I wipe my face with the back of my hand and square my shoulders and look at this impossible, lonely man in his impossible, quiet home in the forest, and make a decision I know I'll be thinking about for a long time.
"Alright," I say. "Show me what we're working with."
6
ROLIN
Teaching her is not the same as teaching anyone else.
Most people, when instructed, perform the task and wait to be told what comes next. Sybil performs the task and then immediately begins building a theory about why it works, and then she tests the theory, and then she finds the edge case where the theory breaks down and brings it to me with a specific expression, showing she is not asking permission to have an opinion. She is exhausting. She is also the fastest study I have encountered in sixty years of managing this forest, which I do not tell her because she is already difficult enough.
We spend the long September days working the orchard boundary together — tracking the corrupted animals, patching the weakened points in the barrier with carved rune-posts, mapping the spread of the imbalance in my field notes while Sybil keeps parallel records in her own system that is incompatible with mine in every possible way. I inform her of this. She tells me her system is legible to people other than herself, which mine apparently is not. We do not resolve this.
I teach her the behavioral markers. The black-eye tells you nothing about timing — a fully corrupted animal looks the sameas one that turned an hour ago. What matters is the gait, the breathing pattern, the head position. She learns these faster than I expect and asks questions that indicate she is integrating the information rather than memorizing it.
"What does the corruption feel like? In the bond."
I consider how to answer this honestly. "Static. The frequency the deity uses to communicate with the sacred creatures is specific — like a signal on a particular channel. The corruption is the same channel running wrong. Too loud, no information. Just noise."
"And you can feel the difference."
"The bond doesn't use hearing."
She writes this down. I watch her write it and think about how she arrived here — to this fence line, to this particular stretch of forest, to this conversation with me — and whether the orchard called her back or whether she came back for reasons that have nothing to do with the land and is only now discovering what was waiting.
The ravine is my fault.
We are pursuing a wounded iypin into the east section — not corrupted, just injured, the kind of animal that needs to be found before something else does — and I am slightly ahead on the trail when I hear her foot slip. I turn in time to see her lurch toward the drop, the slope loose with autumn rain, her arms going wide for balance she isn't going to find.
I catch her by the arm and pull her back and we end up closer than we have been — her back against my chest, my arm around her waist, the drop a foot in front of us. Her heart is going fast. It pounds where my arm crosses her ribs. She is breathing hard, not entirely from the near fall.
I should release her immediately. I know this.
I hold on for one second longer than I should before I step back.
She turns. Her face is flushed. The confrontational expression she uses as a default when anything catches her off guard is present but not as sharp as usual, which I have come to understand means something has actually landed.
"Thank you," she says. The two words come out smaller than her usual register, which means she means them.
"Watch the east slope. The rain changes the drainage."
"I know what rain does." But she says it quietly, without heat, and doesn't move away yet.
I make myself look back at the trail.
The tension between us has been building since the shadowcat — since she stopped arguing with me long enough to actually look at me, and I made the mistake of looking back. It is not appropriate. It is not wise. She is here to save an orchard and I am here to hold a forest together and the bond is consuming me by degrees and there is no version of this that ends with either of us intact if it goes the direction it is going.
I know all of this. I have been knowing it for two weeks. The knowing does not appear to be changing anything.
I spend the afternoon imagining what it would look like if she stayed. Not the fantasy version — the practical one. Sybil Esquine at this fence line every morning. Sybil Esquine's parallel record system next to mine. Sybil Esquine asking questions I don't have clean answers for and filing the non-answers away for later. It is not a thought I have permitted myself before. It opens like a room I didn't know existed and I look into it briefly and I remember why the door was closed.
The bond. The math. Eighteen years, if I'm lucky, before the Keeper consumes whatever is left of the man. That is not enough. It is not fair to offer, and I am not a person who offers things he cannot make good on.
I close the door.
Beth Tallow findsme at the forest edge the following evening.
She is eleven years old and the daughter of the lead manticore trader and she follows me whenever the caravans stop in Briarhollow with the tenacity of a person who decided this is the most interesting thing available and is not wasting the opportunity. I answer her questions because she asks good ones and because she listens properly.
