The thaw woke Rowan before the light did.
It wasn't a sound. It was the lack of one. All winter the cabin had sat under snow the way a hand sits under a blanket — everything pressed down and muffled. That morning that heavy quiet was gone. Water was moving somewhere under the world. Water dripped from the roof as the ice let go of it, one drop at a time.
He went out in just his shirt, with no coat. The yard was a shallow sheet of melt, with the stones of the path showing through like knuckles. Cold found his ankles through his boots. He didn't mind. He had spent four months minding the cold. They were done with each other.
The birches along the creek had gone dark with wet. He put his palm flat to the nearest trunk out of habit — four months of rooting mornings, checking in — and stopped.
It was moving.
Not the breath. Under the breath. A slow push upward through the wood. The tree's juice, called sap, climbing toward buds that hadn't dared open yet. Seedling had taught him healthy from sick. This was a verb. The tree was doing something. For the first time, he could feel the doing.
"Show-off," he told it.
Further down, where the melt had pooled against a young spruce, the water stood brown and still. The seedling — a knee-high young tree, three years of stubborn — was drowning in it, needles gone dull. He crouched and dug a channel with the bone-handled knife, wrist-deep in ice water. He watched the pool drain itself toward the creek in a brown rush.
Then he did the other thing. The new thing.
He went still — shoulders down, breath to the count of the wind — and laid his palm on the wet needles, and fed it a little. A sip, not a drink. The green breath went down through his hand, down the path it had learned all winter. The seedling took it like a cold person takes a blanket. The needles didn't green up. Nothing dramatic. But the needles looked a little less dull.
"There," he told it. "We'll both pretend that was your idea."
His fingers were cold from the meltwater. They reported the cold properly, on time, in order. Four months ago they couldn't have told him his own name. He flexed them and got on with the morning.
The Stag's Rest smelled of wet wool and baking bread. That meant the village was awake and pretending it had never been winter.
Nora was at the corner table, Rosa's ledger open in front of her, a pen behind her ear and ink on three fingers. She had come down the mountain in autumn, half-starved and suspicious of soup. Now she was doing sums in a column and muttering at the ones that didn't behave.
"She does the books," Rosa told Rowan, setting down bread he hadn't asked for. "I do the feeding. Fair trade."
"She staying?"
"She's staying." Rosa said it like she'd already argued about it with herself and won. "Spring, summer. We'll see about the rest."
Nora looked up, caught him looking, and went back to her column with her ears pink. That was fine. Pink ears were an improvement on gray cheeks.
Silas was at the next table, telling the bear-and-the-canoe story to two trappers who'd heard it before and wanted to hear it again. He'd started coming down for market days again. Rosa saved him the corner table without being asked. He got to the punchline, laughed before he delivered it — actually laughed out loud at his own joke — and raised his cup to Rowan when he saw him watching.
Back among the living. Properly, this time. No ghost at the treeline. Just an old trapper with gravy on his beard, telling his stories to everyone around him.
June came in with snowmelt on her shoulders. She sat on the bench beside Rowan without a word. She took his tea, drank half of it, and handed it back. Ember climbed onto her boot and went to sleep there, one eye shut, the other already gone.
Rosa looked at the two of them, opened her mouth, and thought better of it. "Eat," she said instead. "You're still all elbows."
Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to.
After midday they walked the east patrol line, June and Rowan, to check what the melt had done to the trail. A cold wind came over the ridge.
The ridge gave them the view. Down on the east track, dark against the white, the first wagons of spring were picking their way north through the slush. Five of them. Canvas tops, iron-rimmed wheels, the creak of wood carrying a mile through the cold air. Men walking alongside with poles, testing the soft ground.
Wells had said twice the crew. He'd been short.
Rowan counted again to be sure. Then he wrote it in the notebook: Five wagons, east track. Crew looks doubled. Second mill parts, probably.
"They're early," June said.
"They're eager."
She watched the wagons like weather — no hurry, no mercy. "Spring work starts at the river cuttings. They'll be felling by the time the buds open."
He put the pencil away. There was nothing to do about it from a ridge with a notebook. There was just the knowing, filed where it belonged: under spring, prepare for. He'd spent the winter learning the moods of the snow, as he'd once learned fevers. Spring was getting the same treatment. Protocol didn't care about the season.
They walked back along the melt-soft trail. Halfway home June stopped, reached into her coat pocket, and took out the old nail.
The hand-forged one. From under the oldest stump. Older than Silas.
She held it up between thumb and forefinger and looked at it — the iron with small holes eaten by rust, the hammer marks, the rust worked into every crease. She turned it once. The light found an edge that wasn't rust, a line of clean metal where someone's hand had held it, a long time ago.
Then she put it back in her pocket, and they kept walking.
Rowan didn't ask. She didn't offer. Some things you carry until they're ready to be put down, and the nail wasn't ready.
Evening. Outside, meltwater dripped steady from the roof. The cabin smelled of woodsmoke and the wintergreen tea Pip made too strong because he'd decided strong was a personality.
He was at the table with his notebook open, practicing the herb-wrap knot on a willow twig. The twig kept winning. He was not looking at Rowan, which meant a question was coming. He'd tied that knot a hundred times over the winter. The twig was the only thing that hadn't gotten the message.
"When I'm sixteen," he said, to the twig. "The still thing. Will you teach me?"
The twig snapped. He pretended it had been the plan.
"Sixteen," Rowan said. "Summer. Channels aren't set before that. You know this."
"I know. But will you?"
Rowan looked at him — fifteen now, all elbows, ink on his chin from the notebook — and understood, as surely as he knew the right amount of a medicine, what the summer would actually ask of him.
Not the knot. Not the stems. He'd taught him the mundane trade all winter and Pip had learned it fast — dry moss and a spark. But rooting wasn't a trade. It was the Way. Stillness. Give and take. The whole slow discipline of it. You couldn't teach that with a spare notebook and a spare hour. You'd need —
A school. The word sat in his head like a stone in a boot.
"I'll teach you," Rowan said.
Pip tried very hard not to grin. Failed. Went back to the twig like nothing had happened.
Rowan opened his own notebook to a clean page. He wrote, in the spring-protocol section he'd started that morning: Thaw survey — creek high, ground soft. Sap running (birch). Stakes to re-drive after melt (east ridge). And underneath, smaller: Summer. Pip, sixteen. Teach him to root. Start with stillness.
No word had come from Corvin since the roads broke up — nothing yet about the man in Dunmere asking after the northern tonics.
That was the whole of it. One line in the notebook, and the winter's last question filed under later.
Dawn, the next day. The morning air was cold and clean.
Pip was out before Rowan, basket over his arm, down at the creek where the first green was pushing up through the dead leaves. He crouched over a patch of it the way Rowan had crouched over the orange mushrooms, what felt like a lifetime ago — back straight, eyes on the ground, listening with his feet.
"Not those," Rowan said. "Those are first. Take the second ones."
"Why?"
"Because the first ones are doing the work. You take the second, the patch forgives you."
Pip moved his hand to the next clump. Crushed a leaf. Smelled it. Made the face.
"Good," Rowan said. "The nose knows before the book does."
"That's what you always say."
"It's true every time. That's why."
Ember came out of nowhere and stole the best shoot out of his basket and ran three feet with it, triumphant, one-eyed, absurd. Pip chased her, shouting, and the creek ran high and brown beside them, and the birches stood dark and wet above, and the light came down through the branches the color of weak tea.
Rowan stood and watched him work the patch — the boy who'd followed him around the drying racks asking which leaves went in the winter tea, now reading ground like a letter — and the notebook stayed in his pocket, and the morning did whatever mornings do.
Pip would be sixteen by summer. Old enough to root. Rowan looked at the boy, at the thaw, at the green coming back — and felt the forest waiting for its answer.
End of Volume 2.