Tonight she is not asking questions. She has her arms wrapped around herself and she looks past me into the trees with the expression of a child who has heard something she shouldn't have and is trying to determine what to do with it.
"What did you hear?" I say.
She looks at me. "My father and the other trader. On the wagon last night." A pause. "They were talking about the white deer. The big one, the one that stays near the old stone." She means the sacred stag. "They have a buyer. Someone in Vhoig. They need the whole animal — alive for transport."
The cold that moves through me is not caused by the temperature.
"When," I say.
"Next stop. Two weeks."
I look at the forest behind her. The imbalance I have been managing for months, the accelerating decay of the barrier, the corrupted animals ranging further each week. I have been attributing this to general pressure — decades of careless extraction. But if Bram's traders have been working toward the white stag deliberately, then the timeline I've been calculating is wrong.
Everything is much further along than I thought.
"Don't tell your father you told me," I say.
"I know," Beth says, with the dignity of someone that has already worked this out. "Are you going to fix it?"
I think of Sybil on the ravine edge. Her heart going fast under my arm. The door I closed this afternoon.
"Yes," I say. "I'm going to fix it."
I go back into the trees.
7
SYBIL
Ifind the poisoned trees on a Tuesday. Six of them — the oldest row, the ones my father planted the year I was born. Deliberate. Knowledgeable. Celia Mercer's handiwork.
I confront her in the market square. She denies it with that practiced smile, calls Rolin mypetin front of the guild wives. I call her jealous. She calls me a tragic heroine playing house with a monster. I walk away before I do something I'll regret.
The storm breaks an hour later. I end up past the north boundary without meaning to — soaked, furious, lost.
I don't mean to go into the forest. I mean to go back to the orchard, check the remaining trees, catalogue the damage with the cold practicality I've been performing all morning. But the rain comes in hard and fast and I'm already past the orchard's north boundary before I notice, walking through the anger the way you walk through bad weather.
The forest closes in around me. It's different in the rain. The canopy catches most of it but lets through a cold dripping curtain that soaks through my coat within minutes, and the sound is everywhere, a dense white noise that makes the world feel very small and very immediate.
I stop. I am wet, furious, and deeply lost.
"You went past the tree line."
I spin around. Rolin is standing ten feet away in the rain like it's not happening to him, which is deeply unfair. His silver hair is dark with water. His expression is somewhere between irritated and something else I can't immediately name.
"I know," I say.
"I told you not to."
"I know that too." A pause. "I'm having a bad day."
He stops for a long moment. "Come on," he says.
The cabin is warm and dry and smells like woodsmoke and dried herbs and something underneath that is just — him, some quality of the space he inhabits that I've been carefully not thinking about for two weeks.
He puts a heavy blanket around my shoulders without asking and then moves to the hearth to build the fire higher, and I sit in the chair nearest the heat and watch him, and something about the combination of anger and cold and the exhaustion of performing strength all day makes my defenses significantly less operational than usual.
"She poisoned the north row," I say. "The old stock. My father planted those trees the year I was born."
