A week passed, and the garden changed.

Joren saw it first in small ways, the way a man sees weather turning in his knees. The gravel paths had been raked in a new pattern, wide and orderly, because Aveline Rooke could not abide a path that did not go somewhere. A row of labeled jars stood along the shed shelf, each one holding a soil sample with a neat paper tag in her cramped hand. The tools on the pegs hung in a different order. The stone bench by the dry fountain had acquired a cushion, a worn plaid thing that she had brought from her lodgings and left without comment, and on cold mornings there was a second mug beside his on the wall.

He told himself that none of it meant anything. A garden was a place that was worked in. A person who worked in it would leave marks.

But the plant had changed too, and that he could not explain away.

Three buds on the lowest branch had held their crimson seams for seven days. They had not opened, but neither had they closed, and each morning when he came through the gate before dawn with his heart in his throat, he found them a little fuller than the day before. The brown on the leaves had stopped spreading. The petals that fell at night were fewer. Yesterday, for the first time in six years, he had gone to rake the bed and found nothing to rake.

He had stood in the cold with the rake in his hand and not known what to do with his face.

It was worse than the dying. He had learned how to endure the dying. He had built an entire self around it, a patient, hard, closed thing that carried the cloth and gathered the petals and asked for nothing. Hope was a different animal. Hope went through that structure like a hot knife through wax, and he did not know how to stand in the wreckage.

And the valley knew. That was the other change. Everyone knew.

It had begun with the wish-blooms. They were on every gatepost now, on every lintel, strung across the lane in long red garlands that fluttered in the wind like a procession. Someone had hung one on his own lodge door. Someone had hung one on the rim of the garden well. The village children left small offerings at the oak gate each dawn, an apple, a coil of ribbon, a pebble with a flower scratched on it, and when he gathered them up and put them in the compost, they reappeared the next morning, replaced by other hands.

Baskets had begun to arrive. Eggs. Honey. A jar of pickled walnuts. A knitted scarf, dark green, so carefully made that he could not bring himself to burn it. Each basket was marked, in a different hand, with the same name.

*For the Doctor.*

On the seventh morning, as he stood at the lodge door and watched Thom Brannock of the Circle come puffing up the lane with a fresh hamper, a thing in him that had been holding on for a long time quietly let go.

*They are looking at her the way they looked at the others.*

He went inside and took down the strongbox from the top shelf, and counted what was in it.

* * *

It was a simple plan. He thought it was a good one.

He had the Circle's stipend, which he had never touched, six years of it in a roll of rough linen. He had the money his father had left him, and his mother's silver, and the little hoard of coin that a man collects when he has nothing to spend it on. He put all of it in a purse. To it he added a letter, written the night before in a hand so stiff it looked like a stranger's, addressed to a man at the Academy whose name he had found in one of her papers. *To the Keeper of Botanical Appointments. The bearer of this letter is Aveline Rooke, whom I have had occasion to observe in the practice of her art. She is, without qualification, the finest field physician I have known. I recommend her to any post in your gift.*

He did not mention the retraction. He did not mention Corwin Thale. It was a good letter. It was an honest letter. He was, he thought, doing a good and honest thing.

It was two days to the first frost. After that, the plant would go to ground or it would not, and if it did not, the valley would turn to the one remaining option, and the one remaining option would be standing in the middle of the garden with a spade in her hand.

He put the letter in his coat and the purse in his belt, and he went down the hill.

Her lodging was above the bakery. He had never been inside it. He climbed the narrow outside stair in the thin gold light of late afternoon, past a row of winter geraniums in tin pots, and found the door ajar and a lamp already lit. He knocked on the frame. The door swung open under his knuckles.

Aveline was sitting cross-legged on the floor with her notebooks spread around her in a fan, a blanket over her knees and a smear of ink on her chin. A pencil was clamped between her teeth. She had taken her hair down. It fell past her shoulders in a thick chestnut wave, and in the lamplight there were threads of copper in it that he had not seen before.

She looked up, and the pencil fell out of her mouth.

"Mr. Vael."

"May I come in?"

"You may." She scrambled to her feet, dragging the blanket with her, and looked around as though noticing the room for the first time. It was very small. A bed, a washstand, a table heaped with books and dried specimens. A window with a view of the village square. The air smelled of ink and warm bread and, faintly, of pressed leaves. "Forgive the state of it. I'm, there's tea. I think. The kettle is probably still warm."

"I won't stay."

"Then you shouldn't have knocked."

It was said lightly, and he almost smiled. He stopped himself. He closed the door behind him and stood with his back against it, because there was nowhere else to stand, and took the purse from his belt and laid it on the table among her papers.

She stared at it.

"What is that?"

"Passage," said Joren. "To the lowlands. And a stipend for the first year. There is a letter with it, to the Academy. A recommendation. I wrote it myself." He heard his own voice, clipped and cold, and could not seem to fix it. "I would like you to take them. I would like you to leave in the morning."

For a long moment she did not move.

Then she picked up the purse. She weighed it in her palm. She opened the drawstring and looked inside, and her face did something complicated and went very still.

"This is a great deal of money," she said.

"Yes."

"Where did you get it?"

"It is mine."

"It's," she counted, with the swift habit of a woman who had lived on very little, "it's several years of a physician's wage. It's more than the Circle offered me. It's more than I was paid for the whole of my work at the Academy." She lifted her eyes. They were hazel, and they were not warm. "You want to pay me to fail."

"No."

"You want to pay me to leave before the frost, so that when the plant dies, I'm not here to see it. So that no one can say I failed."

"That is not what I said."

"Then say what you mean, Mr. Vael. You're very good at saying exactly what you mean, when you choose to." She put the purse down with great care, as though it might go off. "Why are you paying me?"

"To live."

She did not understand him. He saw that at once. He saw the word go in, and he saw it turn into something else on its way. She thought he meant *comfortably*. She thought he meant *to be sure of your rent*, to take the pity of a rich man for a poor woman, a charitable stranger tidying up a nuisance.

"I see," she said, and her voice went flat and low. "I see. You're being generous."

"Rooke, that is not."

"The last man who tried to pay me to go away was Corwin Thale's patron." She was speaking very evenly, the way people do when they are holding a glass very full. "He came to my lodgings the night before the symposium. He brought a purse. He said that it would be *kinder to all concerned* if I withdrew my name from the paper. He said that a woman of my gifts could surely find a quiet position somewhere. He was very civil. He had a very civil purse."

"I am not."

"You are not what?"

"I'm not him."

"No," she said. "He didn't stand in my doorway and look as though he'd rather be flayed."

He had no answer to that. He pressed his shoulders against the door and said, as steadily as he could, "This valley breaks the people who try to save it. I have watched it. I would rather you left whole."

"That's not an answer."

"It is the only one I'll give you."

"Then it's a poor one."

"Yes." He was almost grateful for the anger. It was something to stand against. "It is."

"Tell me the real reason."

"No."

"Why?"

"Because it will not help you."

"That," said Aveline, in a voice like a drawn blade, "is not for you to decide."

* * *

She did not know that she was moving until she was already across the room.

It was the habit of a lifetime. When someone told her that something was not hers to know, a hot wire went through her, and she went after the thing. She crossed the floor in three strides and stopped a hand's breadth from him, tilting her head back to meet his eyes, and said, "You have been lying to me for a week."

"I have not lied."

"You have *refused*. It is worse. It is the same as lying, only with better manners." She jabbed one finger at the center of his chest. It struck wool and, beneath it, a wall of muscle that did not give. "You tell me the plant is safe, then that it isn't. You tell me I cannot touch it, then that I may. You stand on a wall for two hours and watch me as if I'm about to explode. And now you come here with a purse and a letter, and you tell me to go. Why?"

"Rooke."

"*Why?*"

She jabbed him again. He took a step back and found the door. It rattled in its frame. She did not stop. She followed him, a half step, and then another, until there was no more room, and she was standing so near that she could feel the heat coming off him through the layers of his coat. She could see the pulse beating in the hollow of his throat. She could see the small white scar through his eyebrow and the slight tremor in his lashes and the way his eyes had gone dark.

She stopped.

She had not planned to stop. But something had changed in the room, and she felt it the way one feels a pressure change before a storm. The air had gone close and strange. Her breath was too loud. He was breathing hard, too, a quick shallow rhythm she could feel against her face, warm and unsteady, and for one dizzy moment she thought, with perfect irrelevance, that he smelled of woodsmoke and cold apples and crushed petals.

She became aware of his mouth.

It was not a thing she decided. It simply happened, as a note happens in a piece of music, as a stone drops into water. Her gaze fell to his lips, and stayed there, and she saw them part a little, as if to speak, and not speak. She saw him swallow. She saw his eyes drop to hers, and then lower, and she knew with a terrible, thrilling certainty that he was looking at her mouth too.

Neither of them moved.

She could have counted the seconds. She could not, in fact, count anything. Her mind had emptied like a basin. There was only the lamp hissing softly on the table, and the muffled sounds of the baker's boys stacking crates below, and the sound of his breath, and her own.

"Aveline," he said.

It was the first time he had used her name. It sounded different in his mouth than it ever had in anyone else's, lower, rougher, as though he had been carrying it somewhere dark and had taken it out to look at it. Her knees went peculiar.

She stepped back.

It was the hardest thing she had done all day. She took one step, and then another, until the air between them was cold again. She put her hands behind her back, where he could not see them shaking. She lifted her chin.

"Thirty days," she said.

His eyes flickered. "What?"

"Give me thirty days. Not nine. The frost does not decide, Joren. The plant is already showing signs of recovery. You have seen it. You know it." She heard her voice firm up as she spoke, and held to that like a handrail. "If I cannot save it by the end of that time, I will go. I will leave without your purse and without your letter, and I will not write a word about this valley to anyone. You have my word."

"And if you can?"

"Then you stop trying to buy me off." She drew a breath. "And you stop standing on walls. And you tell me, in plain words, what it is that you are so afraid of."

The silence that followed was the longest of her life.

She watched his face. She saw a hundred things cross it, and she could not name any of them. She saw him look at her, and then at the purse on the table, and then at the window, and then at her again, as though some immense and silent argument were taking place behind his eyes. She saw his hand lift halfway toward her, and stop, and fall.

He did not answer.

He turned, quite slowly, and opened the door. The cold came in. He stepped across the threshold, and he did not look back, and she heard his boots going down the wooden stair, one step at a time, steady and heavy and sure.

The door swung gently shut.

Aveline stood in the middle of her room with her hands behind her back.

*That is a no,* she thought.

It was almost funny. She had braced herself for a fight, and instead he had simply left, and now she was alone with a purse of gold and a letter she did not want, and the silence rang. She told herself that it was fine. She told herself that it was exactly what she expected. A cold, closed, impossible man had refused to give her a reason, and so she would go on without one. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all.

She sat down on the floor, abruptly, in the middle of her fan of notebooks.

Her hands were shaking. She looked at them in the lamplight with a kind of distant annoyance. She put them flat on her knees, and they went on shaking. She took out her pencil, because writing always steadied her, and opened the notebook to a fresh page, and wrote the date, and then sat looking at it.

*Day 8,* she wrote. *Subject V. offered payment to leave. Refused. Reason: to be determined.*

She stopped. The pencil hovered.

She had not meant to write the next line. It came on its own, in a smaller hand, as though it were being said under the breath.

*No one has asked me to stay in a very long time.*

She stared at it. Heat rose behind her eyes, and she pressed the heel of her hand against them, hard, and breathed through her teeth until it passed. It was ridiculous. He had not asked her to stay. He had asked her to go. The sentence was nonsense, a thing that belonged in a different book, and she did not know why she had written it.

She knew exactly why.

* * *

Joren stood on the landing outside her door for a long time.

He had not meant to stay. He had gone down three steps and stopped with his hand on the rail, and then, for no reason he could give, he had come back up, slowly, as a man goes back to a house he has already left. The wood beneath his boots was cold. The sky had turned the color of a bruise. Through the thin planks he could hear her moving inside, and then the small dry scratch of a pencil.

He stood very still.

It ran on for a minute. Two. A steady, private sound, the sound of a woman putting thoughts in order. Then it stopped, and the silence that followed was a different silence, and he heard, so faintly that he might have imagined it, a long unsteady breath.

He put his hand flat against the door. It was an old door, pitted and gray, and it did not give. He felt the grain of the wood under his palm. He thought, *If I knock she will let me in.* He thought, *And then I will tell her everything, because I cannot look at her and lie.*

He stood there for the space of ten heartbeats, with his hand on the wood and his forehead nearly against it, and every nerve in his body telling him to knock.

Then he took his hand away, and went down into the dark.

* * *

He did not go home. He went to the garden.

It was well past midnight when he reached the oak gate, and the valley was still. No wind. No stars. A low cloud sat on the ridge like a lid, and under it the air was thick and cold and held a faint, sharp smell of coming snow. He lifted the latch. The gate swung inward. He walked down the center path, past the shed and the bench and the dry fountain, with his hands in his pockets and his head down, in the way of a man who has made this walk so many times that his feet no longer need him.

Rule three. The garden was closed from sunset to dawn. He had made the rule himself, and he had never once broken it.

He stopped at the edge of the bed.

The Crimson Bloom stood dark and bent against the cloud. He could just see the shape of it, the thick trunk, the sparse stems, the pale scatter of the leaves. He stood and looked at it for a long time, and he did not ask it for anything.

"She wants thirty days," he said, aloud, to the plant.

It was foolish. He knew that. He had never spoken to it in six years. But he was tired past all reason, and his chest hurt, and there was no one else.

"I said no. Or I didn't say yes, which is the same." He drew a breath that shuddered. "She is going to stay. You know she is. She is the most stubborn woman I have ever met, and she is going to stay out of sheer contrariness, and I will have to stand here and watch."

A faint wind moved the leaves. Nothing else.

"I can't do it again," said Joren. "Do you understand? I cannot. I will not."

He lowered his head. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, something had changed.

At first he thought it was a trick of the dark. The three buds on the lowest branch, the ones with the thin crimson seams, were catching some light that he could not find the source of. A very faint glow. The color of the inside of a shell. He blinked. It did not go away. The buds were not red, not as they had been when her hand was on them. They were only the faintest, softest pink, like the first flush of a cheek, and they were all, every one, turned a little toward him.

Toward where he was standing.

His heart stopped.

He had not touched them. He had not come within a yard. He stood at the edge of the bed with his hands in his pockets, and the three buds, in the black stillness of the night, leaned very slightly in his direction, as sunflowers lean toward the east, as a sleeper turns toward the warmth of a stranger.

*No.*

It had never done that. In six years, in a hundred thousand mornings, in the long cold watches of every night, it had never so much as stirred for him. It had never known him. He had come to take that as a kind of mercy.

"What are you doing?" he whispered.

The pink deepened, by the smallest degree.

He took a step back. Then another. He felt the gravel shift under his heel, and the cold at his back, and he turned to put the wall between himself and the thing in the bed, and as he turned, he saw, far down the dark slope of the valley, a single light.

A lamp. A small yellow lamp in an upper window above the bakery, a hundred paces and more, steady in the night.

He looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked back at the buds.

They had turned again. They had not been leaning toward him at all. They had been leaning past him, toward the village, toward the lamp, toward the woman bent over her notebook in the lit window. And when he had stepped away, they had followed the light.

He understood that. But he understood something else too, a thing so quiet and terrible that for a time he could not move.

When he stood where he had stood, between the plant and the lamp, in the line of her light, the buds had turned pink.

*For her.* And, a little, *for him.*

He stood alone in the dark garden with his hand over his mouth, and he did not know which of the two truths frightened him more.