WHEN AURI WOKE, the sky was there again.
It was always there now. Full of its own slow turning. She had been afraid of it once. She remembered that the way you remember a fever after it breaks. You know it had held you. You know it had made the world too large.
She rose from her mat and her bare feet found the sand, still cool from the night. That was good. That was proper. Cool things wanted warming, and her feet were happy to oblige.
Foxen sat in his dish beside her pillow, his light gone down to almost nothing. She touched his edge with one careful finger. “Not yet,” she told him gently. “It is a sun day. You can rest.”
He dimmed, content.
The old grove stood tall at the edge of the water, their silver leaves catching the first light the way cupped hands catch rain. They sang their morning song, thin and sweet. But the old grove was not her work. The old grove knew itself.
Her work waited in the rows of clay pots lining the water’s edge. Thirty-two saplings, each no taller than her knee. Some had sprouted only days ago, still shy with the strangeness of being alive. Others had been growing for months, their tiny silver leaves just learning how to catch the light.
She listened. She always listened. It was the easiest thing. The most necessary thing. You did not tend a thing by telling it what to be. You tended it by learning what it was. You listened with your fingers and your feet and the soft part behind your eyes that had no name but knew things all the same.
The fourth pot was fretting. The sapling’s roots had pressed against the clay walls in the night, circling and binding. She knelt and tapped the clay. The sound came back tight. Choked.
“I know,” she said softly. “I know.”
She worked her fingers along the rim, loosening the soil the way you loosen a fist that has been clenched too long. The roots came free in a pale tangle, and the sapling shivered when the air touched them.
Auri sat back on her heels and looked at it for a long time. This one had grown too fast. Reached too far. Its roots were grasping not because they wanted more but because they were afraid.
She found a wider pot, clay still cool from the morning shade. She lined the bottom with dark earth, careful and slow, making a bed the way you make a bed for someone who has not slept well. Then she settled the sapling in and pressed the soil around its roots, gentle as a word you only say to someone you love.
The sapling went still. Not the stillness of a thing enduring, but the stillness of a thing that has finally been heard.
She smiled. A grin, really.
She did not think about the woman from the west who had come asking questions last season, looking for someone with a different name. She did not think about the name she’d had before, the one that had been heavy as a crown and just as cold. She did not think about the boy with red hair and clever fingers who had given her the name she kept.
She did not think about any of these things, because there were thirty-one pots left to check and the morning was just beginning.