The Tea Witch of Briarfield: The Briarfield Almanac

Ink dust rose from the brittle page when Wren turned it, and the smell of it, old iron and lampblack and a sweetness underneath that might once have been clover pressed between folios, prickled the inside of her nose. She sat alone at the long table near the Briar Barrel's hearth, a tallow candle guttering beside her, and the public house breathed around her in small sounds: the creak of Bram's settles settling into the evening, the clink of a tankard being set down too carefully at the bar, the soft footfalls of the serving girl on the flagstones.

She had asked for the almanac and Bram, with a great rolling theatrical bow that knocked his own elbow against the till, had produced it from beneath the counter as though he were unveiling a saint's relic. It was not a saint's relic. It was a stubby leather-bound thing, scuffed at the corners, its spine cracked along three separate seams, and it had spent so many decades wedged between a ledger of cricket scores and a jar of pickling onions that the onions had left a pale ring on the back board.

Wren flattened her palm against the page. The Briarfield Almanac, Volume the Ninth, began at the year 837 of the local reckoning and ran, in a tight clerk's hand, up through harvest tallies, marriage entries, stillbirths, floods, the great frost of '09, the barmkin fire, the planting of the new oaks on the green. She turned the pages with care, easing each one over with the heel of her hand so as not to tear the hinge, and her candle threw her shadow long across the oak boards.

She was looking for one thing.

She had come to the almanac the way she had come to most things since her aunt died, half on business and half on instinct, with the queer prickle up the back of her neck that she had learned to trust and to distrust in equal measure. Three days before, a child had brought her a sprig of borage from the churchyard, blue and star-faced, and the borage had told her something it should not have known. It had told her about a summer that had not been, a summer in which a child should have been born and had not. Wren had known, in the prickling way she knew these things, that the borage spoke true. And so she had gone looking for that summer.

The entries ran in order through spring of 851, then early summer: a note that Widow Mallow's pig had eaten her best Sunday bonnet, a record of the lambing count, the price of tallow at market. And then, where the almanac should have rolled forward through high summer into the first cool rains of autumn, there was a gap. A single sheet of paper had been pasted in, smooth and newer than its neighbours, its edges cut clean, and on that sheet, in a hand that mimicked the clerk's but did not quite match it, three terse lines.

No entries for the season.

No record of births.

No record of deaths.

Wren read it twice and a third time, her lips moving without sound.

The pasted sheet was dated, in a small flourish at the foot, to the year of her grandmother's time. The ink had not faded the way the rest had faded. It had been put in recently, or the original had been removed recently, and the paste still held the faint vinegar sharpness of a kitchen job done in haste.

She laid her hand flat against the gap and felt the slight warmth of the paper, the texture of a lie.

Across the room, Bram was polishing a tankard with a cloth that had seen better decades. He had not looked up since she sat down. This, for Bram, was unusual in itself. Bram Cogglesby looked up at everything.

She closed the almanac gently, leaving a thumb between the pages to mark her place, and slid it across the table a finger's width toward her own knee.

"Bram."

His polishing stopped. He set the tankard down with the exaggerated care of a man pretending he had not been waiting to be addressed.

"Miss Wren."

"How long have you kept this?"

"Oh, that old thing." He picked up another tankard and set to work on it, though it was already gleaming. "Came in with the cricket ledger. Found it under the floorboards in the back parlour when I reflagged the cellar, oh, must be fifteen years now. More. Before your aunt."

"And the pages."

He paused.

"The pages?"

"The one that's been replaced. The season with no entries."

Bram's polishing cloth went round and round the belly of the tankard. He was, Wren noted, not looking at her.

"The Briarfield summers are dull reading at the best of times," he said, with a chuckle that arrived a beat late. "If a season had nothing to report, the clerk would simply have left it out. You'd think the man had a life beyond his quill."

"Bram."

"I wouldn't know about any such page, Miss Wren."

"You would, though."

He set the tankard down. He leaned both hands on the bar and looked at her with the mild, injured expression of a man who had been caught out in a kindness and would rather not discuss it.

"It is not my page to discuss," he said, more quietly. "It is the postmaster's. Finch keeps the keys to the parish chest. He would have the original, if anyone would."

"And who removed it?"

Bram's mouth made a shape as though to whistle. He did not whistle.

"Best you ask the postmaster, Miss Wren. Best you ask him in the morning, when he has had his porridge and his walk about the green. He is a man who does his difficult thinking before noon."

She inclined her head. She did not press. She understood Bram's particular sort of loyalty, the kind that ran in the village like the streams ran in spring, underground and very particular about which stones it moved around.

She gathered up the almanac and tucked it under her arm, and Bram's eyebrows climbed his forehead in a manner that suggested he had intended for her to leave the book where it was. She pretended not to notice.

"I will bring it back in the morning," she said.

"Bring it back whole, Miss Wren. It is the only copy in the village."

"I will bring it back whole."

"And do let the postmaster have his porridge first."

She crossed the taproom, her boots quiet on the rushes, and at the door she turned back.

"Bram."

"Miss Wren."

"Did you ever meet my grandmother?"

The cloth went round and round the tankard. He did not look up.

"Once," he said. "A long time ago. She came through here on her way to the mill, in the season that was not."

"What season was that?"

"The one with no name, Miss Wren. The one the almanac skips over." He set the tankard down at last, and his face was older than it had been a moment before. "I was a boy. I remember only that she had a shade in her pocket, and that she was not afraid of it."

Wren stood very still.

"A shade?"

"A small grey thing. The colour of pond water. She had it wrapped in a sprig of fennel and tucked in her shawl. She said it was her helper." Bram's mouth twitched, not quite into a smile. "She said it would keep her secrets for her."

The door was heavy in its frame. Wren pushed it open and the night came in, smelling of wet grass and woodsmoke and the very last breath of the year's roses from the hedgerow. She stepped out onto the threshold, and the almanac was warm under her arm, and her candle, left behind on the table, guttered once and went out.

The night air settled around Wren like a held breath.

She walked the lane back toward the village square with the almanac clutched to her ribs and Marigold riding her shoulder. The shade had not spoken since Bram's tale, but she could feel her there, a cool spot against the wool of her cloak, a weight no heavier than a folded leaf. Above them the clouds had broken open in one place, and a single star showed through, low and orange as a struck match.

Marigold rippled.

Wren stopped walking.

"Marigold."

The shade did not reply, but she lifted from Wren's shoulder and drifted upward, slow as thistledown, until she hovered above the lane at the height of a weather vane. The starlight passed through her and made her glow, faintly, the colour of weak tea. Wren had seen her do this only once before, the night her aunt had died, when Marigold had risen above the cottage bed and stayed there for the length of a candle's burning, watching the door.

"What is it?" Wren whispered. "Marigold, what do you see?"

The shade's edges frayed and re-knit, frayed and re-knit. Then she descended, quick as a dropped stone, and pressed herself flat against Wren's cheek. The touch was cool and smelt of fennel and rain and the deep green smell of cellars. Wren closed her eyes.

In her mind, as clearly as if it had been spoken, a word formed.

Briarfield.

Then another.

Ash.

Then, very softly, as if from a great distance:

Remember.

Wren opened her eyes. The lane was empty. The star was gone. The clouds had closed again, and the dark had the weight of felt.

She walked on, faster now, and did not look back.

The post office sat at the corner of the square, a low stone building with a pitched roof and a single window still lit. Wren had passed it a thousand times and never thought much about it. It was the kind of building that disappears into the life around it. Tonight, though, it looked watchful. The lamp inside burned steady and yellow, and the shadow of the postmaster moved behind the glass, back and forth, back and forth, like a man pacing a cage.

Wren climbed the three stone steps and lifted the iron knocker.

The pacing stopped.

A chair scraped. Footsteps, quick and light. The door opened a hand's width, and Postmaster Finch peered out at her through the gap, his spectacles riding low on his nose and his cravat half-untied. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been expecting no one and was not entirely sure he wanted company.

"Miss Wren," he said. "It is past ten."

"I know. I am sorry to disturb you."

"You are not disturbing me. I was awake." He did not say why. He glanced past her, at the empty square, at the dark, and then stepped back and held the door wider. "You had better come in, then. Mind the step."

The post office was smaller than it looked from outside. A single room, whitewashed, with a counter at one end and a wall of wooden pigeonholes at the other, each labelled in the postmaster's tidy hand. A deal table stood beneath the window, covered in papers and a ledger so fat its spine had cracked. The lamp on the table was the only light. It smelt of ink and cold tea and, faintly, of bird.

Finch shut the door behind her and bolted it. The bolt was heavy and made a sound like a bone settling.

"Sit, if you please," he said. "I will put the kettle on."

"I do not want tea, Mr. Finch. I have come about the raven-post."

His hand, which had been reaching for the kettle, stopped.

"How did you know about the raven-post?"

"Bram told me. He said the birds have not come in."

"They have come in." Finch drew his hand back and folded both arms across his chest, as if to keep himself from doing something with them. "That is the trouble. They have come in, and they ought not to have come in at all. They ought to have stayed out on the road until morning, as they always do. The service runs from the Cooper's Mill post to the Hallam Moor relay, and the relay to us, and the birds are trained to roost only at the named stations. They have been doing it this way for thirty years. I have the ledgers to prove it. I have the ledgers to prove everything."

He was talking faster than she had ever heard him talk, and his words ran into each other at the edges like spilt ink.

"This week," he said, "they have been coming straight here. At all hours. Midnight. Three in the morning. Once, on Tuesday, at quarter past four. They arrive at the window and they beat their wings against the glass until I let them in, and when I do, Miss Wren, when I take the letters from the capsule and set the capsule aside and go to open the letters themselves, the letters are empty."

Wren sat down slowly on the chair he had offered her. The wood was cold through her skirts.

"Empty," she said.

"Empty. Not opened. Not torn. Empty. The paper is whole. The seals are unbroken. But inside there is nothing. No word. No news. Not even a greeting." He took off his spectacles and polished them on his cuff, though they were already clean. "And there is this."

He crossed to the counter and lifted a small wooden tray, the kind apothecaries use for powders, and brought it to her. On the tray lay a single sheet of paper, folded into a letter and sealed with red wax. He set it on the table and gestured for her to look.

She looked.

The paper was white. The seal was unbroken. But along the edges of the sheet, where the fold pressed the paper flat, there was a fine grey powder, like the dust from a hearth. She leaned closer. The powder smelt of nothing she could name. Not ash. Not soot. Not lime. It smelt of absence.

"May I?" she said, and touched the seal with one fingertip.

"Careful, Miss Wren."

The seal gave under her touch. Not broke. Gave. As if the wax had thinned. She unfolded the letter and held it to the lamp.

The page was blank.

She turned it over. Blank. She held it up to the light. Blank. She brought it to her nose and breathed in. The grey dust stirred, and for one moment she thought she saw, very faintly, the ghost of a word on the page. A name. Marigold. Then it was gone.

Her hand was trembling. She set the letter down.

"When did this one come in?" she asked.

"This evening. A quarter past nine. I had just sat down to my porridge. I heard the wingbeats, and there she was on the sill, a hen-bird, three years old, a good bird, a steady bird. Her name is Patience. She was shaking. I have never seen a raven shake. I opened the capsule and there was this letter inside, and the capsule was warm, Miss Wren. Warm, as if someone had held it in their hand a moment before. But the letter is addressed to no one. There is no name on the outside. There is no sender's mark. There is only this."

He lifted the letter and turned it so she could see the back. There, in the same red wax, was a single impressed seal she had not noticed before. A sprig. Three leaves. A star-shaped flower at its tip.

Borage.

"The seal of Saint Borage," Wren said, and her voice was not her own.

"Yes." Finch set the letter down carefully, as if it might bite. "I have been postmaster of this village for twenty-three years. I have handled every letter that has come through this office since my father died and I took the keys from his hand. I have seen seals I could not read and seals I would not read. I have never seen this one. And yet, Miss Wren, when I look at it, I feel as if I ought to know it. As if I have known it all my life and forgotten."

He sat down across from her and took off his spectacles again. Without them his eyes looked very small and very tired.

"There is more," he said.

"Tell me."

"The birds that have come in early this week. Every one of them, when I let them go again, has flown not back toward the moor but toward the old churchyard on the hill. You know the one. The one with the broken steeple. The one nobody goes to anymore because the roof is off and the rain gets in. The birds have been perching on the stump of the steeple and refusing to leave. I went up yesterday, in the rain, to see what they were about. They were sitting in a circle around the statue. The saint. Saint Borage. They were sitting in a circle and they were looking at it, and I swear to you, Miss Wren, the statue's face was different."

"Different how?"

"I cannot say. I am a man of ledgers. I do not deal in faces. But I have passed that statue a thousand times and I know every chip and every crack, and yesterday the chips were in different places. Or they were not chips at all. They were letters. Tiny letters, carved into the stone, and they moved when I tried to read them."

He put his spectacles back on. His hands were not steady.

"I came down from the hill," he said, "and I went home, and I drank a cup of tea, and I sat in my chair, and I thought very carefully about what I had seen. And then I decided that I had seen nothing, and that I would go to bed, and that in the morning the birds would behave themselves and the statue would be a statue again. That is what I decided. And yet here you are, on my step, past ten at night, asking about the raven-post. So I will ask you a question, Miss Wren, and I would like a plain answer."

"Ask."

"Has something happened in this village that the postmaster ought to know about?"

Wren looked at the empty letter on the table. She looked at the grey dust on her fingertip. She looked at Marigold, who had drawn herself small and still on her shoulder, a grey knot of wool against the wool of her cloak.

She thought of the almanac under her arm, and the missing pages, and the season with no name.

She thought of Bram's tale, and the shade in her grandmother's pocket.

She thought of the word that had formed in her mind on the lane, unbidden and unasked.

Ash.

"Yes," she said. "Something has happened. I do not yet know what it is. But I think it began before any of us were born, and I think it has only just now begun to wake up."

Finch took off his spectacles a third time. He set them on the table beside the letter. He folded his hands in his lap. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been waiting a long time to hear those words, and who was not at all relieved to hear them now.

"Then," he said, "we had better start at the beginning."

He reached for the kettle.

From where the wind touched her, Wren felt the answer before she heard it, and she set her cup down. The door to Finch's cottage hung open. Marigold was already through it.

She went down the three stone steps with the strange, sure pace of a small grey cat. The lamplight from the parlour fell across her and made her thin shadow stretch along the path like a spill of dark water. She crossed the lane. She passed under the lychgate. She went among the leaning stones of the churchyard, and Wren, after a beat of two, set her cup on the table and followed.

The night was mild and smelled of bracken and old rain. A waning moon hung over the yew tree like a crooked nail. Somewhere in the orchard a thrush was singing its second verse, the one it always sang at this hour, the one she had heard since she was small and thought the world was safe. She was aware, as she walked, of the almanac under her arm, and the weight of it seemed to her greater than before.

She found Marigold in the shadow of Saint Borage.

The statue stood in its alcove as it had stood for a hundred years. The stone was pale in the moonlight, and the moss at the saint's hem was black. Marigold sat at the saint's feet, very still, and Wren sat down beside her on the worn slab. She did not ask what was the matter. She waited.

After a long while Marigold said: "He has a key."

"A key."

"On a cord about his neck, under his robe."

Wren looked at the saint's stone hands. They were folded on the open book, as they had always been folded, the thumb of the right hand laid across the left, the fingers worn to smoothness by generations of village touch. She could not see any cord. She could not see any key. She saw only the saint, and the patient open book, and the letters carved into the page that she had been told no one could read.

"What is it a key to?" she said.

"I do not know," Marigold said. "But it is cold."

The wind stirred. The thrush went on singing. Somewhere down in the village, a dog gave one short bark and was silent. Wren set her hand on the slab between her knee and Marigold's, and she felt the cold come up through the stone, and the cold was the kind she had learned to recognise in her aunt's workroom, the kind that came when a thing had been shut up too long in the dark.

"We will have to speak to the Mayor," she said.

"Yes," Marigold said. "He will not like it."

"He never likes anything," Wren said. "He liked my aunt's elderflower wine. That is the only kind thought I have ever heard him speak of a person."

"He liked my grandmother's ways with a ledger," Marigold said. "She told me so."

Wren was quiet for a moment. The thrush began a third verse, then thought better of it and went silent. A bat passed her face, close enough to stir her hair. She thought of the letter on Finch's table, and the grey dust, and the word she had not spoken aloud.

"We will have to tell him everything," she said.

"Yes," Marigold said again, and her voice was small.

"Including," Wren said, "that there is a shade at the foot of his church, and that she has been here longer than he has, and that she would like to be introduced."

A sound came from Marigold that Wren had not heard before. It took her a moment to recognise it as laughter.

The Mayor's house stood at the top of the village street, square and white and frowning under its steep slate roof. A lamp burned in the parlour window. A laurel shrub stood at the gate, cut into the shape of a lopsided egg. The brass knocker on the door was polished to a shine that Wren always thought of as faintly reproachful.

She lifted it. She let it fall.

The sound went through the house like a small, polite thunderclap.

There was a long pause. Then a light went on in the hall. Then the sound of a latch, and the door opened a cautious hand's width, and Mayor Hawthorne looked out at her over the chain.

"Miss Thistlewood," he said.

"Good evening, Mayor."

"It is half past ten," he said.

"So it is," she said. "I am sorry for the hour. I would not have come at it if I did not think it mattered."

He looked at her. He looked past her, at the empty lane, and at the dark of the churchyard beyond. He looked at the almanac under her arm. He had the face of a man who has been waked from a comfortable chair by a sound he cannot place, and who has not yet decided whether the sound is friend or foe.

"Come in," he said at last, and shut the door, and took the chain off, and opened it again, and stood aside.

The parlour was small and very tidy. A fire had been let down to a low red glow. A pair of brass candlesticks stood on the mantelpiece, unlit. A teacup sat on a side table with a spoon in it, and a folded paper, and a pair of spectacles that Wren did not think were his own.

"Sit," he said. "I will put the kettle on."

"You have a kettle already on," Wren said.

He stopped. He looked at the door that led toward the kitchen. He had the air of a man who has lived alone for some time and is no longer used to being observed.

"So I have," he said. "Sit."

She sat. She set the almanac on her knee. She looked about the room with the careful eye her aunt had taught her, the eye that notes what a person has chosen to keep about them, and what they have chosen to put away.

There was a framed sampler on the wall above the mantelpiece, worked in faded silks, that read MAY THIS HOUSE BE PROSPEROUS AND ITS MASTER WISE. There was a small portrait over the sideboard of a woman with a severe mouth and kind eyes, whom Wren did not recognise. There was a row of leather-bound ledgers on a shelf, and a pair of brass scales, and a jar of pickled walnuts with a ribbon round the neck that said BRAM COGGLEBY, BEST IN COUNTY, in a florid hand.

The Mayor came back with a tray and two cups and set it down between them with the air of a man performing a rite. He sat. He folded his hands.

"Now," he said. "What is it that cannot wait until morning?"

Wren opened the almanac at the first of the missing pages. She turned it so that he could see. The paper was grey-edged. The space where the verses had been was rough, as if torn. The faint smell of it came to him, and she saw him notice it.

"This came to me this afternoon," she said. "In a brown envelope, with a raven-post stamp. The stamp is from a service I do not believe has existed in this village for forty years. The pages are missing. The song that was on them is gone. The ink that wrote the song is now a grey dust on my finger, and on the finger of the postmaster, who will confirm it."

The Mayor looked at the page. He did not touch it. He looked at it the way a man looks at a thing he has been told not to touch.

"Go on," he said.

"I have spent the evening trying to find what the song was," Wren said. "I have looked in my aunt's books. I have looked in the church register. I have spoken with Bram Cogglesby, who remembers a song his mother sang, and with the postmaster, who remembers a service that no one else does. The song was about a season we do not have. A season that has been taken out of our year, and out of our memory, and out of our books."

"And you have come to me," he said, "because?"

"Because you are the Mayor," she said. "And because the postmaster thinks the song was last heard at a council meeting, in this room, under this roof. And because there is a shade at the foot of Saint Borage who has been waiting a very long time for someone to ask her what she knows."

The Mayor's face did not change. She watched him the way her aunt had taught her to watch a patient who had just been told something they did not wish to hear. The colour went out of his cheeks by a shade. The line of his mouth thinned. He set his cup down in its saucer with a small, precise click.

"A shade," he said.

"Yes."

"Of," he said, "the church."

"No," Wren said. "Of the village. Of the household. Of the council. Of this house, possibly."

He was silent for a long moment. The fire ticked. The candle guttered and steadied.

"You must think very poorly of my wits," he said at last, "to come to me at this hour with such a tale."

"I think very well of your wits," Wren said. "That is why I have come to you."

"And yet you ask me to believe," he said, "that the village of Briarfield has lost a season. That a song has been stolen. That a child of grey dust sits at my church door and knows my business. You ask me to believe all this, and to do what?"

"To hold a meeting," Wren said. "Tomorrow. In this room. With the council, and the postmaster, and the innkeeper, and anyone else whose memory might hold what ours has lost."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I will hold it without you," Wren said. "And I will tell them you were asked."

He looked at her. He had the air of a man weighing a coin in his hand, turning it over, listening for the true ring.

"You are very like your aunt," he said, "and that is not a compliment."

"It is not meant as one," Wren said. "Nor is it a complaint. It is a fact."

He sat for a moment longer. Then he reached for his cup, and drank, and set it down.

"There is one thing," he said, "that I ought to tell you, since you have come this far."

"Sir."

"The river," he said, and paused, and Wren saw him choose the next words with the care of a man choosing his footing on a stair in the dark, "the river below the mill has begun to run with a water that is the colour of honey, and that smells of burnt sugar. It began yesterday. It has not stopped. The miller has shut his wheel. He says the water is thick. He says it clings to the stones. He says he has never seen the like."

He looked at her over the rim of his cup.

"I did not wish to call a meeting about it," he said. "I thought it might pass. I thought it might be a trick of the weather. I thought it might be the kind of thing that, if spoken of in a public room, becomes a public trouble."

"And now?"

"And now," he said, "a young woman sits in my parlour with an almanac under her arm and a shade at her heels and tells me a season has been stolen from us. And I find I am no longer able to pretend that the river is the river."

He set the cup down.

"I will send word tonight," he said. "To the council. To the innkeeper. To the postmaster. We will meet at ten in the morning, in this room. You will bring what you have. You will speak what you know. And if, at the end of it, I find that we have been chasing shadows, then you and I, Miss Thistlewood, will have a reckoning."

"Sir," she said, and stood, and took the almanac under her arm.

He rose with her. He was a tall man, and stiff in the back, and he stood for a moment with his hand on the mantelpiece as if steadying himself against a thought he did not wish to have.

"Your aunt," he said, without looking at her, "used to say that the village would come to its knees one day, and that the kneeling would be the cure."

"I remember her saying so," Wren said.

"I did not believe her," he said.

"Nor did she expect you to," Wren said. "She said you would believe the river."

He turned then, and looked at her, and she saw, for the first time, the thing that lived behind the careful face. It was not fear. It was the older thing that comes before fear, the long acquaintance with the cost of knowing. He nodded, once.

"Good night, Miss Thistlewood."

"Good night, Mayor."

She went out into the lane. The wind met her. The thrush had gone to roost. The dog did not bark again. The bat was gone. The moon had moved a hand's width across the sky, and the shadow of the yew tree lay longer across the lychgate.

Marigold was waiting for her under the lychgate, sitting on the lowest rail with her paws tucked under her. Wren sat down beside her. She did not ask how the meeting had gone. She could read it in the set of Marigold's ears, in the small grey plume of her tail.

"It is set," she said. "Tomorrow at ten. In his parlour. He will send the word tonight."

Marigold said nothing for a while.

"He is afraid," she said at last.

"Yes," Wren said. "He has been afraid a long time. I think he has been afraid since before we were born. I think that is part of what was taken."

Marigold considered this. She uncurled one paw and set it on Wren's knee.

"Will it be enough?" she said. "The meeting."

"No," Wren said. "It will not be enough. It is a beginning. Beginnings are rarely enough. They are only the shape a thing takes when it first agrees to be seen."

The wind stirred. Somewhere in the village, a light went on in a window, then another, as the Mayor's messengers began their rounds. Wren thought she could hear, very faintly, the sound of a door opening and shutting at the inn, and of Bram's voice raised in some kind of surprised salute. She thought she could hear, farther off, the sound of Finch's latch, and his quick footsteps on the cobbles.

She thought of the river. She thought of the honey-thick water, and the smell of burnt sugar, and the season that had been cut out of the year like a misprint from a page. She thought of the key on the cord about the saint's neck, and the book in his stone hands, and the letters no one could read.

She thought of the word that had formed in her mind on the lane, unbidden and unasked.

Ash.

She did not know yet what the word meant. She knew only that it was the right word, the way her aunt had taught her there are right and wrong words for a thing, and that the right word is the one the plant answers to.

Marigold climbed from the rail to her shoulder. She settled there, a grey knot of wool against the wool of her cloak, and Wren stood, and walked on down the lane toward the cottage, and the dawn, and whatever the morning would bring.

Behind her, in the churchyard, Saint Borage stood in his alcove with his patient book and his unseen key, and the moss at his hem was black, and the wind moved in the yew tree, and the moon went on its way, and the village, for the first time in a hundred years, began to wake.