First light comes through the Cabinets sideways, grey-gold and reluctant, the way it does the first week the snow starts giving the ground back. I'm on my knees in the third bed before it's properly up, checking the wormwood crowns by feel because looking at them tells you less than touching does — new growth is soft-fisted, curled tight, and it lets go of your fingers different than the frost-killed stuff does.

Grey-green heads everywhere. Wormwood's up, rue's up, the yarrow's still holding its nerve underground where it belongs this early. I press two fingers into the dirt at the base of the tansy bed and it's gone from iron-hard to something that yields, which means the meltwater got under it overnight, which means I need to move the mulch before the roots drown themselves out of sheer optimism.

My mother cut her initials into the bench at the end of the third row in 1998, the year she put this garden in. I.V., small and square, like she didn't want to take up more space than the letters required. I don't sit on it. I've never once sat on it. I use it to set my basket down and to brace my knee when I'm working the low bed, and that's the whole of our relationship, me and that bench, thirteen years running.

My hands smell like vinegar from scrubbing the infirmary workbench last night — I do the counters last thing, always, because a clean surface in the morning means I don't have to think about what touched it before — and under the vinegar there's beeswax from the salve tins, and under that, if I bring my wrist to my face and actually breathe instead of just smelling by habit, there's yarrow, worked so far into my skin over thirteen years it might as well be blood.

I do the morning arithmetic without deciding to. It just runs.

The infirmary's east door doesn't creak, but the west one announces itself to the whole clearing, so I use the east door for anything I don't want Ossian Reyle timing. Ossian works the fence line between six and eight most mornings unless the frost's bad, in which case he comes late and mean. The tansy bed's twice the size it was three years ago and if anyone asks — nobody's asked in three years, but if — the answer's ready: it's for the goats' bloat, tansy settles a gut, ask Sable. It's not for the goats. It hasn't been for the goats since I worked out what a woman needs if she ever needs to disappear a scent, though I've never once had a reason to use it that way and I tell myself that's a fact and not a countdown.

I don't examine why I keep the lie oiled anyway.

The gate slams before I hear the truck, which is how I know it's Fennick — the boy drives like the road offended him personally — and he's already talking before he's through it, ginger head bare, no hat, twenty-three years old and built like a fence post that hasn't decided yet if it's going to hold weight.

"Ma'am — Miss — Vesely — there's a kid at the log landing, cable snapped back on him, hand's open like a—" He runs out of comparison and just holds his own palm up, flat, like that'll finish the sentence.

"How open."

"Bad. Real bad. Kade's got him in the truck bed, we didn't wait for—"

I'm already moving. That's the other arithmetic, the one that doesn't need thought at all: how many steps from garden gate to infirmary door, seventeen, and how many from door to bay three, six, and how long it takes me to get gloves on while my brain's already running the wound before I've laid eyes on it.

The boy — Ridgeline High age, maybe younger, freckled and grey with shock — is on my table before I've got the gloves fully seated, and his palm is laid open from the base of the thumb clean across, cable-burn crusted black at both edges, blood soaked through two shirts already balled against it.

"Pressure," I say, to nobody and everybody, and Fennick presses down like I told him to defuse a bomb, both hands shaking, calling me ma'am again, and somewhere in the doorway a voice I know without turning says, low and amused at nobody's expense but the situation's:

"What's the healer's name again — Vesely's girl?"

Ossian Reyle. Mustard jacket, bare hands in April, leaning on the frame like he's got all day, and he probably does, because cruelty's never in a hurry.

I don't answer him. I thread the first suture and my hand is dead steady, steadier than it has any right to be, steadier than the rest of me feels, which is the whole trick of it — the worse it gets, the calmer my hands go, like they've made a separate peace with the world my head hasn't signed onto yet.

"Vesely," Fennick supplies, helpfully, uselessly, "she does the — the herbs, and the —"

"Right," Ossian says, like he's filing it and already forgetting it, and that's fine. That's the job. I've spent thirteen years being a fact people file and forget.

Then the doorway's full of someone else, and this time the light changes because he's blocking it — six foot three of him, blood dried dark on both hands from carrying the kid, and he doesn't wait to be told where to stand. He just puts his weight on the boy's shoulders, pins them flat to the table without being asked, without me even glancing up, like he already knows where I need the stillness and where I don't.

"Mira."

Just that. My name, said correctly, said like it costs him nothing and like it's the whole point of opening his mouth.

I don't look up from the suture. But I feel the count of my own breath change — three, four, five, faster than it was — and I hate, distantly, professionally, that a man standing four feet away with someone else's blood on his hands can probably hear the difference too.

"Hold him," is all I say back.

Kade Ashworth holds him. Doesn't flinch when the boy comes half around and screams into the table, doesn't look away from what I'm doing to check if I'm doing it right, which is its own kind of insult I've decided to take as a compliment: he isn't watching my hands because he already trusts them.

He's watching my face instead.

I feel that more than the suturing. I catalogue him because that's what I do with anything that reads as dangerous, and God knows thirty-six years and two years of open defiance against the alpha reads as dangerous — the grey coming in at his temples like frost finding the highest ground first, the nose broken twice and left crooked both times, gun oil and crushed mint and the woodstove ash worked into the collar of his coat the way yarrow's worked into mine. A man in open dissent since August of '22 is a man who has already spent whatever protection he had. He can't shelter anyone. He can barely shelter himself. I know this the way I know the tansy lie, cold and rehearsed, and I repeat it to myself now like a woman repeating a phone number she's afraid to lose.

The boy faints somewhere around the eighth stitch, mercifully, and the room goes quiet except for Fennick's breathing, which is doing something asthmatic and relieved at once.

"You got enough lidocaine for the season," Kade says. Not a question shaped like a question. A question shaped like he already knows the shape of the answer and wants to see if I'll hand him the same one everyone gets.

"There's enough," I say. Pack answer. The answer I give Sable, the answer I'd give Dorian if he ever bothered to ask about supply instead of symptoms.

He doesn't fill the silence.

That's the thing nobody's told me about Kade Ashworth in eleven years of him being a name on a duty roster and a shape across the infirmary yard — he asks a question and then he just stands there, waiting, like silence is a tool he's comfortable using and I'm not, and it isn't, and forty seconds of it and I hear myself say, low, not looking at him:

"I've been cutting it since February."

He nods once. Doesn't say why didn't you tell anyone, doesn't say that's a problem, doesn't do any of the things a person's supposed to do with information like that. He just files it — the way Ossian filed my name, except it doesn't feel like the same kind of filing at all, and I don't have a clean word yet for what it does feel like, so I set the thought down the way I'd set down something too hot to hold.

Sable comes through the east door — the quiet one, which means she used it on purpose, which means she already knew what was going on before she opened it — trailing scorched coffee grounds and iodine, fifty-one years of not being surprised by anything Ironroot produces, and she takes one look at the room and says, "Out," to Kade, and, "out," again when he doesn't move fast enough, and he goes, but not before his eyes cut back to me once at the door.

"He's still bleeding through the second layer," I tell her, meaning the boy, meaning something to do instead of think.

"He's fine. You're grey." She takes my chin in two fingers, tilts it toward the window like she's checking a jar of something for cloudiness. "Iron's shot again. When did you last eat something that wasn't out of the tansy bed."

"Tansy's for the goats."

"Mm." She doesn't laugh. I try, once, for a coroner's joke — something about anemia being the least interesting way I could die this year, delivered flat, delivered like a woman reading a chart — and Sable's face doesn't move, because to her it isn't funny, it's data, and she's been collecting data on my body for thirteen years the way she used to collect it on my mother's.

I don't think about that comparison. I've gotten very good at not thinking about that comparison.

It's near midday when the light at the infirmary door changes for the second time that morning, and this time it changes the way weather changes — a drop in pressure you feel in your teeth before you see the cloud.

Dorian Vance doesn't knock. He's never once knocked on a door on land his trust holds, which is all of it, so I suppose to him a knock would be a kind of lie.

Pressed shirt. Sleeves buttoned at the wrist even now, even with the thaw mud still on the porch boards outside. Silver-blond hair combed back so exactly it looks less like hair than like a decision. The wedding band from a wife eleven years dead catches the window light when he lifts his hand to the frame, and under all of it, coming off him steady as breath, iron and antiseptic and the eucalyptus rub he uses on some old injury nobody's ever asked about because nobody asks Dorian Vance anything he doesn't offer first.

"How's the boy," he says. Courteous. Always courteous. His voice has never once needed to be anything else.

"He'll keep the hand. Full function, probably, if he doesn't go back on the winch too soon."

"Good." He says it like he means it, and the terrible thing about Dorian is that he probably does mean it — the boy is inventory, and inventory in good condition pleases him the way a fence with no gaps pleases him. "And the garden."

"Coming up."

"The rue especially. Ilona kept it in the eastern bed, as I recall." He says my mother's name the way he says everything, mild, unhurried, like there's no particular weight to it, which is exactly how I know there's weight to it. "Have you moved it?"

"No." I keep my hands busy folding gauze that doesn't need folding. "Same bed. Same rows, mostly."

"Good," he says again, and this time it lands differently, this time it sounds like he's checking something off a list I can't see. "Ironroot's lost too many springs to carelessness, I think. Bad seed stock, bad rotation, half the household staff down with something by June because nobody thought to plan in April." He looks around the infirmary — not at me, at the room, cataloguing it the way I catalogue danger — and says, "I intend to be thorough this year."

He doesn't touch anything. He doesn't raise his voice, not once, not even a degree. He threatens nothing you could repeat to the Circle and have it mean anything. And still the room feels smaller when he's in it, the way a jar feels smaller once you know something's been put in it that you didn't put there yourself.

He turns to go, and on the second stair — I can see him through the doorway, one hand on the rail, sleeve still buttoned — he stops, and looks back.

Not at my face.

At my braid. The flat, plain, deliberate braid I've worn the same way for nine years, the one thing about my body I've engineered down to the inch, and he looks at it the way a man looks at a fence line he built himself, checking that it's still holding.

Then he's gone, boots on the porch boards, unhurried, and I stand there with a fold of gauze crushed flat in my fist and feel my own pulse in my ears like something trying to get out.

The relief when the door shuts behind him is instant and total and it disgusts me. I flinch from it almost as hard as I flinched from him — because relief means my body was braced for something worse the whole four minutes he stood there, and some animal, exhausted part of me is grateful it wasn't worse, and being grateful to Dorian Vance for anything, even by accident, even involuntarily, is a thing I have sworn to myself in every language I know I would never again let myself be.

Kade comes back in for his coat. Just his coat, slung over the third-bay rail where he left it when Sable threw him out, blood on it gone brown now instead of red.

He doesn't ask if I'm all right. He looks at the door Dorian just went through, and then at me, and says, "He came for you. Not the boy."

It isn't a question. I don't answer it as one. I don't answer it at all, actually — I go back to the gauze, and by the time I look up to decide whether I'm going to deny it, he's already gone, boots on the same boards Dorian's just left, the sound of the truck door a minute later, gravel under tires pulling away.

I stand in my own infirmary in the smell of my own vinegar and somebody else's blood, and I let myself have exactly four seconds of not being anything to anyone before I go back to closing up.

Dr Kastel's spring bloodwork schedule is clipped to the board above the counter where it's clipped every April, has been every April for the six years he's run that machine for Dorian, and I only look at it because I'm wiping the counter down and it's in the way of the vinegar rag.

Household staff. Enforcers on the north roster. Lodge servants, Junie's name third from the bottom in Kastel's own round, tired hand.

And under all of it, at the very foot of the page, in a different hand entirely — finer, harder-pressed, the pencil strokes small and exact the way a man writes who never once in his life has had to write quickly —

*VESELY, M. — full panel.

I read it twice. I read it a third time because the second time didn't take.

Thirteen years I have run this infirmary. Thirteen years since my mother's name went on a death record that said internal haemorrhage and nothing else, and in all that time nobody — not Kastel, not Sable, not one single soul in this pack — has ever once put my own name on that list, because healers don't get tested, healers do the testing, that's the whole shape of the job, that's thirteen years of arithmetic I built my invisibility on.

Full panel.

Not routine bloodwork. Not iron, not the anemia Sable's been chasing since this morning.

Full panel.*

The rag is still in my hand, wet with vinegar, and I don't move it, and I don't put the schedule down, and somewhere down in my chest something starts counting — not breaths, not floorboards, nothing I can name — just counting, fast and useless, toward a number I don't have yet.