The map said the crosses ran east of the cabin, along a river Rowan did not know.
The river was there, the way the map promised — smaller than the big river at home, running quick and tea-brown over stones, with alders leaning over it. Alder is a soft tree that loves wet ground, the first to leaf and the last to let go. The three of them walked its bank in the morning, June with the map folded in her coat, Silas saying nothing and saving his knee, and the land rose slow and steady under their boots.
Ember had not been invited. She was discovered at first light in the cabin woodbox, in state, and a woodbox at a warm hearth outranked a cold riverbank in her order of things. Some members of an expedition hold the base. She held it.
The first cross stood an hour out, on the far side of the water.
They crossed on stones that showed black above the current, one at a time, June first with her warden's balance, Rowan last with a pack and no balance worth naming. On the far bank the ground changed — older trees, closer together, the light going green and dim the way it does in woods that have not been cut in living memory.
It was cut into a flat stone at the foot of a spruce — a plain cross, deep as a thumb joint, and green with moss in the cut. And the spruce itself was like no wild spruce Rowan had ever walked past. Its lower limbs had been taken off clean, years and years ago, the scars long healed into smooth grey mouths. The brush at its foot had been cleared once, in a ring, and though forty years of wild had grown back over the clearing, the shape of the work was still there, the way a path stays in grass after the walker is gone.
"Somebody tended this tree," Rowan said.
"Somebody tended all of them," June said, and unfolded the map on the flat stone. "If the map's honest."
Silas looked at the healed cuts a long time. "That's his hand," he said. "Pruned high, so the snow load slides. Alba used to say he kept them like — " He stopped, and shrugged, and the shrug was the rest of the sentence. "Well. Forty years gone, and I'd know his pruning in the dark."
The second cross was the same, and the third. At the second, Rowan found the other half of the old man's craft: a shallow channel, dug by hand from the river's edge to the tree's foot, long silted up and grown over, but straight as a ruled line under the moss. In dry summers, somebody had led water to this tree the way you lead it to a garden row. He stood looking at it a while. Tending a wild spruce was one thing. Digging for it, summer after summer, alone, where no one would ever see — that was a man keeping a promise to something that could not thank him.
Rowan stopped at the third and did what he had come to do.
He put his palm flat to the bark and went still.
The tree's breath came up to meet him, slow and green — and then it stumbled. Not failed. Stumbled, the way a man going up a hill with a bad knee catches himself and goes on. Rowan counted the sound, the way he counted everything, in beats, his own heart marking the time. Twenty-two beats clean. Then the catch. Then the beat again, weaker, climbing back.
"Twenty-two," he said. "Then it catches."
"Is that bad?" June said.
"It's a tree with a limp," Rowan said. "You'd know about walking with one of those."
"Watch it, herbalist."
At the fifth cross the tree was stronger, an old fir with a trunk two men could not have spanned. Forty-five beats clean before the stumble came, and the stumble was small — a stone in a shoe, not a hole in the road. Rowan wrote both numbers in the notebook, and the place of each, and June paced the ground between the crosses with her warden's stride and called out the distances, and he wrote those too. A measure is a thing you can hand to the next person. That was the whole trade. Under the numbers he wrote what the numbers said: Third: twenty-two. Fifth: forty-five. The same stumble, at different depths.
At midday they ate cold food on the riverbank, in the brief spring sun. "He came in all weathers," Silas said, of the old man, not looking up from his bread. "Frost or flies. Alba said a tree doesn't know what day it is — and neither, in the end, did its keeper."
The distances grew as they went. A quarter hour between the first crosses. Near an hour to the fifth. The ring was not a garden plot. It was a country, walked at a tree's pace, and a man who tended it walked his life away inside it a quarter hour at a time. June wrote the paces on the map's edge in pencil, in her small warden's hand, so the paper would say what the ground had cost.
At the sixth cross there was no stone at all. Frost had taken it, or time, or the river in a high spring. Only the tree marked the station — tended, cleared, pruned in the old way, standing in its ring of order with its marker gone. Rowan stood a moment, liking it more than he could say. The stone had only ever been the old man's notebook. The tree was the cross.
The seventh cross stood where the river bent north.
Rowan knew the tree before he touched it. Its crown was thin on the north side, the needles sparse, one whole arm of branches bare and grey. On the ground below it, the cleared ring of long ago had grown back thinner than anywhere else along the line, as if even the brush knew.
He put his palm to the bark.
Thirty beats, clean and slow, and he had begun to think the tree was better than it looked — and then the breath went out.
Not a stumble. A hole. The slow green note under his palm dropped away entirely, and there was nothing, nothing at all, for a count of seven of his own heartbeats — and then it came back, low and tired, like a man hauling himself up out of deep water by the arms.
Rowan did not take his hand away. He stayed the way you stay with a person who has fainted, until the breath under his palm was steady again, such as it was.
"Thirty," he said at last. "Then a hole. Seven beats of nothing, then it climbs back."
June had the map open on her knee. She was looking at it the way she looked at weather coming over a ridge — and then she turned it a quarter turn, and looked again, and her face changed.
"Rowan."
He came and stood beside her, and she put her finger on the line of crosses and drew it slow along the vellum — the stiff, pale skin old maps are drawn on. East along the river, cross after cross. Then, near the top of the sheet, the line bent.
"It bends," she said. "Look at it. It isn't going anywhere. It's going around."
The crosses ran east, and then north, and then — at the edge of what the map could hold, in crosses the old hand had drawn smaller, as if from memory or from report — west again. An arc. A ring, or the most of one, closing around the high ground north of the cabin. Around the place where the forest's note went false at three hundred paces, and held wrong, and had held wrong since before any of them were born.
"He didn't draw a road," Rowan said slowly. "He drew his work."
Fourteen crosses, maybe. More, maybe — the old hand's line faded where the vellum tore. But the shape was there, and the shape was a wall made of living trees, each one tended like a garden nobody was meant to see, standing around a wound.
"And the wrongness leaks out between them," Rowan said. "Where the ring is weak. It's been leaking since its keeper died — a little more every year, down the water, down the slope. That's what's feeding the old cut, June. Not a stream. A failing. Forty years of it."
"And the strong ones hold," June said.
"The strong ones hold," Rowan said. "That's the whole of it. Where an old man's work still stands, the wrongness stays home. Where his work fails — " He looked at the thin-crowned spruce, at its grey bare arm. " — it walks out, a pace at a time, and eats my valley at the far end."
Silas had come up quiet behind them, the way a man comes up to a grave in a churchyard. He stood looking at the seventh tree, and the seventh tree's cleared ring, and his face did a thing Rowan had not seen it do before, and could not name, and did not ask about.
"She'd have tended this one first," Silas said, very quiet. "Weakest first. That was her way, even at nineteen." Then he turned and walked down to the river, to check a snare line that did not exist, and was gone a while.
June folded the map away.
"One station," Rowan said, mostly to the thin spruce. "A man can tend one station. Come morning, I start with the weakest."