The orchard keeper aimed at the moth and fired past Suth’s ear.
The shot broke a red fruit. A black shape spilled out and struck the ground beneath it. The moth escaped through the branches.
For a moment nobody moved.
“Gevren,” Suth said, very quietly.
A man in a leather apron lowered his little powder gun. He was standing on a ladder with its feet sunk unevenly into the soil. Smoke climbed past his face.
“I thought you were over by the water.”
“I was, yesterday.”
“The wing got between you.”
“No,” Ashaun said. “The wing was beyond her.”
He looked from the weapon to the old woman. His mouth changed shape. “I didn’t mean—”
“Unload it,” Suth said.
“It is unloaded. I fired.”
“Then put it down.”
He climbed from the ladder. The lowest rung split beneath his boot, completing his humiliation with a small, flat crack. Chaska took the gun from him before he could decide where to lean it.
Ysabet had gone to the fallen shape.
It was a bird, folded so tightly that its neck looked broken. A pale blossom clung to the feathers. Its beak moved once when she lifted the shell away.
“Cloth,” she said.
Chaska handed over a clean corner from her pack. Ysabet made a cup of it, avoiding the tiny breast. The bird’s eyelids had not opened. The shell had come apart along an uneven tear rather than a natural seam, and thick red fluid clung to the broken edge.
“Is it alive?” Gevren asked.
“For now.”
“I’ve been shooting those moths all week. Nothing else keeps them off.”
“Then keep them off this tree with your hands for a minute.”
He did. His palms were red by the time Suth joined Ysabet on the ground.
The old woman held a flower from the fallen fruit beneath the bird’s nostrils, then withdrew it. The beak opened. It took a breath, a second, and began to shiver.
“Too early,” Suth said.
“Can you put it back?” Gevren asked.
“Into which half?”
He glanced at the shattered shell and looked away.
They made a little nest in a sieve, covered it loosely, and moved it to his kitchen. The room smelled of lamp smoke and old fruit. Gevren heated water while Ysabet checked the bird’s wings. No shot had struck it, but one pinion bent where it should have flexed.
Pip rose on its rear legs to see. Ysabet moved the sieve to the table. The creature lowered itself and waited beneath it, eyes fixed on the edge.
“No,” she told it softly when it began to open the pouch. “Not this one. It needs a different temperature.”
Suth touched the little bird’s feet. “And perhaps something we can’t provide.”
By afternoon the shivering had slowed. The bird slept, or something close enough that Ysabet could not distinguish it without disturbing the breath. Gevren stood beside the table with both hands empty.
“Priests,” he said.
Chaska looked up from cleaning the gun. She had separated the powder flask and shot and put them on opposite shelves.
“What?”
“Priests came through in spring. Stayed by the root spring. Said a blessing. The fruit’s been wrong ever since.”
“How was it wrong in spring?” Suth asked.
“It wasn’t. It was growing.”
“Then when did it change?”
“When it didn’t open.”
“Has anyone else been here?”
“Buyers. Quarry men. Two people with a dancing ferret. Don’t tell me the ferret blessed it.”
Suth went to the window. Beyond the glass, red shells hung in every tree. Some were nearly the size of a child’s head. On the undersides, the pale moths were fixing rows of pearl-colored eggs.
“Once in ten years,” Gevren said. “I kept the orchard through nine ordinary harvests for this. My father saw four hatchings. He said when they opened you couldn’t hear your own thoughts.”
The kitchen was so quiet that Ysabet could hear the mouse moving grass in its box.
“What do the birds eat when they come out?” she asked.
“Blossom insects. The moth grubs, if they haven’t hatched first.”
“And if the grubs do hatch first?”
Gevren stared toward the orchard.
Suth took her staff from beside the door. “We’ll look at the spring. Then the wind.”
“You believe me?”
“I believe you’ve got a problem.”
He turned to the table. The bird made a weak scraping movement under its cloth. Gevren bent so close that his beard touched the sieve.
“There’s mineral honey in the storehouse,” he said. “For the little one, if you can help. And food. Whatever you need while you’re working.”
Ysabet did not promise him a hatching.
She checked the cloth once more, set water near the sieve where she could reach it, and went outside to see what had gone quiet.