Gevren had already dug a pit for the poisoned soil.
It stood behind the storehouse, waist deep, with a shovel across the mouth. He had thrown two sacks of good leaf mold into it and was preparing to add a third when Suth took a handful from the sack and held it to her nose.
“Who told you to do this?”
“Nobody. I thought—”
“I see.”
Ysabet knew that tone. It was the tone in which she had once discovered a miller dosing a sluice hound with lamp oil. She went around the storehouse before the conversation could acquire an audience.
The root spring emerged through a trough of reddish stone. Fine hairs hung from the nearest roots into the water. Some bore translucent beads, and the beads moved. Ysabet knelt, keeping her shadow off the surface. Small larvae flexed in their casings. A water beetle shouldered past one and dragged a morsel beneath a stone.
“Alive?” Gevren asked behind her.
“Several things.”
“That doesn’t prove it isn’t poisoned.”
“No. What did the priests put in?”
He rubbed his apron. “Their fingers.”
“Anything from a bottle?”
“I wasn’t watching all the time.”
Ysabet filled her clean cup upstream of the roots and another below them. She smelled both. Neither smelled of anything except wet stone. That proved little too. She set them aside and watched the larvae. She had seen the rigid curl of poisoned water beetles before. These were busy eating one another’s food.
Ashaun arrived with a strip of red fruit rind. She had cut it from a shell already torn by moths, leaving the intact fruit alone.
“Same tree as the shot bird?” Ysabet asked.
“Next row. East side.”
The rind was tough, green inside the red, and sticky where the knife had passed. She pressed it with her useful thumb. It bent without breaking.
Gevren made an impatient movement. “You could try opening one properly.”
“You opened one,” Ashaun said.
The man looked toward the house.
Ysabet followed him back. The bird lay with its beak under the edge of the cloth. When she lifted the corner it opened one eye, a tiny dark slit, then closed it. Its breast moved quickly. The bent pinion had not straightened.
She mixed a little boiled water with the crushed blossom Suth had saved. The old woman showed her how to put a damp thread against the beak rather than pour liquid into it. The bird swallowed once. A second attempt brought a sharp turn of the head.
“Enough,” Suth said.
Gevren had stopped breathing while they worked. Ysabet touched his sleeve.
“You can breathe. It isn’t doing it for you.”
He took an enormous, embarrassed breath.
Outside, Chaska had tied colored scraps to three branches. The highest hung north, the middle turned west, and the lowest remained almost still. Lilt rested beyond the trees, offended by the moths that kept landing on her warm back. Each time one settled, a ripple traveled across her skin and threw it off.
“The wind’s arguing with itself,” Chaska said.
“Doesn’t it always?”
“Over trees, yes. But look at the dust.”
Farther up the valley, a pale thread lifted behind a low ridge and traveled south. It passed above the orchard without stirring the strips. Ysabet remembered the trees they had seen coming down the slope. Their crowns leaned the other way.
“What is behind there?”
“The chalk quarry,” Gevren said. “They widened it in summer. Good stone in the north face.”
“When?”
“After the rains.”
“When did you last hear the migrating thrushes?” Suth asked.
He opened his mouth and shut it.
“They pass high,” he said at last. “Not these birds. The gray ones. A line of them usually comes over the quarry saddle.”
“Usually,” Chaska repeated. She climbed onto a root, sighted along the colored strips, then came down to find her sketchbook.
They walked to the upper orchard while Gevren remained with the bird. Pip followed with the mouse tucked inside its warm pouch. Its thin leg managed the soft ground better than the hard path. Twice it stopped to inspect a fallen fruit; twice Ysabet found a moth already laying eggs beneath it.
At the ridge Suth turned away from the trees and closed her eyes.
Ysabet listened too. Insects. Leaves. A distant metal knocking. Beneath it a sound almost too low to separate from the air, repeating in uneven phrases.
“Drakes,” Ashaun said.
“Yes,” Suth said. “Something has spoiled their nursery.”
Below them a wide white scar cut across the hillside. The old saddle had become a sheer notch. Wind poured through it, lifting dust from the quarry floor and carrying it away from the valley.
Chaska held one finger before her lips, then turned to the orchard.
“If the call comes down from the north,” she said, “it goes through there now.”
“And never reaches the trees,” Ysabet said.
Suth opened her eyes. “That is worth testing.”
On the path behind them Pip put its head on the ground. A faint answering note came from its folds. It stopped at once, startled by the noise it had made.
Ysabet sat beside it and took out the clean clay. Before they went looking for another frightened animal, this one needed its supper.