Three years ago, herbalist Rowan Marlowe misread a dose in a fever winter. Mira was eight. She fell into a sleep like death — and Rowan ran, to a cabin at the edge of the boreal Northwood, where he gathers herbs, dodges gratitude, and hides. His old master searched three years to deliver one sentence: Mira woke. Mira lives.
The Northwood teaches him the Rootway: cultivation by rooting, skin to bark, breath to wind. Six realms, each a full season at the least, and every gain counted like a dose: twenty steps of sensing, three hundred heartbeats shared with a tree. Nothing taken without return. Draw too fast, and frostburn takes your fingers.
The Ashford company drains the forest's breath through iron nails, bottled as tonics — fevers breaking too fast, too clean. The maker's daughter, Nora, lives on them, her heart at thirty beats to ten breaths. Rowan counts her down, promising nothing. Against company paper — "unworked forest, without keeper or claim" — he sets a ring of fourteen tended trees, a register, and the rule the last keeper's death taught them: she held the ring alone, and the stillness took her. No one holds the ring alone.