By the end of the first week of the thirty days, Aveline had a schedule.

She had always been a woman of schedules. At the Academy she had kept a ledger of her hours in three colors of ink, and Corwin had teased her for it, fondly, in the days when he still teased her fondly. *Our Aveline would catalogue the sunrise if you gave her a pen,* he used to say. She had laughed then. She did not laugh at the memory now. But she kept the habit, because habits were the one thing that no one could steal.

The schedule ran like this. She rose at five, in the dark, and lit her lamp above the bakery and ate a heel of bread and a spoonful of honey while she reviewed the previous day's notes. At six she walked up the hill. At half past six, as the first gray crept over the ridge, she let herself through the oak gate and found Joren already there, always already there, standing at the edge of the shelter with a mug in each hand.

He never said good morning. He handed her the mug. It was tea, mild and sweet and very hot, a good deal gentler than she would have expected from a man who looked as though he drank it black, and by the second morning she had stopped being able to tell whether she liked it or simply needed it.

Then they worked.

They worked in a rhythm so quickly established that it unsettled her. She measured, and he recorded. She dug, and he lifted. She said *the lantern* and the lantern was in her hand. She said *more straw on the north side* and he was already carrying it. On the third day she realized that she had stopped looking behind her when she held out her hand for a tool, because she knew it would be there, and she stood for a moment in the cold with her hand in the air and a strange, tight, helpless feeling in her chest.

*Habits,* she told herself. *It is a habit. Nothing else.*

He stopped standing on the wall on the fourth day. She noticed only afterward, when it occurred to her that she had not seen him up there in some time. He had moved down to the gravel without comment. He stood close enough that she could hear his breathing, and when she looked up from a sample she often found his eyes on her, pale and unreadable in the early light, before he turned them away.

She did not mention it. She wrote *Subject V. no longer observing from height; cause unknown* in her notebook, and then, because that seemed ridiculous, she crossed it out.

* * *

On the eighth day they quarreled about ash.

It began, as most of their quarrels began, with an excess of competence on both sides. She had been studying the soil around the plant, which was extraordinary, deep and loose and dark, and which she was convinced would respond to a green manure of crushed clover and vetch. She had mixed a small trial batch the night before and brought it up the hill in a bucket, steaming gently in the cold, with a note of triumph.

Joren looked at the bucket. Then he looked at her. Then he said, in the tone of a man being reasonable under provocation, "No."

"You haven't heard my reasoning."

"I have heard the word *vetch*."

"It's a nitrogen fixer."

"It's a weed."

"It is a weed *because* it fixes nitrogen." She set down the bucket. "The soil in this bed has been dressed with wood ash every autumn for, how long? Twelve years? Twenty? Ash raises the alkalinity. It's lovely for fruit trees. It is not necessarily lovely for a plant with a delicate root system and a pH tolerance I do not yet understand."

"The soil has been dressed with ash for two hundred years."

"That is not an argument."

"It is the only one I need." He had folded his arms. He was frowning at her with an expression so nakedly stubborn that she had to bite the inside of her cheek. "My mother dressed it. And her mother. They did it every year after the first frost, and the plant lived. I will not experiment on the roots of the last Crimson Bloom with a bucket of clover porridge."

"It is not porridge. It is a carefully calibrated, fermented, green mulch."

"It smells like a sheep."

"It smells like *nitrogen.*"

"It smells like a sheep, Rooke."

She stared at him. He stared back. A muscle was working at the corner of his mouth, and she realized, with a small cold shock of delight, that he was trying very hard not to laugh.

"I propose a trial," she said, with dignity.

"No."

"Two plots. Half the bed on your ash, half on my mulch. We measure root growth, leaf color, bud count. In four days, we compare."

"You'll be wrong."

"Then you will have the pleasure of saying so."

"I will not have a trial on the main bed."

"There is a spare plot behind the shed. The soil is the same. I tested it. You must have noticed."

He had, she saw. He had known about the spare plot all along, and had been waiting to see if she would find it. Something warm turned over in her. She did not know what to do with it, so she lifted her chin and said, "Well?"

For a long moment he regarded her. Then, with a deep, long-suffering sigh, he unfolded his arms and picked up the bucket.

"Show me where."

They dug the plots side by side. He worked with a speed and economy that she could only admire, turning the earth in clean, deep strokes, and as he worked he began to talk, grudgingly, about ash. He knew a surprising amount. He knew how long it should steep, how finely it should be sieved, how much to scatter in the first week and how much in the second. He knew the names of trace minerals she had only read about in manuals. He knew that wood from the valley's apple trees gave a milder ash than wood from its oaks, and that his mother had always mixed the two. He knew that the soil, if you held it in your palm and breathed on it, would tell you its temper by its smell.

"You could write a treatise," she said.

"I could not."

"You could. You have forty pages of practice, all in your head."

"I can't write." He said it bluntly, to the spade. "Not well. My father's hand was beautiful. Mine is not. My mother used to say that I wrote like a hen walking through ink."

"That's a shame."

"It is a mercy. No one reads what I say."

"I would read it."

His spade stopped. He did not look up. Then, with careful nonchalance, he drove it back into the earth and said, "You can have the day's question."

She was caught off guard. It was only the third time he had volunteered. She stood in the cold with her hands full of loam and tried to think of something that mattered, something that would not break the moment, and found herself saying, quite softly, "Who taught you to garden?"

"My mother."

The words came quicker than any answer he had given her. They came out almost warm, as if they had been waiting. His face changed, softened, a fraction, and he went on digging, but there was something loosened in his shoulders.

"She was the warden's wife," he said. "She did not hold the title. But she kept the garden, and the old plant, long before my father did anything but carry water. She taught me to turn the soil with my bare hands. To smell it. To know when it was ready." He turned a clod. "She said a good gardener is only a person who has learned to be patient with something that does not owe them anything."

"That's lovely."

"She said many things." He drove the spade down. "She was a difficult woman. She would have liked you."

Aveline could not speak for a moment. She bent over her bucket, and found that she was smiling, and that her eyes stung.

* * *

On the ninth day she cut her hand.

It was a stupid accident. She had been reaching under the frame to adjust a stake and had caught the heel of her palm on a rusted iron peg left by some earlier hand, an old nail of a thing, crooked and brown. It was not deep. But it was dirty, and it bled with a bright, spreading welling that seemed to go on and on, and she said, "Oh, blast," in a voice more annoyed than frightened, and pulled her hand free.

She was still looking at it when Joren reached her.

She had not heard him come. He had been on the far side of the bed with a bucket, and then he was simply there, one big hand clamped around her wrist and the other already tearing a strip from the hem of his shirt. His face was white. His eyes were fixed on her palm with an expression she had no name for. It was the look of a man who had watched blood come from this soil before.

"It's nothing," she said. "A scratch."

"It is iron. It is old."

"I will wash it. I have spirit in the bag."

"Sit."

"Joren."

"*Sit,* Rooke."

She sat. She was so surprised that she did it. He knelt in front of her on the gravel and turned her hand palm up in his, and she saw that he was shaking, a fine, ferocious tremor that ran from his shoulder into his fingers. He poured cold water over the cut from the flask at his hip. He washed away the blood. He examined the wound with a ferocity of attention that was almost comic, turning her hand this way and that in the gray light, and then he reached for the spirit and she took it, and he took it back, and cleaned the cut himself.

It stung like fury. She hissed through her teeth.

"Sorry," said Joren. His voice was rough.

"It's all right."

"I'm sorry. It must."

"It's all right. It is an ordinary wound. I have had worse from a rose."

He did not answer. He took the strip of linen from his lap and began to bind her hand. He did it badly. He did it, in fact, like a man tying a root-ball for transplanting, with a thick quick knot at the wrist and a great deal of unnecessary wrapping, and she watched his broad scarred fingers working over her palm with a feeling she could neither name nor stop.

His hands were gentle. That was the difficulty. They were so large and so rough, and yet when they touched her skin they were as careful as breath. She felt every callus on every finger. She felt the warmth of his thumb pressing the dressing flat. She felt her pulse, absurdly loud, in the cut, in the wrist, in the hollow of her throat.

"There," he said.

He did not let go.

* * *

Joren knew that he should.

He had finished. The bandage was in place, tied, tidy, absurdly thick. There was no further reason to hold her hand, no pretext, no medical necessity. He knelt on the cold gravel with her palm resting in both of his and knew with perfect clarity that the correct, decent, sane thing to do was to release it and stand up and put the width of the garden between them.

He did not.

She did not pull away. That was the other fact. She sat on the stone bench with her hand in his and her eyes lowered, her lashes casting small shadows on her cheeks. A strand of hair had come loose from her pins and blown across her mouth, and she had not brushed it away. She was breathing very quietly, and very evenly, in the manner of someone taking great care to do so. He realized he had forgotten how.

It had been a long time since anyone had let him touch them. Six years. He had forgotten the warmth of it, that simple fact of skin on skin, the way it spread up the arm and into the chest like drink. He had forgotten what it did to the room, to the air, to the whole careful structure of the day. It made everything very close and very bright. It made him aware, with a terrible clean clarity, of every inch of the space between his body and hers.

*I want to be near her.*

It arrived whole. It did not ask permission. It was not a new thought, he understood, only a newly named one. It had been present since the gate, since the cold gray morning when she had come striding into his garden with her chin up and her notebook in her fist. He had been calling it other things. Irritation. Duty. Anxiety for the plant. But it was none of those, and he was too tired and too honest to pretend any longer.

*I want to be near her, and I am going to hurt her.*

He lifted his eyes.

She was looking at him. When he moved, she moved, and their glances met in the thin gray light, and neither of them smiled. Her face was open. It was a plain, clever, tired face, and just then it was so unguarded, so unprepared, that he felt something in him lurch painfully toward it, like a man reaching for a rope.

"Joren," she said. It was barely a breath.

"Yes."

"It's a very large bandage."

He stared at her. Then, to his own astonishment, he heard himself say, "I tied it like a root-ball."

"I noticed."

"I do not usually bind hands."

"It is the first thing you have ever bound that did not hold a plant, I think." Her mouth was trembling at the corner. "I think you may have invented a new surgical technique. The Gardener's Knot."

He laughed.

It came out of him quite without warning, a short, startled, genuine bark, and it was followed by another, and another, until he was laughing in earnest, there on his knees on the gravel with her hand in both of his. It was an unfamiliar sound. It was low and rusty and a little cracked, like a gate that had not been opened in years, and it hurt his chest in a way that was almost pleasure. He saw her face change. He saw her eyes widen, and soften, and begin to shine.

She was looking at him as if he were something she had not expected to find.

"You've a very good laugh," said Aveline, softly.

"I have not got one."

"You do. It was hiding."

The laughter died slowly. It left behind a silence so full, so warm and so close, that he could hear the frost ticking in the branches and the small dry sound of the lantern wick. She had not taken her hand away. He had not let go. Her gaze had drifted, he saw, a fraction lower than his eyes, to his mouth, and held there, and he felt his breath stop altogether.

"Mr. Vael!"

They flew apart.

It was Pip, barreling through the gate with a flapping coat and a face scarlet from running, shouting with a boy's total disregard for dignity. "Mr. Vael! Warden! The Circle's coming! The whole Circle! Elder Brannock sent me ahead, he said they're bringing, they're bringing the *registrar*, and they want to see the plant and the lady, and they're on the lane, they're nearly here, and Mum says to tell you she's put the kettle on!"

Aveline had risen so fast she nearly overturned the bench. Joren was on his feet, though he could not recall standing. He was aware that his ears were burning, that she had gone pink to the roots of her hair, that her bandaged hand was clutched against her chest as if she were hiding contraband. Pip looked from one to the other with enormous, innocent, dawning eyes.

"Was I interrupting?" said Pip.

"No," said Joren.

"Certainly not," said Aveline.

They had spoken together. It was too fast, too firm, and too identical. Pip's gaze traveled slowly to the bandage, and from there to the gravel, and from there to Joren's face, and a look of enormous satisfaction crept across his freckles.

"Right," said Pip. "I'll tell them you're, er, tending the plant."

"Pip."

"Yes, Warden?"

"Go away."

Pip went, whooping softly under his breath. The oak gate banged. The garden fell silent, and Joren stood in the cold light with his hands at his sides and did not look at the woman three feet away.

"Well," said Aveline, with a heroic effort at composure. "I suppose we had better look respectable."

"Yes."

"I'll, I'll fetch the notebook."

"Yes."

She went. He listened to her boots recede across the gravel, quick and light, and he put both hands over his face and stood very still in the center of the path, and thought, with an odd detached calm, *You are in a great deal of trouble.*

* * *

The Circle came, and was shown the plant, and was gratified.

It was an uncomfortable hour. Five of them in their dark coats, and Elder Brannock stiff as a heron, and the registrar, a fat, genial, nervous man in a green waistcoat, who kept saying *remarkable* and *astonishing* and sweating in the cold. Aveline showed them the soil charts. She showed them the shelter and the lanterns. She showed them the buds, which had swelled in a week to the size of walnuts, and glowed faintly at the seams, and were, as far as any of them could tell, thriving. Joren stood at the back with his arms folded and said nothing, and tried not to watch the way she lifted her bandaged hand to point at things. She was very good. She spoke with a calm and exact authority that silenced even Brannock. She did not mention the touch, or the red, or the thing none of them would name.

And at the end of it, when they had gone, trailing down the hill in a long murmuring line, she turned to him with her notebook pressed to her breastbone and her eyes very bright and said, "Well?"

"You were magnificent."

It came out before he could stop it. She blinked. Color rose in her face, slowly, from throat to hairline, and she looked down at her notebook and then up at him, and smiled, shyly, a small, astonished, lopsided smile that cut through him like a blade.

"Thank you," she said.

"It's true."

"Well." She cleared her throat. "I should go. The soil trial. I'll need to check the plots, and then there's, there is a good deal of, of..."

"Rooke."

"Yes?"

"Go home. Rest your hand."

"It's only a cut."

"It's a cut from a rusted nail in the soil of a valley that has no physician but you. Go home."

She went. She went with obvious reluctance, glancing back twice at the gate. He watched her out of sight.

* * *

He could not sleep.

He lay on his cot in the watch lodge, fully dressed, with his left hand lying open on the blanket, and looked at the faint paleness of his palm in the dark. He could still feel her. It was ridiculous. A woman's hand, in the cold, for perhaps two minutes. But the feel of it had gone into him like a brand. He flexed his fingers and felt the memory of her pulse, the warmth of her skin, the small, brave, tremulous quiver.

*Remember why,* he told himself.

He was good at it. He had practiced for six years. He lay quite still and made himself see it, deliberately, in detail, the way a man presses on a bruise. The long cold hours by the bedside. The shawl folded over his arm. The hand that had once been warm, and then was not. The bell in the valley tolling, and tolling, and tolling, and no one coming to make it stop.

He saw it all. He made himself.

And then, because he was tired, and because it was the middle of the night, and because there was no one in the dark to see, he let himself turn his head and look through the window at the garden.

The wall was black. The pear trees were black. But above the wall, over the dark bulk of the shelter, he could see a very faint pale shimmer, low and warm and rose-colored, like the first blush of a dawn that had lost its way.

The buds were glowing.

Not red. Not the deep wine-dark crimson of the morning in front of the village. A soft, delicate, tender pink, the color of the inside of a shell, coming from the whole bed at once. And as he watched, he saw that the glow was not even. It was brightest on the side nearest the lodge. It leaned. It leaned through the dark, through the wall and the pear branches and the cold, toward the narrow window where he lay.

Toward him.

He turned over on his side and put the blanket over his head, like a boy, and lay there with his heart beating in his throat and the faint rosy light pressing against his closed eyes.

*Remember why,* he said, again, more softly, to the dark.

It did not help. It did not help at all.