She had not expected an audience.

Aveline came through the garden gate at half past eleven on the ninth morning with a roll of charts under one arm and a sleepless night folded behind her eyes, and the first thing she noticed was the sound. Not a sound, in fact, but the absence of one. The valley had always had a voice, the clink of pails, the mill, the distant hammering from the forge. This morning it had gone dead quiet.

The second thing she noticed was the wall.

People stood along it. They stood all the way around the garden, three and four deep, shoulder to shoulder on the cold gray stones, as if a market day had been called and no one had thought to tell her. Potters in their aprons. Orchard hands with their sleeves rolled. Women with babies on their hips and shawls drawn tight, old men leaning on sticks, a cluster of children perched like starlings along the top. A few had brought stools. Several had brought food. All of them, every last one, were looking at her.

"Oh, no," said Aveline.

"They came on their own," said Pip.

He was at her elbow, as ever, with an expression of such abject apology that she could not even be angry with him. His cap was crushed in both hands. "I didn't tell them. I mean, I did tell my mum, and she told Mistress Hale, and Mistress Hale told, well. I'm sorry, Doctor. The Circle said they wanted to see the work. And you said noon."

"I said noon for the *Circle*."

"It's sort of the same thing."

She looked at the faces on the wall. In the pale light they were drawn and eager and a little frightened, and she thought, quite clearly, *I could turn around and walk out of here. I could simply leave.* The thought was so strong that she felt her feet begin to turn. Then she saw the little girl from the bakery, Nell, with her thumb in her mouth and her wide solemn eyes fixed on Aveline's face, and she did not turn.

She straightened her shoulders. She went down the central path with her head up and her charts under her arm, as if she were walking to a lectern.

* * *

The Circle were waiting by the bed.

There were five of them, in dark coats and heavy boots, with the weathered, patient look of people accustomed to deciding things for others. Odalie stood among them, small and square. Beside her was a tall, spare man of perhaps sixty, with a long gray face and a white moustache and an air of thoroughly disapproving dignity. She recognized him from the bakery, where the baker had called him *Elder Brannock* in the tone one uses for a distant cousin of the Almighty.

"Doctor Rooke." He inclined his head about half an inch. "Thom Brannock. We have not been introduced, though I signed your letter."

"A pleasure, Elder."

"We are grateful. I hope you understand how grateful." His voice was precise and dry and carried perfectly across the garden. "The valley has been waiting a very long time."

"So I'm told."

"Naturally, the Circle is anxious to know how matters stand."

"Naturally." She unrolled the first chart. She had worked on it until two in the morning, a clean graph of soil temperatures and growth measurements and leaf counts, every figure traced in black ink. She held it up. "I'll be glad to show you. The plant is not in pathogen distress. I have eliminated fungal and bacterial infection, root rot, nutrient depletion, and soil toxicity. There is a structural peculiarity in the root system, which I'll explain. And there has been," she hesitated, because the next word was harder, "a measurable improvement in the last nine days. Fewer petals have fallen each night. The buds on the lowest branch have maintained their, their color."

A low murmur went through the crowd on the wall.

"Their color," repeated Elder Brannock.

"Yes."

"The red."

She felt her face heat. "I am calling it a pigment response. It is not understood. I have a number of hypotheses."

"And the cause?"

"I do not yet know."

"But it responds to you."

"It responds to a number of stimuli."

"It responds to *you*, Doctor." That was Odalie, quietly, from the edge of the group. "We have all heard. The whole valley has heard."

Aveline lowered the chart.

She had been dreading this. She saw it now, entire. She saw the people on the wall, and the Circle by the bed, and the broad flat shining hope on every face. She saw how it had been laid out for her like a table. And she saw, with bleak clarity, what they wanted.

"You would like me to show you," she said.

"If you would be so kind," said Odalie. "It is only that people have waited so long."

"I am not a conjuror, Mistress Fenn."

"No one thinks you are."

"I am a scientist. This is not a performance. It is a, a phenomenon that I am trying to understand. If I do it for an audience, if I do it because I'm told to, I'll learn nothing. It won't be a data point. It will be a show."

"Doctor," said Brannock. "Nobody is asking you to be a conjuror."

"Aren't they?"

The word fell between them like a dropped plate. For a heartbeat, no one spoke. She heard a baby whimper on the wall and a mother hush it. She heard the breath of the crowd, three hundred lungs held at once. Then a low, steady voice said, from the gate:

"No."

She did not need to turn. She knew that voice the way she knew her own signature.

Joren came down the path.

He was bareheaded. He wore the old green coat and had a spade over one shoulder, and he walked with the slow, unhurried stride of a man crossing a field he owned. The crowd on the wall shifted as he passed. A few of them looked away. A few looked at the ground. But no one spoke, and no one moved, and as he went by the villagers drew back their feet from the edge of the stone, the way one draws back from a hearth. She had seen that gesture before, at the bakery, at the well. She had not understood it. She was beginning to.

They respected him. They feared him. They did not love him, and it was clear that they wished they could.

"Joren," said Odalie.

"Mistress." He set down the spade. It rang against the gravel. "I have said it before. I will say it before all of you. She is not to be asked to do this."

"Warden." Elder Brannock's voice was very cold. "This is a matter for the Circle."

"It is a matter of a woman standing in a garden being stared at by half the valley."

"The plant is the valley's. It is not yours."

"I keep it."

"You keep it *for* us."

"I keep it for her," said Joren. "For whoever it pleases to answer. And it is not answering to a crowd."

"You are not the arbiter."

"No. Nor are you."

They faced each other across the path. It was the oddest thing Aveline had ever seen, the old man in his dark coat and the young one in his green, both of them rigid with a fury that seemed to have very little to do with the present argument. Elder Brannock's hands were trembling. Joren's were clenched. The air between them sang like a struck bell.

"Six years," said Brannock, very softly. "Six years you have kept her from us. Do you think we have not noticed? Do you think we have not counted? Every spring you stand in that bed and you say *wait*, you say *not yet*, you say *it is too soon*, and every spring there is less of it. How many more? How many more, Warden, before you let us try?"

"Try what?"

"You know what."

Joren said nothing. He had gone white to the lips.

"The bloom," said Brannock, in a low, hard voice, "is the valley's. It is not yours to keep from us because you are afraid."

"I am not afraid."

"You are afraid of every soul in this garden."

"Stop," said Aveline.

She had not known she was going to speak. The word came out clear and loud and rang off the stone, and every head in the garden turned. She felt it like a blow. She felt the weight of three hundred eyes and she did not flinch. Her heart was going like a hammer. She took two steps, putting herself between the two men, and looked at the old one.

"You do not get to speak for me," she said.

Brannock's brows rose.

"Neither of you." She turned her head, briefly, to include Joren, who had gone very still. "I am standing right here. I have ears. I have a mind. I am the one that this concerns, whatever *this* is, and I will thank you both to stop discussing me as though I were a, a parcel to be delivered." Her voice shook, but only a little. "I will decide what I do. I will decide whether I touch that plant, and when, and in whose presence. No one else. Not the Circle. Not the valley. Not the warden."

There was a silence so deep that the wind seemed to stop.

She felt the old, familiar heat rise behind her breastbone. It was the thing that had driven her out of her childhood home and into a school she could not afford and through twelve years of being looked past. It was the thing that had stood in the Academy hall and said, *That is my work.* It was the oldest and truest part of her, and it had one article of faith. *No one decides for me.*

"I'll do it," she said.

"Rooke," said Joren, sharply.

"I'll do it. Not for you." She was looking at Brannock. "And not for them. For me. Because I will not have it said that I was frightened, and I'll not have a plant treated as a miracle when it is almost certainly a mechanism. If it is a mechanism I can understand it. If I understand it, I can heal it. And if it is not," she drew a breath, "if it is not, then I should like to know that too."

"Aveline."

It was the second time. She felt it go through her, a quiet, helpless sound. She did not look at him. If she looked at him she would stop.

She stripped off her glove. She put out her hand.

The garden watched. She felt it. Pip had gone rigid at the edge of the path. Odalie had lifted a hand to her mouth. Somewhere on the wall a woman began, softly, to pray, a murmur of syllables that she did not know. The wind had dropped. The sky was a pale, bright, cloudless blue. The frost lay on the east side of the bed in a delicate lace.

She touched the lowest branch.

For one long breath, nothing.

Then, as if the whole garden had been waiting to exhale, the red came.

It came all at once, and it did not stop. It poured out of her fingers like wine from an upturned cup, racing up the branch and across the stems and into the trunk. It filled the buds, and they swelled. It filled the leaves, and the brown flushed away from them, and they unfurled in the morning air, wet and green. It ran down the bark in dark bright veins and sank into the soil, and the soil itself seemed to stir. Not three buds now but thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred small hard knots sprang out along the branches where she had seen none, all of them tipped with crimson, all of them quivering. The whole plant trembled, from root to crown, like a bell struck softly.

A sound came from the crowd. It was not a cheer. It was a long, shaken, broken sigh.

She could not feel her fingers. She could not feel anything but the warmth, a vast, golden, welcoming warmth, as if she had put her hand into a hearth and found, to her astonishment, that it was a hand she was holding. A small voice in the back of her mind, her own voice, her scientist's voice, was saying clearly, *Record this. Record the time. Note the temperature. Count the buds.* She could not do any of it. She could only stand, with her palm against the bark and her eyes full of crimson light, and understand that she was not the one doing this.

*It is doing this to me,* she thought. *It is choosing.*

"Aveline!"

Someone had hold of her wrist.

She was pulled round. A hand closed hard around her forearm and drew her back, away from the plant, and the contact broke. For one second she felt a pang of such bitter loss that she cried out. Then she was staring up into Joren's face, white and wild-eyed and so close she could see her own reflection in his pupils.

"Enough," he said. "Enough."

He had not let go. His fingers were locked around her arm, and she felt his pulse, or her own, she could not tell. The garden spun around them. And then she saw the red.

It had not stopped.

It had not gone out when she let go. It was still rising, still spreading, only now it was not rising from her. It had changed direction. The color was running toward them both, the entire bed of it, leaning in. Every bud, every leaf, every trembling stem was turning crimson in the space where they stood, and the light poured off the shrub in a sudden warm tide, and fell across Aveline's face and Joren's and the gravel at their feet. Their shadows, long and clear, were painted red on the ground. They were standing at the center of a bloom.

"Joren," she whispered.

"Don't move."

"What is happening?"

"I don't know."

"You do."

"I *don't*," said Joren, hoarsely. "Not this. Not like this. It has never."

And on the wall, one by one, the people of Crest Valley began to kneel.

* * *

Joren saw it happen in the corner of his eye. He saw old Mistress Hale go down on the cold stones, then the potter, then the baker with her flour-white hands pressed together. He saw a woman covering her face. He saw a very old man weeping openly, with his cap in his fist. The kneeling spread, wave on wave, like wind through barley, until the whole ring of the wall was bowed and the only ones still standing were the Circle, and Pip, and the two of them in the garden's red heart.

He heard someone sob. He heard someone say, over and over, "Six years. Six years, saints be thanked, six years."

He knew what they were seeing. He knew exactly. It was the same sight he had seen a long time ago, from the same place, with a different woman's hand in his. He had thought that he would never see it again.

*Not her,* he thought, with a savage, helpless violence. *Not her.*

"Warden." Elder Brannock's voice was quivering. The old man had gone ashen. Tears glittered on the white moustache. "Warden, do you see?"

"I see."

"It is her. It is *her.* After all this time."

"No."

"You cannot deny it."

"I deny it." He heard his own voice rise. It was not a voice he recognized. It was raw and loud and it cracked on the last word. He turned his head and spoke to the entire garden, to the kneeling hundreds, to the faces lifted to the red light, with all the force that his lungs possessed. "She is not your bearer. Hear me. She is a guest of this valley. She is a physician. She came here to heal a plant, not to be, not to be *used*, and any one of you who lays a hand on her, who so much as speaks to her of vows or promises or duty, will answer to me."

The silence was absolute.

"Bearer," said Aveline, beside him.

He closed his eyes.

"What is a bearer?"

No one answered. He felt it in the quality of the quiet, thick, shamed, ruinous. He opened his eyes and saw that the faces on the wall had turned away. Some stared at the ground. Some stared at the sky. The baker had her apron over her mouth. Mistress Hale was crying. Nobody would meet her gaze.

"Mr. Vael." Her voice had gone very small. "Someone tell me what a bearer is."

"Ask him," said Odalie, quietly.

She was standing at the edge of the bed, small and grave and wet-eyed. She did not look at Joren. She looked at Aveline, with an expression of such helpless, loving sorrow that it was hard to bear.

"Ask him, my dear. It is his to say."

* * *

The garden emptied slowly.

No one left in haste. They went in twos and threes, in silence, with their heads bowed and their children close, and the oak gate swung and swung until the gravel was quiet. Odalie went last, with her hand on Pip's shoulder. She paused at the threshold and looked back once, and Joren met her eyes, and neither of them said a word. Then the gate closed.

They were alone.

The red had not faded. It hung over the bed in a soft, shifting haze, deep as a late sunset, and the buds, hundreds of them now, small and perfect and half-open, stood quivering in the cold air. Joren had not moved. He had not let go of her arm. He became aware of this suddenly, as one becomes aware of a long-held breath, and let her go. His fingers ached. The mark of her bones was in his palm.

She did not step away.

"Say something," said Aveline.

"I don't know how."

"Try."

He turned and looked at her. She stood in the red light with her hair coming down and her ungloved hand still held a little away from her body, as if it were something precious and fragile that had been handed to her. Her face was pale. There were tear-tracks on it, he saw. She had not noticed. She was looking at him with those clear, clever, bruised eyes, not angry now, and not afraid, but only open. Waiting. It was the look of a woman who had asked for the truth and was prepared, with all the courage she had, to be told.

He thought: *I have never been more afraid of anything.*

"It is called a Vow," he said.

She did not speak.

"It is an old thing. It is older than the valley. It is how the plant is kept alive." The words fell out of him, one at a time, like stones from a pocket. "Someone makes it. Someone binds themselves, in a way that I will tell you about, when I am ready, and the plant answers. That someone is called a bearer. There have been a number of them."

"Number."

"Yes."

"How many?"

He said nothing.

"Joren."

"Three," he said. "In my lifetime. Not all at once."

She took that in. He watched her take it in, saw her mind go to work, quick and fierce and thorough, and saw it arrive at something and shy away from it, like a horse at a fence. She pressed her lips together. Her free hand curled slowly into a fist.

"And they are," she said carefully. "Where are they now?"

He could not answer.

He did not need to. She had seen the graves. She had not yet understood that she had seen them, but the knowledge was in her face, a kind of dawning, dreadful quiet. She took a step back. Her hand went to her throat.

"No," said Aveline.

"I have not said."

"You don't need to."

"I haven't *said.*" His voice cracked. "Rooke. Listen to me. I am not going to tell you tonight. I cannot. It is, it is too much, you have had too much, and I would only, I would do it badly. But I need you to hear me." He stepped toward her and stopped, and held out both hands, palms open, in a gesture that was almost a plea. "Do not say yes to anything. Not to the Circle. Not to the village. Not to the plant, if it asks you. Not to anyone who offers you a promise or a bargain or a vow, not until I have told you what it costs."

"What it costs."

"Yes."

"You said it was not safe."

"I said that."

"You said it was not safe *for me.* The first day. You meant this."

"Yes."

She stared at him. In the red light her eyes were enormous. He saw her go through everything, every look, every evasion, every locked door of the last nine days, and he saw the pieces fall into place with a slow awful click. Something happened to her face. It did not crumple. It cleared, as water clears after a storm, and what lay beneath it was not fury, or contempt, or fear. It was a kind of terrible gentleness.

"You were not angry," she said slowly. "At the gate. When you read the letter. You were frightened."

"Yes."

"You thought I would be one of them."

"I thought," said Joren, and stopped. He tried again. "I hoped it would not be you."

Something shifted between them. It was very small, a thing of angle and breath, and he could not have said what it was. It was only that the distance between them, a yard of cold air and crimson light, had somehow become less. She was not afraid of him. She had every reason to be, and she was not.

"Then tell me," she said. "Now. Tell me what it costs."

"Not tonight."

"Why not?"

"Because I am a coward," said Joren Vael, "and tonight I would rather be one."

He turned. He walked away from her, down the long gravel path, past the shed and the fountain and the bench with its plaid cushion, toward the gate. His back was very straight. He did not look round. He felt her eyes on him all the way, and he felt, too, the light, the red warmth at his back, following him like a hand.

At the oak gate he stopped. He could not help it. He turned his head.

The Crimson Bloom was still red. It burned in the center of the garden like a coal in a grate, shot through with gold. And every one of its hundred half-opened buds, each small and bright and shivering in the cold, had bent on its slender stem toward the gate.

Toward him.

He stood there until the last of the color faded and the garden went gray, and the girl at the center of it stood watching him, with her ungloved hand pressed against her heart, as though she, too, had felt the turning.

Then he went out into the cold, and shut the gate, and let the dark take him.