Every morning, the snow gave back a little more of the world.
There was a line on the slope above the cabin. Above the line, the snow still lay white and deep. Below it, the ground stood bare and dark, and it steamed a little in the morning sun. That was the melt line. Every day it climbed a hand's width. Every day, something winter had buried came back into the light.
A mitten, dropped in December, gone soft as cloth from a wreck. An antler a deer had shed and left. And by the woodpile, the dark patch of ground where the sample root had spent the winter.
Rowan crouched by the patch. It was smaller than his two hands put together. It smelled of nothing yet. The thaw had not reached down to whatever held it.
"Not yet," he told it. "I see you, though."
Ember came out of the woodpile with a strip of dried mushroom in her teeth. She looked at him the way she always did, one eye bright, no shame at all.
"That's the winter store," he said.
She ran. He let her. Some taxes you just pay.
Pip came up from the creek with the hammer and a bundle of fresh stakes under his arm, red twine in his pocket. The melt had heaved half the east grove stakes out of the ground like bad teeth, and re-driving them was his job and he knew it.
"Straight this time," Rowan said. "The January ones leaned."
"The January ones were in frozen ground," Pip said. "Everything leaned. The ground leaned."
"Then straight will be an improvement on the ground."
Pip grinned and headed east, toward the grove by the cabin — his stakes, his ground, a different patch of black from the one Rowan was bound for. Two patches, two markers: stakes for the grove Pip watched, cairns for the old cut nobody watched but June. Rowan had explained it once, in the warm, with the map on the table. Some lessons you set in wood and stone, and then you set them again every spring.
"You write what you count," Rowan called after him. "Depths, leanings, any stake that moves. You don't touch the black."
"I know," Pip called back, in the tone of a boy who has been told a thing the right number of times and one more.
June came up the path before the sun was well up. Warden's coat, no pick today, her limp showing a little on the wet ground. She had said she would come at the thaw, and June did the things she said she would.
"You ready?" she said.
"The old cut, before the melt turns it to soup," he said. "Edges go unreadable once the ground is all water."
"Then we walk."
The river was up, brown and loud with melt. They crossed one at a time on the warden's log, a great fir laid across the water years ago, its top flattened by an adze — a tool like an axe, for shaping wood. June went first, easy as a road. Rowan went second, slower, with his eyes on his boots. Some skills a man admits he does not have.
On the far bank, out of the noise of the water, June said, "The grove."
Rowan knew what she meant. He had known since the thaw started.
"You said talk later," he said.
"I said don't. Then I said later."
"It stuck with me. The later."
They walked a while. The path was soft. A frog somewhere made one short sound and thought better of it.
"I don't do things by accident," June said at last. "Not that. Not much, in general. It wasn't the cold, and it wasn't the moment. I want that said plain, so neither of us has to carry a wrong version of it."
"All right," Rowan said.
"Your turn."
He had had days to prepare a speech, and the speech had not improved with keeping. So he said the true thing instead, the short way.
"I'm good at leaving. I've had practice. Dunmere. Near here, once or twice, in my head. Staying is the thing I'm still learning. I'm slow at it. That's the whole of it."
"Slow I can work with," June said. "Gone I can't."
They walked on. After a while she reached over and took his hand, the way she had held it out to him in the grove — palm up, business first. She turned it over. The fingertips that had mended her cut were pink and whole and ordinary.
"They came back," she said.
"Mostly. They tell me the cold on time now. That's enough."
She let go. "Then we work," she said, and that was the talk, and it was enough too.
The old cut lay east of the river, where the company had felled years before any of them came. June's cairns marked the black ground. A cairn is a pile of stones set up as a marker, and she had built them the winter the rot first showed, one at each corner of the wrongness.
Two of them had slumped in the melt. June rebuilt the worst one while Rowan got out his notebook and his pacing feet.
He walked the long side first, heel to toe, counting under his breath. Then the short side. Then the long side again, because a measure you do not trust is worse than none.
"Thirty-nine," he said. "By thirty."
"December it was forty-one by thirty," June said.
"Winter held it."
"Starved it, more like." He crouched at the edge of the black and put his palm flat to the ground. The soil there was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the season. "It didn't feed out. It fed down."
Seedling had taught him the surface of things: healthy from sick, the way you learn the face of a road. Sprout was teaching him the underneath. In December he had dug into this black with his knife, a hand's depth down, and found the bottom of the wrongness and cut his sample there. Now he did not need to dig. Lying his palm at the edge, breathing slow, he could feel how far down the wrongness ran, the way you feel the depth of cold water with a toe before you trust it with a foot.
At the cairns' side it lay thin. One hand deep. The way it had been in December.
At the middle it ran two hands deep. Roots made of cold, going down toward the water under the hill.
He sat back on his heels. Feeling was one witness. He wanted a second.
"Your depth stick," he said.
June took the warden's measuring stick from her pack — a straight ash pole, notched in hand-widths, the kind she used to test snow and bog. She pushed it down into the black at the cairns' side. It slid easy for one hand's width, then firmed. At the middle she leaned her weight on it, and it went down two full notches before the good ground took it.
"Two hands," she said. "Your toe agrees with my stick."
"Palm and pole," Rowan said. "That's a measure, then."
Meltwater ran along the black's lower edge in a thin brown channel, on its way to the creek. Where the water slipped under the dark ground and came out again, it carried a smell — faint, sweet at the front, wrong at the back. Rowan crouched and watched it go.
"That's why we measure now," he said. "If this breaks up in the full thaw, it rides the water. The creek takes it to every bank and beaver dam between here and the village."
"It won't break up," June said. "It's settling. You just told me so."
"It's settling if it's fed slow and steady from below. If the thaw hits it all at once — " He shook his head. "Spring doesn't ask my opinion. So we get the numbers while the numbers can still be read."
"It's not spreading," he said. "It's settling."
"Settling where?"
"Down. Toward whatever feeds it from below."
June looked at the black ground a long moment. "You think it's fed from somewhere."
"I think everything is fed from somewhere."
He wrote the numbers in the notebook. Old cut, first thaw measure: thirty-nine by thirty. December was forty-one. Depth at the middle: two hands, was one. It feeds down, not out.
Below them, east, the river bent around the low ground, and a thin column of smoke stood up from the new mill camp. The felling would start at the river cuttings when the buds opened, June had said, and the smoke said the men were already there, sharpening.
"They'll want the north stands by autumn," June said. "The old trees. Wells heard it from their own cook."
"I know."
"The north patrol is mine to file." She said it the way she said most things, as if it had been decided for a while and the words were just catching up. "Three days to the cabin on the map, and the melt won't make it shorter. I've traded my south rounds for it."
Rowan looked north, past the river, past the ridge, to where the land rose and the trees stood old and close. Somewhere up there the breath of the forest went wrong, one note low, and had been going wrong longer than anyone in the valley had been alive.
"This spring," he said, "I go north."
June started down the path toward the river, her limp easy on the downhill, her voice dry as kindling.
"You've been going north for days," she said. "Your feet are just the last to know."
"When we go, we go with Silas," Rowan said. "He knew the way before the map did. And he knew Alba. There's a winter he hasn't told me yet, and she's in it."
"He promised you the melt, didn't he," June said.
"He did. And it's the melt."
Above them on the slope, the melt line climbed a hand's width more while they watched, giving back the buried world — the lost things first, the way it always does.