over Aveline's for a moment, hard and warm. "You'll want your strength, Doctor. All of us, all of us are, well. We only want you to keep your strength up."

"I'm sure I'll manage."

"Of course. Of course you will."

Aveline looked into her face. There were tears standing in the woman's eyes. Tears, over a loaf of bread, over a stranger buying ink.

A cold uneasy prickle crept up the back of her neck.

She took the bread and thanked them and backed toward the door with her arms full. A little girl at the counter, no more than four years old, tugged at her mother's skirt and said in a clear, piping voice, "Is that the lady who's going to save us?"

"Hush, Nell."

"Is she?"

"Hush."

The bell jingled. The door closed. Aveline stood on the cobbles with two loaves of bread and a twist of candied peel and a sensation she could not name, a prickling, a pressure, as though invisible hands had laid themselves across her shoulders and were pressing slowly down.

"They're happy," said Pip, at her side. "It's a good thing. They're happy."

"Pip." She looked at him. "What are they happy about?"

"That you're here."

"Why?"

He shuffled. "Because you can fix the plant."

"I haven't yet."

"But you will." He said it with simple, awful confidence. "Everyone says so."

It was a very particular feeling, she thought, to be looked at as though you were something other than yourself. She had felt it once before. She had felt it in the hall of the Academy, standing at the lectern with her three years of work in her hands, with every eye in the room fixed on her, bright and hungry, expecting brilliance. She had felt, in that moment, a terrible sense of being weighed. She had felt that she was not a person but a thing that would either succeed or fail.

*That was before Corwin took it from me,* she thought. *And now, here, it's the same.*

* * *

"Come in, my dear," said Odalie Fenn, at the door of her cottage. "You look as though you could use something hot."

It was a small house at the edge of the village, low and thatched, and almost swallowed by a tangle of overgrown garden. A line of wooden hives stood along the south wall, wrapped against the winter in straw jackets, and a thin rope of smoke curled from the chimney. The door was open. Inside, a fire burned on a wide stone hearth, and the air smelled of beeswax and woodsmoke and dried lavender. Aveline stepped across the threshold and felt her shoulders loosen by a full inch.

"Sit, sit," said Odalie, shooing her toward a deep armchair by the fire. "Pip, take the lady's basket. Put it by the door, there's a good boy, and then run and tell your mother where you are. Go on."

Pip went. The door closed behind him. Aveline sank into the chair, which was lumpy and warm and covered with an old patchwork quilt, and watched the old woman bustle about the room.

She was a small, solid, weathered person, perhaps seventy, with a plait of iron-gray hair coiled about her head and a face as seamed as a walnut. Her hands, as she measured tea into a pot, were beautiful, strong, brown, knotted at the knuckles, and entirely steady. She hummed as she worked. The hum was low, wordless, and strangely restful, and it took Aveline a moment to realize that she knew it, that it was the same hum Pip had described, the bees' hum, the one that meant spring.

"You're humming at the kettle," said Aveline.

"Am I?" Odalie sounded pleased. "So I am. It's a habit. The bees don't mind, and neither, I hope, does the water." She set a cup in Aveline's hands. "Honey tea. It's the last of the summer's. Drink it while it's hot."

The tea was thick and golden and tasted of clover and smoke. Aveline drank, and a slow warmth crept down through her chest, and she thought that if this old woman had been a spy or a poisoner she would have had to admire the technique.

"You've been very kind to me," she said. "All of you. I'm not used to it."

"Are you not?"

"Not recently."

"Hm." Odalie sat down opposite, creaking, and folded her hands in her lap. "I read your letter of introduction, you know. The one the Academy sent when the Circle wrote to ask. I read all of it, and your papers, and the long ugly thing at the end."

Aveline's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

"The retraction," said Odalie gently. "The ruling. The one that gave your studies to the man Thale."

Silence. The fire popped. A log shifted and sent a shower of sparks up the chimney.

"You knew," said Aveline.

"We all knew. Tilda Marsh's boy runs messages to the post house, and he reads. Or, no, that's not fair, the Circle read it, and the Circle talks." The old woman's black eyes were steady. "Mistress Hale, at the pottery, came by my door yesterday with a pot of preserves for you. She wanted me to tell you that she was sorry about the theft, and that in her opinion the man was a thief and a coward, and that she hoped you'd someday see him hanged."

Aveline set the cup down very carefully on the arm of the chair. Her hand had begun to shake. "I see."

"I thought you ought to know. I thought it would be better said plain."

"Who else knows?"

"Everyone in the valley who can count to a hundred."

It struck her like cold water. She felt her face go hot, then ice cold, then hot again. All those eyes in the bakery. All those faces. Those careful, gentle, pitying faces. She had walked through the village in her best apron and thought *they are being kind* when what she had meant was *they are sorry for me*. They had read the worst thing that had ever happened to her in an official document, and they had passed it from kitchen to kitchen. They had brought her bread.

"I've been a spectacle," she said. Her voice was very quiet. "A, a charity."

"No."

"I've been *handled.*"

"Aveline."

"You read my record and you chose me because I was desperate." She stood up. She did not remember deciding to. The quilt slid to the floor. "Because no one else would have me. Because I'd come for anything and stay for nothing. Because you knew I'd be grateful."

"Sit down."

"I am not going to be grateful, Mistress Fenn." Her voice shook with something she had not felt in a long time, not sorrow, not shame, but a bright, hard anger, the anger of a woman who had been taken advantage of once before and had sworn it would not happen twice. "I will do my work. I'll do it well. And when it is done I will put my name on it, and I will leave, and none of you will have a claim on me. Not for a loaf of bread. Not for pity."

"Sit down, child."

It was not a command. It was only a quiet, level, unhurried voice, and something in it reached past the roar in her ears. Aveline stood a moment longer, trembling, and then sat.

"I'll tell you why we chose you," said Odalie. "And then you can be angry as long as you like."

Aveline said nothing. She stared into the fire.

"It was not the retraction. That, we regretted. It was your fieldwork. Three years of it. I read every page, and I thought, here is someone who goes back to the same plot week after week, in the rain, in the mud, in the cold, for no reason but that she wants to know. Here is someone who does not leave when it is hard." The old woman paused. "We have had visitors before. Clever ones. They came with their instruments and their certainty, and they stayed a fortnight, and then they went home with a cold and an excuse. This valley does not need clever visitors, my dear. It needs a person who does not leave."

"That is not a reason to bring me here."

"No. But it is the true one."

Aveline lifted her eyes. Odalie was looking at her with an expression she could not decipher, tender and weary and, underneath, afraid. It was an odd thing to see on so composed a face.

"There is more," said Aveline.

"There is always more."

"But you won't tell me."

"Not today." Odalie's mouth curved, faintly, and the curve had a sorrow in it. "It isn't mine to tell, and it would not be kind. But I will say this. Go gently with the warden."

"The warden," said Aveline, with some heat, "has been nothing but, I don't know, a locked gate with legs."

"He has been exactly that." Odalie nodded. "He has also stayed awake three nights in a row since you came, and walked the garden wall at two in the morning, and put his hand on that plant for the first time in six years. He is a very frightened man. Frightened men are rude. Be patient with him."

"Frightened of what?"

"Of losing something." The old woman's gaze slid toward the fire. "He has lost a great deal already."

The words seemed to hang in the warm air. Aveline opened her mouth, and the door of the cottage swung open, and the cold came in.

* * *

He filled the doorway.

For a moment she saw only the silhouette, a broad dark shape against the white light, the long coat, the leather strap, the shoulders braced against the weather. Then he stepped inside and shut the door behind him, and the firelight caught his face, and it was Joren Vael. His hair was dusted with sleet. He was breathing as though he had come a long way very fast.

"Odalie," he said.

"Joren."

"You've done it again." He had not looked at Aveline, or perhaps he had and was pretending otherwise. He was staring at the old woman, and there was something in his face that Aveline could not read, a raw, hard, bitter anger so steeped in love that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. "She's been in the village for an hour. Every soul in the valley has stood at their door and gawped at her like she was a, a relic. They're hanging wish-blooms on every gate. Do you know what the baker said to me?"

"I can guess."

"She said, *Thank the saints, Warden, we have her at last.*"

"She did."

"You *chose* her." The words came out low and shaking. "You chose her, Odalie. You put her name in front of the Circle. I know it was you."

Odalie rose. She was small and old and a head shorter than he, and she did not flinch. She looked up into his furious face and said, very clearly, without heat, "The valley chose."

"Do not give me that."

"It is the truth."

"It is a story you tell yourself, so you can sleep."

"It is not a story, Joren." She laid one hand against his chest. "And you know it."

He did not move. Aveline sat very still in her chair, hardly breathing. She felt like a trespasser in a cathedral. The air in the room seemed to thicken. She saw his chest rise under the old woman's hand, saw the muscles of his throat work, and then, to her astonishment, she saw him bow his head slightly, as a son does when he is angry and cannot say it.

It was then that he saw her.

She watched it happen. His eyes lifted, fell on her face, and stopped. The anger went out of his expression so fast it was like watching a lamp snuffed. What replaced it was blank and careful and terribly young.

"Rooke."

"Mr. Vael."

"I did not know you were here."

"Obviously."

"How much did you hear?"

"Enough to know that I'm a relic." She stood and brushed the quilt from her skirt and picked up her satchel with as much dignity as she could manage. "Thank you for the tea, Mistress Fenn. I'll see myself out."

"Aveline," said Odalie. "Wait."

She did not wait. She was already at the door, and her face was burning, and she wanted, very badly, to be out in the cold. She pulled the door open and stepped out into the sleet, and heard, behind her, a single low voice say, "Let her go," and a boot on the flagstones, and then the door closing, and then footsteps behind her in the lane, long and even and perfectly unhurried.

She did not stop walking. She did not look back.

"Rooke."

"I don't wish to discuss it."

"Rooke." He fell into step beside her. He did not touch her, did not crowd her. He simply matched her pace, a yard to her left, hands clasped behind his back, eyes fixed on the road. "You asked for a question a day."

"I did."

"You haven't had today's."

She nearly laughed. It came out as something sharper. "I have rather a lot of them at the moment."

"Then choose one."

They walked. The sleet turned to a fine dry snow, a veil of white drifting down between the houses. It silvered the roofs, the chestnut tree, the lines of laundry hanging stiff and frozen in the dooryards. Villagers watched them from windows. She felt every gaze like a hand on her back. Joren seemed to feel it too. His shoulders were rigid. But he kept walking at her side, and when a small boy darted out of an alley with a bundle of kindling, he moved smoothly between them without breaking stride, so that the child went by on his far side and did not so much as brush her sleeve.

She noticed. She did not know what to do with it.

"Why do you object?" she said finally. She did not look at him. She kept her eyes on the white road. "To my being here. You said it the first morning, that you resented it. And it isn't the Academy, and it isn't my sex, or at least it isn't only that. So what is it?"

A long silence. The snow fell. She counted twelve of his footsteps against her own.

"Because you will be very good at it," said Joren.

"At what?"

"At the work."

"That's an odd thing to resent."

"Yes," he agreed. "It is."

She turned her head and looked at him. He kept his gaze straight ahead. The snow had caught in his dark lashes and in the shadow at his throat, and his face, in profile, was so still it might have been cut from stone. But she saw the muscle working in his jaw, and the tight, helpless line of his mouth, and she understood, with a sudden slow turn of the heart, that he had just told her the truth. The whole of it, or very nearly. He had said it as if it were a wound.

*Because you will be very good at it.*

She did not understand. She understood only that it was not contempt. It was something closer to grief.

She said nothing more. They walked on together through the white morning, out of the village and onto the long lane that climbed toward the garden, and somewhere on the slope above the pear orchards she made a decision. It formed quietly, without any drama, the way real decisions did. She would stay. She would find out what they were not telling her. And she would not let any man, any Circle, any hopeful face in any bakery decide for her what she was for.

*No one will use me again,* she told herself. *Not like that.*

She did not realize that she had slowed down until she noticed that so had he.

It was a small thing. His stride was a great deal longer than hers. For the past quarter mile he had been, she saw now, deliberately shortening it to match her pace, a half step at a time, so smoothly that she had never noticed he was doing it. And when they reached the low-hanging bough of an old apple tree that arched across the lane, he lifted one arm without a word and held it up, out of her way, so that she could pass underneath with her satchel and her bread and her fury without bending her head.

She passed beneath his arm. For a moment she was very close to him, close enough to feel the warmth coming off his coat. Then she was through, and he let the branch swing back, and they went on without a word.

The silence was different now. It was not comfortable, quite. But it was no longer cold.

* * *

They reached the gate of the garden just as the afternoon light began to thin.

She saw it before she knew what she was seeing. The oak gate stood slightly open, as always. But from its iron ring there hung something new, a wreath. It was woven of dried grass and dark ivy, braided with little red wooden blooms, and from its base a long ribbon trailed in the wind. A white ribbon, stitched across with careful letters.

*AVELINE.*

She stopped. The breath went out of her.

Someone had stitched her name. Someone had sat at a kitchen table and threaded a needle with red silk and worked her name, letter by letter, into a ribbon, and tied it to the gate of the garden she was supposed to save.

Underneath, in smaller stitches, were four more words.

*Come home to us.*

"They've begun to pray for you," said Joren.

His voice was raw. She turned and saw his face, and for a moment she did not recognize it. All the stone had gone out of it. What remained was naked, white, and shaking with a terror so profound that she took a step toward him before she knew she meant to.

"Joren."

"They shouldn't have." He was staring at the ribbon. "They had no right. They promised me. They *swore.*"

He strode to the gate, caught the wreath in both hands, and ripped it from the ring. The ivy tore. The little wooden flowers rattled to the ground. He tore at the ribbon with fingers that would not hold it, that trembled so badly he could not get a grip on the silk, and he went on tearing until it came away in a long red-and-white tatter, and then he stood with the ruined thing crushed in his fists, his head bowed, his breath coming in great ragged heaves.

Aveline watched him, and she was very frightened, and she did not know why.

"What is it?" she said. "What are they asking me to do?"

He did not answer. His shoulders shook. Snow settled on his hair and the scarred backs of his hands.

"Joren. What are they praying for?"

"You." It was barely a whisper. "They're praying for you."

"Why?"

He lifted his head. There were no tears in his eyes. It would have been better if there had been. What was in them was something far older and far more terrible, the look of a man who has watched a thing happen once already and knows, to the last small detail, exactly how it ends.

"Because they think you will not leave," said Joren Vael.

And then he turned and walked into the garden, with the torn ribbon trailing from his hand, and left her standing at the gate in the falling snow with her loaves of bread and her name in pieces at her feet.