The farmer's wife arrived just after eight, while Seraphine was still deciding whether her breakfast had been enough or whether she was the kind of person who had a second breakfast. She was leaning toward yes when the knock came.
"Just a moment," she called, and swept three things off the nearest chair — a bundle of dried yarrow, a pair of scissors, and a jar of something she'd meant to label two days ago — and deposited them on the workbench with the instinctive tidying method of someone who knew company was coming and had done nothing to prepare for it.
The woman at the door was Edna Carver. She was in her fifties, broad-shouldered, with the permanently windburned look of someone who'd spent four decades outdoors and found it perfectly agreeable. She had a basket over one arm and the no-nonsense expression of a woman who was here for a transaction and not a conversation, which Seraphine respected enormously.
"Morning," Seraphine said, stepping back to let her in. "It's the cough again, is it not?"
"Three weeks now." Edna set her basket on the table—eggs, a small round of hard cheese, a bunch of late-season carrots that had seen better days but were trying their best. "He won't see the village healer. You know how he is."
"I know how he is," Seraphine agreed, because she did. Willem Carver had a complicated relationship with being helped that expressed itself mainly as refusing to admit anything was wrong until it had been wrong for a month. Half her regular customers were like this. She'd stopped taking it personally.
She moved to the workbench, pulling jars without needing to look—yarrow, thyme, a small measure of elecampane root that she'd dried last autumn specifically for chest complaints. "How bad is it? Wet or dry?"
"Wet in the mornings. Dry at night."
"Fever?"
"Mild. Comes and goes."
"Hmm." She worked while they talked, measuring with the particular accuracy of someone who had never owned a proper scale and had learned to trust her hands. "This should help with both. Tell him to take it with warm water, not hot—hot kills the herb-work—and don't let him skip nights because he feels better. That's when people skip and then they're back at the start."
"He'll skip."
"He will," Seraphine agreed. "Tell him I'll know if he does. I won't actually know, but tell him."
Edna almost smiled. She watched Seraphine work with the comfortable familiarity of someone who'd made this trip a dozen times and knew not to offer to help. "Heard anything strange this week?"
Seraphine glanced up. "Strange how?"
Edna's eyes moved, just briefly, toward the north window. Toward the Mirewood.
"There's talk in the village," she said, lowering her voice in the way people did when they weren't sure if the information was serious or gossip and didn't want to commit to either. "Travelers on the forest road. Two last month, one the week before last. Just gone."
Seraphine kept measuring. "Travelers disappear on forest roads. It's not a pleasant truth but it's a truth."
"Not like this." Edna folded her hands over her basket handle. "The carter who does the south run said he saw lights in the trees. Not lantern lights. Wrong lights. Too low, and cold-colored."
Seraphine stoppered the jar and considered this. Cold-colored lights in old-growth forest could mean a dozen things, most of them mundane—foxfire, reflected moonlight, the particular way the Mirewood mist caught and held illumination on certain nights. It could mean a dozen other things too, but those things were considerably less comfortable to think about before she'd finished her tea.
"Mirewood's always been temperamental," she said, and handed over the remedy parcel. "Keep him off the roads after dark for a few weeks, if you can manage it. Not because of anything specific. Just good sense."
Edna took the parcel and didn't look entirely reassured, but she looked slightly reassured, which was what was possible. She left the eggs and the cheese and waved off the carrots when Seraphine tried to return them, which meant Seraphine was having carrot soup whether she wanted to or not.
She stood in the doorway and watched Edna make her way down the garden path, and she did not look at the treeline.
She looked at the treeline.
It looked exactly as it always did in the morning—dense and dark and entirely ordinary, the uppermost branches moving in a wind she couldn't feel from the door. Whatever the Mirewood was doing, it was keeping it to itself.
Good, she thought, and went back inside.
***
The afternoon was hers, which meant she gave it to Maren.
Not literally. That was no longer possible. But there was a formula in Maren's journal—a complex respiratory compound that Seraphine had been trying to reconstruct properly for six months—and Willem Carver's cough had reminded her of it, and the afternoon was long, and she had the ingredients, and sometimes grief expressed itself as productivity. Maren would have approved of that logic. Maren had approved of most things that kept hands busy.
The journal lived at the back of the workbench, behind the tall jar of dried chamomile and the wooden box of things-she-hadn't-sorted-yet. Seraphine took it out the way she always took it out—carefully, which was not a word she applied to many things. The leather cover had gone soft with handling. The spine had been repaired twice, first by Maren and then by Seraphine after, with thread that didn't quite match because she'd been crying when she did it and hadn't cared.
She set it open on the clean end of the workbench and put a weight on the page so it wouldn't curl.
Maren's handwriting was small and precise and covered every margin. She'd written notes on her own notes—corrections, additions, the occasional emphatic NO in the margins of formulas she'd later reconsidered. Seraphine knew these pages the way she knew the cottage—not because she'd memorized them but because she'd spent enough time in their company that they'd become part of the furniture.
For persistent lung complaints complicated by cold or damp, the heading read, in ink that had faded from black to a tired brown. This one requires patience. Don't rush the reduction.
"I know," Seraphine said. "I know. I'm not rushing."
She'd rushed it the first three times.
She didn't rush it now. She worked through the afternoon with the formula open beside her, checking and rechecking, letting the compound reduce at the pace it chose rather than the pace she wanted. Outside, the light went from pale gold to grey without her noticing. The Mirewood disappeared into the dusk. The hearth burned low and warm behind her and the cottage settled into its evening sounds—the creak of the beam above the window, the occasional pop of the fire, the soft agitated hiss of the mint plant doing whatever the mint plant did when it thought she wasn't listening.
She was on the final stage—the cool-down, which required nothing but patience—when she became aware that the wind had returned.
She looked at the north window. Fully dark outside now, and the glass was trembling slightly in its frame. The storm from last night—which she'd assumed had moved off east—apparently hadn't. Or another had followed on its heels. Either way, the sound was building in the canopy, that familiar rushing advance of something large moving through the treetops, and underneath it.
She stilled.
Underneath it, the same feeling as last night. That low, attentive pressure in the air. Her magic stirred in response, not insistently, just noticing— the way it noticed when something entered the boundary of her ward-line.
She told it, again, to settle.
She finished cooling the compound. She labelled the jar properly this time; Maren's formula, batch 4, don't rush the reduction, I mean it, and set it on the shelf. She banked the fire. She put her apron on its hook and stretched her back and told herself she was going to bed.
The storm outside was loud now. The kind of storm that made the Mirewood roar and the shutters strain and turned the garden into a chaos of bending stems and flying leaves.
She was almost to the bedroom door when the crash came.
An enormous something hitting the north garden fence with the full weight of what she thought was a tree, but the sound was wrong for that. And followed, in the ringing silence after, by something that might have been a sound and might have been nothing.
Seraphine stood very still in the middle of her cottage. She looked at the north window and then at the bedroom door.
She picked up the candle from the mantle, wrapped her cardigan tighter around herself, and went to see what had destroyed her fence.