There were four things Aveline Rooke knew about the bearers of Crest Valley, and she knew them the way she knew her own bad habits, by the weight of them.

One. There had been three, in Joren's lifetime.

Two. They had not served together.

Three. They were gone.

Four. A man who had gone white to the lips at the sound of the word, who had knelt in the dust and bandaged her hand like a root-ball and then shut himself in a cold lodge for the rest of the night, did not mourn them lightly.

She laid the four facts out on a clean page of her notebook on the morning of the tenth day, in a column, the way she laid out everything. She looked at them for a long time. They did not add up to a conclusion. They added up to a silence, a shape the size and weight of a coffin, that nobody in the valley would speak of. She had made a bargain. She had said, *I won't push when you say you cannot.* She had meant it, and she intended to keep it.

But she had also said that she was a scientist, and a scientist who stopped asking questions because the answers were inconvenient was no better than the man who had stolen her name.

*There is a difference,* she told herself, *between pushing a man and reading a book.*

She dressed and went down the stair.

* * *

"The remembrance?" said Pip.

He was sitting on the baker's back step with a heel of bread in one fist, swinging his boots against the stone. It was barely seven. The square was white with rime, and the chestnut tree stood bare and silver against a sky the color of weak tea. Aveline had caught him on his way up the hill, which was cheating, she knew, but the boy had no guile in him at all, and she had decided to be merciful to her own conscience on the grounds that she would be gentle with the answers.

"The autumn festival," she said. "You mentioned it. A week ago, in the lane. You said the village keeps something, when the plant blooms."

"Oh." He frowned. "Did I?"

"You said there was a, I think the word was *lantern walk.*"

"The lantern walk is for the dead." He said it plainly, with the unselfconscious brightness of a child who has grown up with death as a neighbor. "We do it when the Crimson Bloom opens. All the families go up to the burying ground with a candle and walk round it three times and say the names. My mum says it's so they know they weren't forgotten."

"And when was the last one?"

"Before I was born."

"Before you were born?"

"Maybe. I was a baby, anyway. I don't remember." Pip crammed a piece of bread into his mouth and spoke round it. "They didn't do it the last time, because it didn't bloom. The warden said there wasn't any point. He said you can't have a remembrance if nobody's sure what you're remembering." He swallowed. "He doesn't like it. He doesn't ever go. He stands at the gate and everyone walks past him, and he doesn't look at anybody."

Aveline sat down on the step beside him. It was cold through her skirt.

"Pip," she said, gently. "Where is the burying ground?"

The boy's face went still. It was an astonishing thing to see, as if a lamp had been blown out behind his eyes. He looked at his bread. He looked at the white square. Then he said, in a very small voice, "It's up behind the garden. But it's, it isn't for me to say, Doctor. I'm not allowed."

"I understand."

"I'd tell you. Only the warden would be."

"I understand," said Aveline again, and put a hand on his shoulder, and felt the thin bones under the coat. "That's a good answer. Thank you."

She stayed with him a minute longer, until the last of the bread was gone. Then she went on up the hill, not to the garden gate but past it, along a narrow path that wound toward the hall of the Hearth Circle, where there were books.

* * *

The Hall was a long, low, hump-roofed building of dark stone, set a little apart from the village on a rise of land. It had stood, she judged, for three hundred years. The door was heavy oak studded with iron nails. The windows were narrow, deep-set, and glazed with thick green glass that turned the morning to the color of pond water. Inside it smelled of woodsmoke, wax, and ancient damp.

Elder Brannock received her in a high-ceilinged room full of cold. He sat behind a desk the size of a barge, in a chair with a carved back, with his long gray fingers steepled in front of his white moustache. A single candle burned at his elbow. The fire in the grate was out.

"Doctor Rooke," he said. "This is unexpected."

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Elder."

"You are not disturbing. It is merely irregular." His eyes were pale and cool, with a faint pink rim, and she felt them assess her from head to boots. "I take it you are not here to discuss the pH of the soil."

"No."

"Then?"

She had rehearsed it. She had planned a careful, graceful, indirect approach, a request for a few reference volumes, a polite curiosity about local history. She looked at his long cold face and discarded it. Something told her that this was a man who could smell a flinch.

"I would like to see the garden's records," said Aveline. "All of them. The growth logs. The prior caretakers' notes. Anything that was written down about the Crimson Bloom, by anyone, at any time."

There was a pause. A very long one.

"That is a considerable request," said Brannock.

"It is a considerable plant."

"The records of the garden are the property of the Circle. They are not, by custom, shown to outsiders."

"I am not an outsider. I am the Circle's own physician." She kept her voice level. "I am the person you asked to save the plant. I cannot do that without knowing everything that has been done to it. My predecessors may have left observations that would save me weeks of work. Or they may have made errors that I could avoid. Either way, I need it."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I will go on working with half the picture," said Aveline, "and in thirty days, if I am wrong, I will tell the valley that the Circle kept the other half from me."

His eyebrows rose a quarter inch. It was the first sign of life she had seen in his face.

"That is a threat," said Brannock.

"It is a statement of fact."

"You are very direct."

"I have been told it's my chief defect."

For a moment she thought she had overreached. She saw his long lip twitch, and his hands unsteeple, and she braced herself for dismissal. Then, with the air of a man conceding a point in a game of chess, he rose, took the candle from the desk, and went to a tall iron-bound cabinet at the far end of the room. He selected a key from his belt. He unlocked it with a soft, deliberate click.

"I have not had cause to open this in some years," he said.

"I understand."

"You do not." He did not turn. "But you will." He drew out a book.

It was large, bound in cracked brown leather, the corners worn smooth by generations of hands. It smelled of damp and age. He laid it on the desk before her with great care, as one lays a sleeping child in a cradle, and stepped back.

"The Garden Ledger," he said. "Kept by the wardens of Crest Valley, and by their wives, and by the physicians they could find. It begins in the year the valley was settled. It ends in the year, well. It ends." His mouth tightened. "You may read it here. You may not remove it. You may not copy more than a page at a time. If anyone asks, I did not show you."

"Why are you showing me?"

He regarded her for a moment with those pale, pink-rimmed eyes.

"Because I have sat in this chair for forty years," said Elder Brannock, "and I have buried a good many of my friends' children. I would like, once before I die, to see someone try something *clever.*"

He left her alone with the candle.

* * *

She read for three hours.

It was slow work. The ledger was written in a dozen hands, over three centuries, in an ink that ranged from rust-brown to ash-gray to a thin, pale violet that had nearly faded from the page. The early entries were brief and practical: dates of sowing, notes of weather, the names of those who tended. *Watered at dawn. Pruned the east limb. A late frost, the buds were spared.* Later entries grew longer. She found herself slowing, tracing the shifts of handwriting, the changes in tone. In one year the entries were sparse and anxious. In another they bloomed into long passages of joy. She read of springs when the plant had flowered so thickly that the whole valley smelled of honey and pepper, and children were let out of school to see it. She read of winters when it had come within a breath of death.

And she read the names.

They appeared in the margins. They were not part of the ordinary record, but written beside it, in a different hand, in a darker ink, as if by someone who did not quite want to be seen writing. Each one was a single line. A name, and a date, and a short phrase.

*Aldric Pell. Sworn at the spring. Gave freely.*

*Ysolde Marne. Sworn at the autumn. Gave freely.*

*Maelis Orn.*

That was all. The third had no phrase. The ink was blotted, a heavy, dark, ragged mark, as if the pen had been pressed down hard and held there. The entry stopped, and the next line, in a different hand, began a new matter altogether.

She sat very still.

*Maelis.* She had never heard the name. She turned it over in her mind, soft, quick, a woman's name, a name that sounded like a bell rung far off. She did not know why it hurt. She only knew that it did, and that she was sitting in a cold room with a dead woman's name under her fingertip and a strange, dreadful tenderness rising in her chest.

*Gave freely.*

She flipped back. She went through the pages again, slowly, and found that the phrase recurred. *Gave freely. Gave freely. Gave freely.* It appeared in every entry for every bearer, down the generations, a litany. And the more she read it, the odder it seemed. Nobody wrote *freely* unless there was some question about it.

She turned the page. And stopped.

There was a drawing.

It had been made with a fine pen, with great skill, in the careful hand of someone who loved the thing they were drawing. It showed a cross-section of the plant. It showed the trunk, and the soil line, and beneath it, spreading in two thick curving lines, the roots. A single crown, dividing into two. One root was drawn thick and glossy, with a dense fringe of feeders. The other was thinner, paler, bare.

She knew it at once. She had sketched it herself, eleven days ago, in the gray morning with her hands full of dirt.

*Not a malformation,* she thought. *It was never a malformation. Someone knew about this.*

Beside the sketch ran a column of notes, in a spidery brown hand. She leaned close and read by the guttering candle.

*Two crowns. One fed. One not.*

*The old way feeds only the one. It has always been so. It has always held.*

*But the plant will not thrive on one alone. It endures. It does not bloom.*

And lower, much lower, squeezed into the very bottom corner of the page, in a smaller, quicker, more agitated hand, a line that had been struck through with a single hard stroke of the pen. She tilted the ledger to the light. She could just make it out under the scratch.

*Divided, it is not enough. Alone, it breaks.*

She stared at it.

She did not understand it. She understood only that it was an answer to something, that someone had stood in this room, three hundred years ago or thirty, and written down a truth and then thought better of it, and cut it out. The line had the look of a thing that had been *meant* to be hidden. A frightened line. An ashamed one.

*Divided, it is not enough. Alone, it breaks.*

She took out her pencil. With a hand that was not quite steady, she copied it onto a scrap of paper. Then she copied the sketch, with the roots, and the three names, and the blotted ink. She was not supposed to take more than a page. She took exactly one.

When she looked up, the window had gone dark.

* * *

She found him behind the lodge, splitting wood.

It was late afternoon. The light had gone low and amber, and the air smelled of snow and resin. He had taken off his coat and hung it on a nail, and stood in his shirtsleeves in the chopping yard with an axe in his hands, working through a pile of ash logs with the steady, merciless rhythm of a man who was not thinking about wood. Each stroke rang off the wall. Each log split clean in two and fell in a spray of white splinters. His shirt was wet with sweat. In the cold, steam rose from his shoulders.

She stood at the corner of the lodge and watched for a minute without being seen. She was holding the ledger page in her hand. She had meant to wait until she was calm.

She was not calm.

"Joren."

The axe came down. Stopped. He did not turn. Then, slowly, he lowered the head to the ground and straightened, one hand pressed to the small of his back, and looked at her over his shoulder.

"Rooke."

"I went to the Hall."

"I know." His voice was quiet. "Pip told me."

"I read the ledger."

He closed his eyes.

She stepped forward, into the yard, and held out the page. He did not take it. He stood with his eyes shut and his chest rising and falling and the axe leaning against his thigh, and she saw the muscle jump in his jaw.

"I didn't mean to go behind you," said Aveline. "I want you to know that. I meant to ask, and I did not. I should have. But I couldn't. Every time I thought of it, you went so white." She drew a breath. "I am sorry. I am not sorry I looked."

"I know."

"There are three names."

"Yes."

"Aldric Pell. Ysolde Marne. Maelis Orn." She had not meant to say the last one aloud. It came out soft. She saw him flinch, a small, fine, helpless tremor that ran down his whole body, and she nearly stopped. She did not. "And every entry says, *gave freely.* Except the last."

"Aveline."

"I need to ask you a question."

"Not today."

"It is the question for today. You said I might."

"I said I might answer, or say I could not." He opened his eyes. They were gray and bright and terribly tired. "Then I can't."

"Joren." She heard her voice crack. "How did they die?"

The word fell into the yard like a stone into deep water. It seemed to ring.

She watched his face. She watched it go through everything. She saw anger first, a swift, hard surge, and then something worse beneath it, a bottomless, aching fear, and last of all a look she knew very well, because she had worn it herself in the Academy corridor, the look of a person who has been asked to reopen a wound in public.

He bent. He set the axe against the woodpile, very gently, as though it might wake something. He turned.

"There are no questions today," he said.

"You said you would refuse. You did not say you would, you said, *I cannot say.* That's the arrangement. You have to say it."

"I have said it."

"You've said *no questions.* That is not the same."

"It is the same today."

"Joren!"

He went past her. He did not touch her. He walked straight across the yard, stiff-backed, to the lodge door, and pushed it open, and stepped inside. She went after him. She was five paces behind, ink-stained hand outstretched with the ledger page, when the door swung shut in her face.

The latch dropped.

She stood on the step. The wood was rough and gray beneath her fingers. She had not meant to touch it. She had lifted her hand, and it was simply there, palm flat against the grain, as though she could feel through it the pulse of the man on the other side.

"Joren," she said, to the door.

Silence.

"That was unfair."

Nothing.

"I did not ask you to tell me everything. I asked how. I asked how they, I wanted to *understand.*" She was crying a little, she found, angrily, without noise, and she wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "You told me there was a cost. You told me three people had paid it. You can't expect me to stand here and pretend I haven't done the arithmetic."

Nothing. A wind came round the corner of the lodge, thin and bitter, and flapped the hem of her apron.

She waited. It seemed a long time. The light shifted, from amber to rose to cold gray blue. And somewhere in the middle of it she became aware of a sound that was no sound, a silence with a texture, a listening quality, the quiet of a person standing very still on the other side of a thick door.

The chopping had not resumed.

He was not at the stove. He was not at the window. She knew it as certainly as she knew her own pulse. He had not moved from the threshold. He was standing in the dark of the lodge, a foot from her, with the oak between them and his forehead, she would have sworn it, almost against the wood.

She let her palm slide down the door. She rested her cheek, briefly, against the cold plank, as if she could press an apology through it.

Then she straightened. She wiped her face. She looked down at the ledger page in her hand, the three names, the sketch, the crossed-out line, and after a moment, with great care, she folded it once, and laid it on the doorstep, and put a small flat stone on it to keep it from the wind.

She took out her pencil. She wrote four words on the back of the page, in her small, upright hand.

*When you are ready.*

Then she turned and walked away across the yard, with her shoulders back and her chin high, and did not look round.

* * *

Odalie was waiting at the end of the lane.

She stood alone in the dusk with her shawl drawn tight and her hands folded, small and dark against the blue snow, as though she had been there a long time. There was no basket on her arm. There was no lantern. She had the look of a woman who had come out into the cold for one purpose and would not be moved from it.

"Mistress Fenn," said Aveline. Her voice was thick. "I did not expect."

"No." The old woman's eyes went over her face, and what they found there made her mouth soften. "You've been crying."

"It's the cold."

"Of course it is." Odalie came forward and, without asking, took Aveline's bandaged hand in both her own. They were small hands, warm and dry and hard as roots. "I saw you go in to the Hall. I saw you go up to the lodge. I thought, she has found something, and she will want somebody to tell her the rest of it. And then I thought, no. It is not mine to tell. Not the whole of it."

"You said that before."

"I did." Odalie squeezed her fingers. "But there are things that are better shown than told. And there is one that I think he will not be able to say, whatever he intends."

"What?"

"Come with me in the morning. Early. Before he is awake, if you can bear it." The old woman's gaze was steady and sad and very kind. "I will show you where they are. And then, if he wishes, he can tell you the rest himself."

Aveline's heart gave a slow, heavy thump.

"The burying ground," she said.

"Yes."

"Pip said it was forbidden."

"Pip is a good boy who knows his place." Odalie let go her hand. "I do not. Be at my gate at first light."

She turned and went, a small shape in a gray shawl, up the dim lane toward the cottage, and was swallowed by the dusk.

Aveline stood alone with the dark coming down. Behind her, far up the hill, a single light had kindled in the lodge window. She did not turn to look at it. She walked on, down to the village, down to the bakery stair and her narrow room, with the cold at her back and her fist closed around the edge of her sleeve, and she did not look back once.

But she felt it. All the way down the hill, she felt it, a pale rose shimmer from the garden behind her, faint as a breath on glass, following her through the dark.