The Plague Garden: The Forbidden Garden

The rash had climbed Tobias's throat by midday, and by late afternoon it had begun to map the veins in his neck like a second skin drawn in wine.

Sera Voss stood in the doorway of the small chamber where her brother lay propped against bolsters that smelled of camphor and old wool. The light through the narrow window fell in a slant across his chest, and she could see the way the marks moved, slow and deliberate, as though something beneath his skin were writing its name in a language she had never been taught to read. She had been gone six years. She had not imagined, in all the long walking back, that she would return to find her brother being eaten alive by something no herbal in her mother's old stores could touch.

Caelum Ashford stood at the foot of the bed with his arms folded and his back to the wall. He had arrived at the estate the night before, mud on his boots and the smell of rain still in his coat, asking for shelter and offering his cartographer's skills in exchange. Sera had not asked how he knew the way to the Voss lands. She had been too tired, too desperate, too aware that her sister Margot lay in the room above with a sickness that had been draining the color from her lips for three seasons now. When Caelum had seen Tobias at the breakfast table and gone very still, Sera had understood that he was not only a mapmaker.

"I cannot help him." Caelum's voice was quiet, measured, carrying the faintest curve of the West Country in its vowels. He did not look at her. He looked at the window, at the grey suggestion of the orchards beyond. "You know what I am. You knew when you asked."

"I asked you to look at him." Sera kept her own voice low, steady, the way one speaks in the presence of the sick. "I did not ask you to do anything else."

"Looking is doing." He unfolded his arms, refolded them. A small motion, tight at the elbows. "Looking is how it begins. You see the shape of the sickness, you trace its edges, you begin to understand what is pulling at the man's threads. And then the understanding becomes a weight in your hands, and the weight becomes a temptation, and the temptation becomes a door that does not close again once you have walked through it."

Tobias shifted against the bolsters and made a sound low in his chest, not quite a groan, not quite a word. Sera moved to the bedside without thinking. Her brother's skin was hot beneath her palm when she laid it against his forehead, and she could feel the wrongness beneath, a kind of vibration, as though something hummed behind his ribs in a key that did not belong to the body it occupied.

"The village physician says it is the marsh fever," Sera said. She did not turn around. "He says the wall is to keep it out. He says we should not let Tobias walk the boundaries until the rains stop."

"The village physician is a good man." Caelum's voice came from the same place by the wall. He had not moved. "He is also a man who treats illness as a thing of the body alone. What is eating your brother is not in his blood. It is in the air of this place, in the soil, in whatever bargain your family made with the land before you were born."

Sera's hand stilled on Tobias's brow. "What do you know of our family?"

"I know that the garden behind the east wing has been locked for three generations." Caelum finally looked at her. His eyes were a pale, wintery grey in the dim room, and his expression held the careful blankness of a man who had learned to keep his face from giving away what his mouth might say. "I know that the Voss women were once more than herbalists. I know that your mother could do what I can do, and that she stopped, and that the stopping killed something in her that I do not think she ever recovered."

The room was very quiet. Somewhere below, a shutter knocked against its frame in a wind Sera could not feel from where she stood. She heard, too, the faint creak of the old floorboards settling, and the distant, irregular drip of a leak in the roof she had not yet found the time to mend. The smell of camphor had thickened in the warmth of the afternoon, and beneath it lay something older, something mineral and green, like the scent of a well that had not been opened in a long while.

"Margot is dying," Sera said. "My sister is in the room above this one, and she is dying, and I cannot stop it with any root or tincture my mother ever taught me to prepare. Whatever is in the marsh, whatever is in the garden, whatever is in this house, it is taking them both, and I will not sit at another bedside and watch another person I love slip away while I do nothing."

Caelum was silent for a long time. His gaze moved from her face to the shape of Tobias beneath the blanket, to the dark tracery that had begun at his brother's wrists and crept upward like ivy claiming a ruined wall. The marks were not uniform. They shifted and branched, and in the slanting light they seemed almost to breathe.

"Let me see his chest," Caelum said at last. His voice had changed. The careful blankness was still there, but beneath it Sera could hear the sound of a man stepping toward a door he had promised himself he would not open. "Unfasten his shirt. I need to see how far it has gone."

Sera's hands moved before her mind could catch up with what she was doing. She loosened the ties at Tobias's throat and drew the linen aside, and there it was, the rash laid bare in the afternoon light, spreading from collarbone to sternum in a pattern that was not random, that was not the scatter of any fever she had ever studied in her mother's books. It was a shape. It was a script. It was a map of something that lived beneath the skin and was trying to draw itself a door out.

Caelum crossed the room in three strides. He knelt beside the bed without asking permission, without ceremony, and his hands hovered a breath above Tobias's chest as though he were reading heat from a kettle. Sera watched his face. She saw the moment the refusal in him cracked, saw the exact instant when the mapmaker's trained eye recognized the territory he was being asked to enter and understood that he could no longer pretend the door was not already ajar.

"Hold him still," Caelum said quietly. "He will feel this before it helps."

Sera placed both her hands on her brother's shoulders and pressed down gently, firmly, the way she had once held lambs for the shearer when she was a girl of nine and the world had not yet taught her what it meant to lose. Caelum laid his palms flat against the skin above Tobias's heart, and he closed his eyes.

The smell came first. Not from the room, not from the camphor or the wool or the old plaster of the walls. It rose from the place where Caelum's hands met Tobias's chest, a scent of burning sage and something greener beneath it, something that made Sera think of the garden her mother had never let her enter, the garden behind the locked door with its heavy iron key that hung on a ribbon around her mother's neck until the day she died. The smell thickened until it pressed against the back of Sera's throat, and she tasted it, sage and smoke and the iron tang of old blood.

Then the light.

It began at Caelum's wrists, a thin gold thread that moved beneath his skin the way the rash moved beneath Tobias's, but with purpose, with direction, flowing from his forearms into his palms and from his palms into the body of the man he touched. Sera saw it travel into the rash, saw the dark tracery on Tobias's chest begin to glow faintly where the gold light met it, saw the two colors struggle at the borders of each other like rival roots seeking the same water.

Caelum opened his eyes.

They were not grey anymore. They were gold, pure and bright as new coin, and they held a depth that Sera could not look into without feeling that she was standing at the edge of a well that had no bottom. His face had gone the color of old paper, and there was a fine tremor in his jaw that he did not try to hide. He was paying for this. She could see the price of it being drawn from him in real time, in the loosening of the muscles around his mouth, in the way his breath had grown shallow and quick.

Tobias's back arched off the bed. A sound came from him that was not a scream and not a word but something between, something that seemed to come from deeper in his chest than his voice could reach. Sera held him tighter, pressed her weight into his shoulders, and she could feel the heat coming off his skin in waves now, the rash pulsing under her brother's flesh as the gold light wound itself through the dark pattern and began, slowly, to push it back.

The room filled with the smell of burning sage until it was all Sera could taste, all she could breathe. The shutter below had stopped its knocking. The leak in the roof had gone silent. Even the wind outside seemed to have drawn back, as though the house itself were holding its breath to watch what was being done inside it.

"Don't stop," Sera whispered. She did not know if she was speaking to Caelum or to Tobias or to whatever force had finally agreed to answer her. "Don't stop, don't stop, please."

Caelum's irises flared brighter, a white-gold that hurt to look at directly, and the light under Tobias's skin surged in answer, threading itself along the paths the rash had drawn, filling them, burning them clean from the inside out. Tobias cried out once more, a raw and broken sound, and then his body went slack against the bolsters, and the dark tracery on his chest began to fade at the edges, retreating inward like a tide going out.

Caelum's hands were shaking. Sera could see the tremor run from his wrists into his fingers, could see the gold light in his eyes dim by degrees as the work was done. He did not lift his palms from Tobias's chest until the last thread of the rash had vanished into the skin above his brother's heart, and then he drew back, slowly, as though peeling himself away from something that did not want to release him.

He sat back on his heels. His face was grey again, his eyes their usual winter color, and there was a fine sheen of sweat at his temples. He did not speak. He looked at his own hands as though he had never seen them before, as though they belonged to someone else, someone he had hoped never to become.

Tobias's breathing had eased. The heat in his skin was fading. The camphor smell was returning, mixing now with the lingering ghost of the sage, and beneath it all the old green scent of the house settling back into its ancient quiet.

Sera looked at Caelum across the body of her sleeping brother, and she saw what the healing had cost him written in every line of his face. She had asked for help, and he had given it, and in giving it he had opened a door he had spent years trying to keep shut.

"Stay," she said. "Please. Stay and help me understand what is in this place."

Caelum looked at her then, and in his eyes she saw the shape of a refusal he could no longer make.

The last of the rash did not vanish so much as retreat, pulling inward like a creature seeking shelter. Sera watched it go, watched the angry red lines thin and pale and settle into something almost gentle, a tracery of faint silver that lay beneath her brother's skin like the ghost of a river drawn on an old map. Tobias's chest rose and fell in the steady rhythm of deep sleep, and the colour that had drained from his face was returning in slow degrees, creeping back to his cheeks, his lips, the tips of his ears. He looked, for the first time since she had arrived at the house three days ago, like a man who might wake in the morning and remember his own name.

Caelum remained where he was, kneeling on the stone, his hands still hovering an inch above Tobias's chest as though he could not quite bring himself to break the last thread of contact. Sera saw the tremor in his wrists sharpen, saw his fingers curl inward, and then she saw the first drop of blood fall.

It struck the flagstone between his knees with a sound so small she felt it more than heard it, a tiny wet impact that seemed to swallow the last of the silence. Caelum's head dropped forward, and a second drop followed, and a third, each one dark against the pale grey of the altar floor. His breathing had gone shallow and uneven, and his shoulders, which had held their rigid line throughout the working, began to curve inward as though something inside him had given way.

"Sit back," Sera said. She was already moving, her hand finding the clean square of linen she kept in her apron pocket, the one she had carried since she was twelve and had learned that the body, even in healing, could not be trusted to behave itself. "Caelum. Sit back."

He did not hear her at first. He remained bent over his own hands, watching the blood fall from his nose onto the stone with an expression she could not read, something between exhaustion and a kind of quiet recognition, as though he had been waiting years for this particular cost to come due. Then his weight shifted, his balance betrayed him, and he let himself fall backward until his shoulders struck the base of the altar.

The sound was heavier than she had expected, a dull thud that seemed to travel up through the stone and into the soles of her boots. Caelum slid sideways an inch, then stopped, his head tipped back against the carved edge of the altar, his face turned up toward the vaulted ceiling. The blood was running freely now, a thin dark line from his left nostril down across his lip and into the hollow of his throat. His eyes were open but unfocused, and his hands lay in his lap like birds that had forgotten how to fly.

Sera knelt beside him and pressed the linen to his face. He did not resist. He did not even seem to notice, though when her fingers brushed the skin beneath his jaw she felt how cold he had become, how quickly the warmth of the working had bled out of him. She tilted his head forward, gently, and felt the resistance in the muscles of his neck, the way his body was trying to hold itself together through sheer stubbornness.

"Breathe through your mouth," she said. "Slow. Small breaths."

He obeyed. She watched his chest move, watched the linen darken at its centre, and did not let herself think about what the healing had taken or whether she had the right to ask it of him. There would be time for that later. There would be time for questions and for the answers he was clearly not ready to give and for the long reckoning that would follow this night in every one of their lives. Right now there was only the blood and the stone and the sound of her brother's breathing behind her, steady as a metronome, steady as a heart that had been given back to him by a man who could barely stand upright.

"The rash," Caelum said. His voice was a thread. He did not move the linen from his face, and the words came muffled, half-swallowed by the cloth. "Did it go?"

"It's gone," Sera said. "There are faint lines. Silver. Under the skin."

"That will fade." He swallowed, and she heard the click of it in his throat. "A few days. Maybe a week. It will fade."

"All of it?"

"Enough." He lifted one hand, weakly, and let it fall again. "Enough that it won't trouble him. The root of it is deeper. That's not something I can reach. Not like that."

She did not ask him to explain. She did not yet want to know what he meant by deeper, or what kind of working he imagined might reach it. There were too many questions, and he was in no state to answer them, and she had learned long ago that the worst thing you could do with a man who had spent his life trying to keep a door shut was to kick it open when he was lying on the floor.

She reached past him for the jug of water she had brought up from the kitchen that morning, the one she had been using to keep her own throat wet through the long hours of watching and waiting. She poured a measure into a shallow cup and held it to his lips.

"Drink."

He drank. Some of it spilled, running down his chin and mixing with the blood on the linen, and she wiped it away with her sleeve without thinking, the way she used to wipe Margot's face when they were girls and Margot had come in from the orchards with her mouth full of blackberries and her fingers stained purple to the bone. The gesture was so familiar that for a moment she forgot where she was, forgot that the man in front of her was a stranger she had met only that afternoon, a cartographer with a physician's quick hands and a winter-coloured gaze that she did not trust.

He had given her brother's life back to her tonight. He had paid for it in blood. Whatever else he was, whatever he had come to this house to find or to bury, she could not pretend that the debt was small.

"Better," he said, after a moment. He took the linen from his face and folded it carefully, away from the clean side, and set it on the stone beside him. His nose had stopped bleeding, though the skin beneath it was raw and his upper lip was swollen in a way that would bruise by morning. "I'm sorry. I should have warned you."

"Warned me what?"

"That it costs more than I let on." He looked at his hands again, and this time she saw what he was looking at: the faint silver lines that had appeared across his palms, mirroring the ones now sleeping beneath Tobias's skin. They were thinner, paler, but they were there. "It's not the first time. But it has been a long time since the last."

Sera watched him fold his fingers closed over those silver marks, as though he could hide them by closing his fist. She thought of the books in her mother's study, the ones she had not opened in fifteen years, the ones she had been avoiding since she came back to this house because she knew they would tell her things she was not ready to hear. She thought of the garden behind the chapel, the one no one had been permitted to enter since her grandmother's death, the one her mother had sealed with a lock whose key she had never been able to find. She thought of the way the air in this room had changed when Caelum began the working, the way it had thickened and warmed and taken on a weight that pressed against her eardrums like a change in altitude.

"You used the old words," she said. It was not a question.

Caelum looked up at her. For a long moment he did not speak, and in his eyes she saw the same thing she had seen in the altar room when she first asked him to help: the shape of a refusal he could no longer make. He had come to this house for a reason. He had let himself be drawn into this work because he could not, in the end, refuse. And now the door was open, and he was sitting on the floor with blood drying on his face and silver lines on his palms, and there was no closing it again.

"Yes," he said. "I used the old words."

"And you learned them somewhere."

"I learned them from my father."

The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water. Sera felt the ripples of it move through her, through the stone beneath her knees, through the air that still held the last breath of the sage and the camphor. She knew his father's name. Everyone in the northern valleys knew his father's name, though no one spoke it aloud anymore, and the place where his family had lived was grown over now with bramble and young birch, the stones of the old keep tumbled down into the stream that ran through what had once been the courtyard.

She did not ask the question. She did not need to. The answer was written on Caelum's face, in the lines of his mouth and the colour of his eyes and the way he held his wounded hands in his lap as though they were something he had inherited rather than chosen.

Sera stood up. Her knees cracked, and she felt the cold of the stone through the soles of her boots as she crossed to where Tobias lay. He was still sleeping, his breathing steady, the silver lines on his chest barely visible in the dim light of the altar room. She pulled the blanket up over his shoulders and tucked it around him with hands that were steadier than she had any right to expect.

"He can sleep here tonight," she said. "I'll bring a pallet down from upstairs. The stone will keep him cool."

She did not turn around. She did not look at Caelum. She stood over her brother with her hands at her sides and felt the weight of everything that had just happened settle into her bones, the way snow settles into the branches of the apple trees in the orchard, slow and silent and heavier than it looks.

Behind her, she heard Caelum shift on the stone. She heard him draw a long breath, and let it out again, and she heard the small sound of him leaning his head back against the altar. Neither of them spoke. The candles on the altar had burned down to stubs, and the shadows in the room had grown longer and softer, and outside the high windows the first grey suggestion of dawn was beginning to gather at the edges of the sky.

There would be questions in the morning. There would be answers, or the absence of them, and there would be the long work of finding out what was growing in the soil of this house and what it would cost them both to bring it into the light. But for now there was only this: her brother's steady breath, the stranger's slow recovery, and the silence between them that was no longer quite as wide as it had been an hour ago.

Sera turned toward the stairs.

Sera's hand found the newel post at the base of the stairs, and she stood there for a moment with her fingers wrapped around the worn wood, listening to the house settle around her. Somewhere above, a shutter tapped against a window frame in a wind she could not feel down here. Somewhere in the orchard, a bird gave three short notes and then went silent. The house had its own breathing, and tonight it sounded older than it had yesterday.

She did not go up.

Instead she turned back toward the altar room, her hand trailing along the doorframe, and stood at the threshold looking at Caelum where he lay against the altar steps. His eyes were open. They had been open the whole time, watching her with that careful, measuring look she had begun to recognize as the expression he wore when he was deciding how much of himself to give away.

"You should sleep," she said.

"I will." His voice was rough. "In a moment."

She came into the room properly then, lowering herself to sit on the bottom step of the altar, three feet from where he lay, close enough to speak quietly and not be heard by her brother. The candle nearest them had guttered into a pool of wax, and the light in the room had taken on the reddish, sinking quality of something almost spent. Through the high window she could see the sky had gone from grey to the pale, washed gold of a true dawn, and a single beam of early sun had found its way between two roof slates and lay across the flagstones like a thin bar of warm metal.

"You knew her," Sera said. It was not a question. "My mother. You knew her, and you came back here because of her."

Caelum was quiet for long enough that she thought he might not answer. Then he shifted, and the blanket slipped from one shoulder, and he drew it back up with a hand that moved more easily than it had an hour ago.

"I knew of her," he said. "When I was a boy, my father used to bring me to this valley on survey work. There was a woman in a village near the northern boundary who knew the old herbs better than any apothecary my father had ever studied with. He respected her. He said she understood the land the way he understood maps, by reading what was written there."

He paused, and his eyes moved to the wall above the altar where the carved vines and leaves threw their soft shadows.

"I was seven the last time we came. My father was drawing the boundary line between the Ashford lands and the common pasture, and he brought me to her because I had a fever that would not break. She made me drink something bitter and warm, and by morning the fever was gone, and my father pressed coins into her hand that she would not take." A faint, dry sound that might have been a laugh. "She told him the only payment she would accept was a proper map of the northern fens, because she was tired of losing travelers in the bog. He drew it for her that autumn. I remember thinking it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, that map. All those careful lines, and the little symbols he used to mark the safe ground."

Sera listened. The sound of her brother's breathing filled the small silences between Caelum's sentences, steady and slow, the rhythm of a man sleeping deeply after long pain.

"She taught you," Sera said. "After my father died. She taught you what she knew."

"Your mother taught me what she chose to teach me. I was a student, and not a particularly patient one. I wanted to learn the names of the plants and the recipes and the seasons. She taught me something slower than that. She taught me to look at a piece of ground and listen to what was growing in it before I ever touched a leaf." He looked at her then, and his eyes in the candlelight were the colour of dark honey held up to a fire. "She was the finest teacher I have ever known, and I have had several."

Sera sat with her hands in her lap and felt the shape of what he was saying settle into her, the way she had felt the weight of the snow in the orchard the night she came home. She had been a child the last time she had seen her mother standing at the kitchen table with a basket of herbs, sorting them by touch, naming each one under her breath. She had not known then that the naming was a kind of map.

"I want to learn," Sera said. "The names. The herbs. The way she taught you to look at a piece of ground."

Caelum did not answer at once. He looked at her for a long moment, and she saw something pass across his face that she could not quite read, something that moved between reluctance and a kind of tired recognition, as though he had expected this and had hoped he would not have to refuse it.

"You do not know what you are asking," he said.

"I know exactly what I am asking."

"Then you do not know what you are asking." He sat up a little, slowly, and leaned his head back against the altar. "The knowledge is a crime, Sera. It has been a crime since the Act of Unlicensed Practice was passed the year after your mother died. The Crown decided that the old herbalists were dangerous, that they kept secrets that did not belong to them, and that the only safe knowledge was the kind that could be written down and approved and signed in triplicate by men who had never seen a fever break in their lives."

He gestured toward the altar, toward the carved vines.

"What your mother taught me is not in any approved book. It is not in any approved curriculum. It is passed from hand to hand in quiet rooms by people who have chosen to keep it alive at the risk of their own livelihoods and, in some cases, their lives. The man who taught me the first year of my apprenticeship spent two months in the assizes for possessing a book of pressed flowers. Two months in a cell with no windows because he would not say who had given him the book or who else had copies."

His voice had not risen, but there was a tightness in it now, a controlled anger that he was holding back the way one holds back a horse at the edge of a cliff.

"If you learn this from me, you become part of that chain. You become someone the Crown can prosecute. You become someone whose books can be searched, whose garden can be torn up, whose neighbours can be questioned about what they have seen you do. And if you are found out, the penalty is not a fine. The penalty is the workhouse, or worse."

Sera felt the words land in her, one after another, like small stones dropped into still water. She did not look away from him. She watched the way his hands lay in his lap, the way his fingers had curled slightly inward as he spoke, the way his shoulders had tightened and then, with visible effort, loosened again.

"I understand," she said.

"I do not think you do."

"I understand that my mother taught you, and that you have carried what she taught you for twenty years. I understand that you came back here in the dead of winter with a wound in your side and a fever in your blood, and that you could have died in that storeroom and no one would have known who you were. I understand that you are telling me this because you are trying to protect me from making a mistake I have already decided to make."

She leaned forward a little, and her voice dropped.

"My sister is dying, Caelum. There is a cough in her chest that the physician in the town cannot name, and his remedies have done nothing. The women in the village have nothing to offer that their grandmothers did not already try. I have been home for three weeks, and in those three weeks I have watched her get thinner, and quieter, and I have begun to understand that if something does not change, I will bury her before the spring thaws the orchard paths."

The words were steady. She had not expected them to come out so steady. There was a pressure behind her eyes that she would not let become anything more than a pressure.

"You told me an hour ago that you came here because of her. That she helped you once, when you were seven. That she was the finest teacher you ever had. I am not asking you to teach me because I want to be clever, or because I want to carry on some tradition for the sake of carrying it on. I am asking you because my sister is dying, and you may be the only person left in this valley who knows what my mother knew."

The candle nearest them went out. A thin trail of smoke rose from the wick and curled toward the ceiling. The room grew quieter, and in that quiet Sera could hear the faint, persistent sound of the wind outside moving through the bare apple trees, a sound like paper being crumpled very slowly.

Caelum sat for a long time without speaking. He looked at her, and then he looked at the wall above the altar, and then he looked down at his own hands. When he finally moved, it was to reach, with the careful deliberation of a man whose body is still making up its mind about whether to cooperate, for the inner pocket of his coat, which lay folded on the altar step beside him.

He drew out a book.

It was small, no larger than his spread hand, bound in dark leather that had been softened by years of handling until it had the suppleness of cloth. The leather was tooled, though the design had been worn almost flat by use, and the pages, when he opened it, were not paper but the thin, stiff leaves of plants themselves, pressed and dried and mounted on linen tabs that had been sewn into the binding. Each page held a single specimen, and beside each specimen, in a small, even hand that Sera recognized with a shock that went through her like cold water, was written the name of the plant, the month it flowered, the soil it preferred, and the uses her mother had known it for.

"This is the only copy," Caelum said. "I have carried it for twenty years. It has been in my coat through three winters in the northern fens, two summers surveying the coast, and one very bad spring in a debtor's lodging in Carlisle, where I slept in my coat because the blankets had been sold."

He held it out to her.

"Take it. Learn the first twenty pages before you speak to me again. If you can tell me, without looking, what grows on the south-facing slope of the orchard in the third week of April, and what it is good for, then I will know you are ready to learn the rest."

Sera reached out and took the book from his hand. The leather was warm from his body, and the weight of it was almost nothing. She held it in her lap and looked down at the page it had fallen open to, which showed a sprig of rosemary pressed flat and labelled in her mother's hand.

Her throat closed. She breathed through it, slowly, and looked up at him.

"I will keep your secret," she said. "And hers. I will keep it with my life."

"I am counting on it," he said.

She stood, and the book stayed in her hands, and the dawn light through the high window had moved across the floor and was now touching the edge of the altar where he lay. He closed his eyes as she turned toward the stairs, and she heard his breathing begin to slow, and she let herself look back once from the doorway.

Her brother slept on the pallet by the wall, his face turned toward them, his hand still resting on the edge of the blanket Sera had tucked around him. Caelum lay against the altar with his coat folded beneath his head and the dawn on his face. The room smelled of herbs and candle smoke and cold stone, and the silence in it was the silence of a house that had begun, at last, to remember what it was for.

Sera went up the stairs with the book pressed against her chest, and behind her the first true light of morning came pouring through the high windows of the altar room like water through a broken dam, and fell in long bright bars across the floor where she had knelt an hour before, and where the soil from her brother's hands had at last been allowed to rest.