Joren did not go to bed that night. He did not even pretend to.

He sat on the stone step of the lodge with his elbows on his knees and watched the red go out of the garden by slow degrees, the way an ember fades from a grate. Long after Aveline had gone down the lane, long after the villagers had trailed home with their lanterns and their murmured prayers, the plant went on glowing in the dark, a low banked crimson that lit the underside of the pear trees and threw soft shadows against the wall. It had never done that. Not once. Not even for her, six years ago, at the very end.

*Not even for her.* He turned the thought over and put it down again. He had gotten good at that.

At some point in the small hours the glow dwindled to a few red points on the lowest branches, and then those went too, and the garden was only dark and cold and smelling of snow. He sat on. He listened to the valley breathe. He thought about a woman with ink on her chin saying, *Then tell me what it costs*, and about his own voice answering, *Because I am a coward.*

It was the truest thing he had said in years, and he had said it to her.

Dawn came gray and hard. He rose with his joints aching and went into the garden, because that was what he did, and stood at the edge of the bed with his hands hanging empty at his sides.

The Crimson Bloom had changed again.

It was no longer the sparse, bent, brittle thing of ten days ago. The brown had gone from the leaves, every one, and the new growth that replaced it was a deep rich green with a faint red vein running through it. The stems had lifted. The trunk, which had been splitting along the lower bark, had sealed itself with a dark glossy resin. And everywhere along the branches, in tight clusters, sat buds. Hundreds of them. Small, hard, glowing faintly at the seams, like coals banked under ash.

It looked, for the first time in his memory, like a plant that intended to live.

And the sky behind it was the color of tin.

He knew that sky. He had been reading it all his life, the way other men read a newspaper. There was a flatness to it, a stillness, a dead metallic pallor in the east. The air tasted of iron. In the pear trees, not a single bird sang. The first hard frost of the year was coming, and it would not be the polite silver rime of the last ten nights. It would be a black frost, the kind that kills what it touches by morning.

If the buds opened tonight under that, they would die.

If they did not open, they would still die.

*I cannot send her away,* thought Joren.

It arrived without drama, as the most important facts often did. He stood in the cold light and looked at the living plant and understood that his plan, the purse, the letter, the clean, kind, cowardly plan, had been dead since the moment she touched that bud in front of the whole valley. If she left now, the plant would go back to dying. If she left now, the three hundred souls on the slope below would lose the first hope they had known in six years, and they would turn to the one remaining way.

He closed his eyes.

*I cannot send her away, and I cannot let her stay, and I cannot stop either.*

* * *

Odalie would not help him.

He went down to her cottage as the sun cleared the ridge and found her already in her yard, wrapping the last of the hives in straw against the frost, her breath puffing white in the cold. She did not stop working when he came through the gate.

"I want you to tell the Circle to call it off," said Joren. "The wish-blooms. The baskets. The, the vigil at the gate. All of it."

"I can't."

"You can."

"Then I won't." She tucked a handful of straw round a hive and patted it flat, as if soothing a horse. "Joren. I will say this once and kindly. I have not asked that girl to do a single thing. I have not asked her to touch that plant, nor to stay in the valley, nor to love any of us. She did it on her own, and she did it in front of half the valley, and no one in this world could have stopped her."

"You could have warned her."

"Warned her of what? That she is wanted?" The old woman straightened with a grunt and looked at him. Her black eyes were bright and steady and very tired. "She has been wanted by no one for years. Don't pretend you don't know how that feels."

He said nothing. It was not an argument. It was simply true.

"The Circle will have its say, whether I will or no," said Odalie, more gently. "Thom Brannock sent word this morning. He wishes her to stay, and he is willing to say so loudly. He has, in fact, put it in writing. She is to remain in the valley *a sufficient time*, in his phrase, to see the plant through."

"A sufficient time."

"He is a precise man. It means indefinitely."

"It means until she's dead."

"It means," said Odalie, "until she isn't needed, and perhaps not even then." She lifted a hand when he began to speak. "I know. I know what I'm saying. I'm an old woman and a coward, and I have buried three of those children with my own hands, and I would give my arm to be wrong. But I'm not wrong, and neither are you, and the frost is tonight."

He stood very still in her yard. A cold wind had begun to move through the bare apple boughs, with a dry whispering sound.

"What do you want me to do?" said Joren.

"I want you to keep her alive," said Odalie. "Whatever else happens. Whatever you have to say or not say. Keep her alive, and keep her *free*. Can you do that?"

He thought of a woman standing in a red-lit garden saying, *No one else decides for me.*

"I'll try," he said.

"That is all I ever asked of any of you," said Odalie, and turned back to her bees.

* * *

He had expected the garden to be empty. He had planned, in a vague, dishonorable way, to do the sheltering alone, quickly, before she arrived, and then perhaps to have a hard conversation with himself about what came next.

But when he came through the oak gate with a bundle of canvas on his shoulder and a coil of rope in his fist, she was already there.

She was standing at the edge of the bed in her brown apron with her hair pinned up and a lantern at her feet, and she had a pile of stakes at her side, and she was hammering one into the ground with a wooden mallet. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow. Her face was flushed with cold. She had cut a long length of oilcloth from somewhere and spread it out on the gravel, and beside it lay a stack of straw she must have carried from the bee-yard on her own back.

She was building a shelter.

She was building it exactly as he would have built it, a low frame of stakes with a ridge beam, a skirt of straw at the base, a roof of oilcloth, a gap at the top for the lantern's heat. She had done it from scratch, without being asked, with no one to tell her how. He stood in the gate with the canvas on his shoulder and felt something give way in his chest, a small quiet crumbling, like a bank slipping into a river.

She looked up. Her eyes met his across the garden. She did not smile.

"You're late," said Aveline.

"It's barely light."

"I know. I've been here an hour." She set down the mallet and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a smear of soil. "I read the sky. I'm not a countrywoman, but I can tell when the air goes flat. It's going to be a black frost, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Tonight."

"By midnight."

"Then we've an afternoon." She bent and picked up another stake. "I assumed you would have been here already. I came to start, and, well. I could not very well leave it."

"You are not to enter the garden before dawn."

"It is dawn."

"Near enough."

"Then it is near enough to forgive." She hammered. The mallet struck with a clear, hard, definite sound. "I am sorry to have started without you, Mr. Vael. But I found that I could not stand by while it was unprotected. It would have been like leaving a child on a doorstep."

He had no answer. He found that his mouth had gone dry.

*Like a child on a doorstep.* It was a thing he had thought, a hundred times, in the long cold watches. It was a thing he had never, in six years, said aloud to anyone.

He crossed the garden and set down his canvas. He knelt beside her on the gravel, and without a word began to lash the ridge beam to its uprights with the rope.

For a time, neither of them spoke. They worked. She drove the stakes and he tied the cross-pieces, and between them the frame took shape, low and sturdy and snug against the wind. She handed him things before he asked. He steadied things before she reached. When she held a beam in place with both arms, he moved in behind her to knot the rope, close enough that his shoulder grazed hers, and she did not shift away.

"Rooke," he said, finally, to the rope.

"Yes?"

"I'll agree to your thirty days."

The mallet stopped.

He kept his eyes on his hands. He drew the knot tight. "On conditions."

"I thought you might." She was very still. "Go on."

"One. No Vow." He heard his own voice come out flat and hard. "You will make no promise, no bargain, no oath, no pledge to the plant or the Circle or any person in this valley. Not in words, not in thought, not in any form you cannot be sure of. If anyone asks you for something, you will say no. If the plant asks, you will say no. If *I* ask, you will say no."

"If you ask."

"Especially if I ask."

She was quiet. Then, slowly: "That seems a strange condition for a man who wants me to stay."

"I don't want you to stay."

"No?"

"I want the plant to live. And I want you to live. They are not the same wish, and they do not both come true by the same road." He pulled the second knot. "Two. We use only what a physician would use. Soil, water, warmth, light, sample, measurement. Whatever you can write in a notebook. Nothing else."

"That's my method already."

"Then it is not a hardship."

"No." Her voice had softened. "It isn't. And three?"

He had not planned a third. He looked up, and found that she had turned to face him, and was sitting on her heels on the gravel with the mallet in her lap and the cold wind pulling at the loose strands of her hair. Her face was very near. He could see the pale freckles across the bridge of her nose and the dark circles under her eyes, and the sheer stubborn clarity of her gaze.

"Three," said Joren, and found that he could not finish the sentence.

"You'll tell me," said Aveline. "When you are ready. What it costs."

"Yes."

"All of it."

He swallowed. "All of it."

"Then I accept your conditions." She held out her hand, ink-stained, chapped, steady. "And I add a clause of my own."

He looked at the hand. He took it. It was small and cold and fierce, and her grip was dry and strong. "What clause?"

"The question a day. You answer, or you say plainly, *I cannot say.* You do not lie. You do not change the subject. You do not look at the window."

"And in return?"

"In return I don't push when you say you cannot." Her mouth curved, a very small, wry, tired curve. "I've been told I'm bad at that. I'll try."

"That is a fair bargain."

"It is a fair bargain," she agreed. She did not take her hand away. Neither did he. They knelt together on the cold stones with the wind rising and the sky going the color of lead, and the garden stood around them in its half-built shelter, and he thought: *This is how it starts.*

He knew it with absolute clarity. It was how it had begun before, with a bargain and a handshake and a small, brave, determined woman who said *I will try.* He had known the pattern for six years and he was walking into it with his eyes open.

He did not let go.

* * *

By afternoon the wind had a bite in it.

Aveline had not been warm since breakfast. She had been working, steadily, for nine hours, in a thin wool jacket and a brown apron, and the cold had worked its way past every layer to settle in her fingers and the arches of her feet. She did not mind. She was happy in a way she did not wish to examine too closely. She had a task, and a purpose, and a stubborn silent man at her elbow who handed her things before she asked.

She had noticed something. She was not sure when. He always stood to the windward.

It was only a small thing. When they carried the stakes to the east side of the bed, he took the outer position, between her and the gusts. When they stretched the oilcloth, he held the exposed corner. When they knelt to bank straw against the base of the frame, he knelt at the north end, where the wind came down off the ridge, and she was left in the lee of his broad back, working in a pocket of still air. He did not remark on it. She did not remark on it. But she saw it, and it unsettled her more than she cared to admit.

*He is shielding me,* she thought. *And he thinks I haven't noticed.*

It was absurd. It was also, in an obscure and dangerous way, the kindest thing anyone had done for her in years.

She did not say a word. She tied off her last knot, and checked it, and checked it again.

"The lantern," said Joren. He had straightened and was looking up at the sky. It had gone dark, a bruise-colored dark, though it was barely four in the afternoon. "It must go on the cross beam. If the frame holds enough heat, the buds should be safe. I'll need to get above it."

"Is there a ladder?"

"In the shed."

"I'll fetch it."

"I'll fetch it."

"Joren." She said it patiently. "You are going to be on it. I am going to hold it."

He looked at her for a moment, and then, to her surprise, his mouth twitched. "Very well."

The ladder was an old one, tall and narrow, with a split in the third rung. She set it up against the back of the frame and braced her boots against the foot of it with her full weight, and he climbed. She watched him go up, slow and careful, the long dark line of his back against the lowering sky. He hung the lantern on its hook at the peak. He drew the last flap of oilcloth over. He turned to come down, and the wind came over the wall in one huge indrawn gust.

It hit the oilcloth like a sail.

The whole frame heaved. The oilcloth snapped taut, and the ladder, with a man on it, lurched sideways. She saw him sway. She saw his boot slide from the wet rung. She saw him throw out an arm, catch nothing, and begin to fall.

She did not think. She dropped the ladder and went forward with both hands and caught him by the front of his coat.

It was like catching a falling wall. He weighed twice what she did. The momentum carried her backward two steps, boots skidding on the wet gravel, and for one terrible second she thought they would both go down. Then her heel struck the stone of the bench, and she locked her knees and hauled, and Joren came off the ladder and into her with a thud that drove the breath from both their lungs.

They stood tangled in the half-dark with his arms around her and her fists knotted in his coat.

She could feel his heart. It was going like a drum, hard and quick, against her breastbone. His chest was warm through the wool, and very solid. His breath came fast and hot against her temple, and one of his hands had landed in the small of her back, spread wide and shaking, holding her up as much as she held him. She smelled woodsmoke and iron and cold.

"Are you hurt?" she said, into his collar.

"No."

"You slipped."

"Yes."

"You, you nearly."

"Yes." His voice was low, scraped raw. "You caught me."

"Of course I caught you."

"You are half my weight."

"I am considerably more than half."

She felt, rather than heard, a ragged breath of laughter go through his chest. It shook them both. It went on for a moment, helplessly, and she found that she was laughing too, silently, with her forehead against his coat and her fists still locked in the wool, in the shocked giddy relief of near disaster. It was a ridiculous thing. It was the most absurd and the most intimate moment of her adult life, and she did not want it to end.

It ended.

They both realized it at the same time. The laughter stopped. His hand was still at her back. She could feel each of his fingers, individually, through her apron, and the warmth of his palm, and the very faint tremor in it. She became aware that she was holding him, that she was standing in the circle of his arms in the wind-lashed dusk with her face tipped up toward his, that she could see the pulse in his throat, that if she moved her head one inch.

"Rooke," said Joren, very quietly.

"Yes."

"I can't stand upright if you don't let go."

"Oh."

She let go. She stepped back so quickly that she struck the ladder with her heel, and it clanged against the frame, and he caught it with one hand, and neither of them said anything. Heat was pouring up her neck. She turned away and began, with great energy, to examine a knot that did not need examining.

"The lantern is lit," she said, to the knot.

"Yes."

"The frame is holding."

"Yes."

"We should check the straw on the north side."

"Yes."

"Joren."

"Yes?"

"Thank you for not falling."

A pause. Then, from behind her, in a voice so dry it nearly cracked: "It was a pleasure, Doctor."

She bit her lip, hard, to keep from smiling. It did not work.

* * *

Midnight came, and the frost with it.

They had both stayed. Neither had suggested it. Around ten the temperature had begun to plummet, and by eleven the sky was black and clear and burning with stars, and the oilcloth crackled when she touched it. She had wrapped herself in a heavy blanket Joren had brought from the lodge, and sat on the stone bench with her notebook open on her knee. He had taken the other end of the bench, a careful yard away, with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out before him.

They did not talk much. There was no need. The garden around them was white. Every blade, every twig, every stone of the paths had grown a coat of fine, hard, glittering crystal, so that in the starlight the whole enclosure looked like a place carved out of salt. The pear trees stood stiff and silver. The fountain wore a crown of ice. And in the center, under its low roof of oilcloth, glowing faintly through the seams, the plant sat warm and alive.

She watched it for a long time. Her fingers hurt. Her toes had stopped hurting some while ago, which she knew was not a good sign.

"It's holding," said Joren.

"Is it?"

"Look at the frame."

She looked. On the outside of the shelter, the frost lay thick, a rind of white. But along the straw skirt, where the heat of the lantern leaked out, there was a clear dark line, a hand's breadth wide, where the ice had melted. The frame was breathing. The buds inside, as far as she could tell, were quiet and unharmed.

She let out a long breath. It went up in a cloud.

"One day," said Aveline.

She had not meant to say it aloud. But the silence was so deep, and the stars so bright, and the warmth of the lantern on her face so oddly like a promise, that the words came by themselves.

There was a pause. A very small one.

"Twenty-nine left," said Joren.

She turned her head. He was not looking at her. He was looking up at the sky, at the great cold wheel of the stars, with his hands loose in his lap and the lantern light laying a thin gold edge along his profile. He looked tired. He looked, she thought, a little less haunted than he had that morning.

He had said *left*. He had not said *Only*. He had not said *then you go*.

She turned back to the plant, and her chest was strangely light. She did not write anything in her notebook. She sat with her cold hands tucked into the blanket and watched the frost shimmer and the lantern burn, and somewhere on the other end of the bench a man she barely knew breathed slowly in the dark, a yard away, keeping watch with her.

It was, she thought, the first night in years that she had not felt alone.

She was careful not to say so.

Out in the garden, under the oilcloth and the glittering ice, one single bud on the lowest branch trembled and opened a fraction wider. A sliver of crimson showed in the seam, bright as a drop of blood on snow, and held there in the cold, and did not close.