Hollow Creek was two days' walk south. Rowan only made the trip when the flour barrel went light. It had gone light. He walked the road down, resenting every mile of it. A cold wind pushed low clouds over the road. When he reached the Stag's Rest, its windows glowed in the gray light. Rosa wiped the same glass twice. That meant she had news, and was deciding how to spend it.
"Your man from Ashford," she said. "Harlan Voss. The tonic man. Forty-five, going gray at the temples. He was in here yesterday, asking after rooters."
Rowan's bowl stopped halfway to his mouth. He held it with both hands now. The waxy color had crept past his wrists. His fingers did not trust themselves alone anymore.
"What kind of asking," June said.
"Polite. Desperate-polite." Rosa set the glass down. "Wanted to know if anyone here could talk to trees. Read them. His girl's been poorly — that's all anyone knows. Never seen, the daughter. Keeps her home, they say in Ashford. He sells his tonics cheap as water and asks about rooters."
Pip looked up from the bar, where he had been shelling beans badly. "Cheap? If the tonics work, why cheap?"
"Because he's not selling medicine," Rowan said. "He's buying hope. Different currency."
Rowan set the bowl down carefully. Three sentences. Dry.
"The tonics were rot in a bottle for years. Last autumn they started working."
"He asks about rooters because iron can't hear green breath. He needs someone who can."
"You don't build twelve trunks of circuit for a season. You build it for someone who won't see winter."
June looked at him for a long moment. Then she stood and went to check that her axe was oiled. That was her way of agreeing.
Pip had gone pale. "He's hurting the trees because his daughter's sick."
"He's hurting the trees," Rowan said, "because his daughter's sick." He did not soften it. Pip was fifteen, not stupid. "Both things are true. That's the worst part."
He carried the name home with him. Two days on the road, and Harlan Voss walked at his shoulder the whole way. The first evening back, the air was cold and the grove was silent, except for a few drops falling from bare branches. Rowan went to the grove with paper and charcoal. He told himself it was only counting.
Twelve trunks. He knew the number. Knowing it did not help. Each one stood in the wrong kind of quiet. No green breath moving under the bark. Just a dull buzz from the iron, which he could feel in his teeth, like biting cold metal.
He marked them on the paper. An X for each trunk. Then he walked the ring around the first one. He found the nails again. And he stopped calling it counting.
They were not scattered. Every trunk wore a ring of them, driven at root height. Spaced even as teeth. And from each ring a line ran. Not a wire. Not anything you could see. A drainage — a draining flow. He felt for it with his palms held out, the way he would check a fever. He drew what he felt. Twelve rings. Twelve lines. Each line pouring into the next one. The twelve trunks stood in a line that pointed east. Toward Ashford.
Ember watched from a stump. She stole a mushroom out of his basket while he worked.
"You're welcome," Rowan told the marten. "Take the spotted ones. They're crap anyway."
The second evening, he brought Pip's spare lantern. He walked the lines to see where they ended. They did not end. They fed each other. Ring into line into ring. Trunk to trunk. And the whole arrangement curved. All of it bending east, like water finding a slope.
Halfway through the walk, his hands gave out. The charcoal slipped. He caught it against his forearm. He stood there in the iron-quiet with his teeth clenched, breathing through it. The frostburn had gone past numb into a heavy numbness that would not lift. He pressed his palm to the nearest living tree. A young birch, one the circuit had not touched. He just held it there until the green breath steadied him. Give and take, both ways. He took a little calm and left a little warmth. The birch did not mind.
"You're a colleague," he told it. "Don't tell the others I said that."
The third evening, he found the keystone.
It was the biggest oak in the grove, set at the center of the curve. Its ring of nails was wrong, the way a face is wrong when one eye does not match. The center nail was bigger. Older. Rust had eaten it nearly black. It sat deeper than the rest, driven to the head. Rowan put his hand on the bark above it. The drainage ran through his palm, like cold water through a crack.
He sat down in the fallen leaves and drew it three times, to be sure. Then he wrote underneath, in charcoal that smeared under his thumb:
keystone — this one holds the rest.
A keystone is the one stone at the top of an arch that holds all the others up. He understood it the way he understood a vein. The rings drew from the trunks. The lines carried it on. And the keystone — the keystone was the one nail that held the current flowing in the wrong direction. Pull it out of the pattern, and the rest had nothing to lean on.
Silas found him at the cabin that evening. Outside, the wind moved in the spruce tops, and the light was already fading. He said, "Come." He walked him to the edge of the hollow. He stopped at the last spruce and would not step past it. Just inside the treeline, a stone stood half-buried in moss. Small. Deliberate. Rowan had walked past it a hundred times and never once asked.
Silas toed the moss off it. "Alba."
Rowan waited. Silas used words carefully, like money he did not want to waste, and only on what mattered.
"She rooted here," Silas said. "Went still in the bad winter."
The going-still. The winter trance, deep as a long sleep, that a rooter did not always wake from. Rowan knew the word. He had never heard it said by someone it had happened to.
"I found her when the thaw came," Silas said.
Rowan put his hand on the stone. It was cold in the way only old stone is. He did not root. It did not seem like the place for it.
"She left something here," Rowan said quietly. "That's what you told me, that day at the hollow."
"Her clearing," Silas said. "I couldn't keep it. So I gave it to the woods. The woods gave it to you."
They stood there a while. The green breath moved slow through the healthy trees around them. Rowan listened to it the way you listen to someone breathing in the next room. Just to be sure.
The plan got made at Silas's kitchen table. Silas's table was the biggest. And Silas made tea when he was frightened and would not say so.
The maps went down in the middle. Three evenings of charcoal, smudged at the edges where Rowan's hands had failed him. Twelve rings. Twelve lines. The curve east. And in the center, drawn three times over, the keystone oak.
Silas refilled cups nobody had emptied. He straightened the corners of the maps. He got up twice to check the latch on a door that was already latched. The third time he stayed standing, holding the teapot like a shield.
"Sit down, Silas," June said, not unkindly.
"You'll eat after?" he said. "I'll keep the pot warm. Whatever happens out there — you'll eat after."
"That's the plan," Rowan said. "Eat after."
"Talk me through it," June said.
Rowan put his finger on the keystone. "The big oak. The black nail. That's the keystone. It holds the current going the wrong way. I root at that oak and pay it back through the lines. Everything the circuit took, returned. A current can't run both directions at once."
"And him?" Silas said.
"June," Rowan said. "The grove's under forest law. She stops the man with the hammer."
"That's the job," June said. She did not look up from the map. "I can stop a man with a hammer."
"And the way in?" Silas asked.
"The deer path," Silas answered himself, and almost smiled. "I know these woods. Before dawn. He won't hear us till we're at the edge."
It was a good plan. It was a plan made of tea and charcoal and three neighbors. And it terrified Silas so politely that he kept offering them more tea.
"I'm coming," Pip said.
"No," Rowan said.
"I'm fifteen, not dead."
"It's a man with a hammer and iron-dead trees, Pip. You're fifteen, which is exactly why." Rowan folded the smallest map and put it in Pip's hands. "When this is done — real herb lessons. Not the weeding kind. You learn to read a leaf like a letter."
Pip looked at the map like it was a second prize. It was. "Promise?"
"Promise."
Later, at the door, June pulled her coat on. She said it without looking at him: "I'll stand where he can see me. You root. I'll watch."
Rowan's throat tightened, and for a moment he could not speak. "That's the whole plan, really."
"Then it's a good plan." She limped out into the dark. The door latched behind her. And Silas checked it a third time.
Dawn came up gray and thin. A thin frost covered the deer path, and their breath showed white in the cold air. The deer path gave them to the edge of the grove without a sound.
Silas lifted a hand. Stopped.
Through the trunks, at the keystone oak — a man. Coat buttoned wrong. Sleeves a little too short. A hammer in his hand, raised toward the black nail.
June's hand settled on her axe. Silas stopped breathing.
Rowan put his palm flat to the nearest bark. He breathed out, slow.